Thursday, July 25, 2002
Fun Children's Books
Just found Sixteen Cows by Lisa Wheeler and Kurt Cyrus. It's a romantic bit of rhyming whimsey about Cowboy Gene and Cowgirl Sue and their eight cows each. The kids love it; it gets the "Again!" seal of approval from Rachel.
I picked it up at the library because I've really liked Kurt Cyrus's work before. Slow Train to Oxmox was one of our favorites for Josh and David a few years ago, and Tangle Town is great too. (Amazon.com claims both are out of print, which is really too bad.) Funny, inteligent enough for the adults, silly enough for the kids, and beautifully illustrated -- what more do you need?
Favorites from the previous library haul were Get Set! Swim! and Hello, Ocean. (Hmm, I'm sensing a water theme for last week ...) I was all set to not like Get Set! Swim! for being too PC (our heroine is Puerto Rican, there's a small bit of angst about having to compete against the rich suburban schools who Have It All™), but it turns into a very nice little story of sportsmanship, and I ended up liking it anyway. I thought Hello, Ocean was OK as far as the writing went, but the illustrations are gorgeous (and Nancy and I are both jealous that they depict the beach outside the author's home). Both of these made the "read it again and again!" list for the last few weeks.
Not much blogging for a while ... been busy at work. At last, it's released to the public! The result of my (and a whole bunch of other's) labors is now HeritageQuest Online. We're just getting started; before we're done, we should have all census records from the U.S. Census from 1790 - 1930 searchable and viewable online.
The interface is simple, but we're talking about hundreds of millions of names, and terabytes of image data. There are a few ... technical challenges to doing this that I've never had the opportunity to wrestle with before.
So, <blatant plug> lobby your library to sign up so you can use it! Or, go see our partners at Genealogy.com and sign up for the new "Family and Local History" library. Help make the product a sucess, so that I look good for my bosses and can support my family!
