HCMC Blogs

The minutes noted below are from Friday, this weekend, and today. I'm still working on a list and lineages of units that were active in Victoria during the war. I was just going to use it for my own reference, but would something like that be of interest to anybody else? I can stick it in the Dropbox if so!

My Dropbox folder has some of the attestation papers and photographs I've found so far - personal favorites include the 30th Battalion parading past the Legislature and swarming over the SS Mary's rigging. Research plans for the week include a visit to the Bay Street Armory, 13 oral histories available online through UVic's special collections, and finishing off a list of items I'll hunt for at the BC Archives.

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to get to the Maritime Museum or into the hard-copy Special Collections until the end of the week. My grandfather had a heart attack on Friday, and they moved him down here from Nanaimo yesterday. He's heading into open heart surgery tomorrow morning. It won't be his first, and he had surgery for circulation problems in his lower intestine barely a month ago. My dad and aunt are coming down this afternoon, and staying with me tonight. I will try to get some work done here and there... but I'll be spending as much time as I can with my family.

Made more progress with the graphics and presentation for the Dates talk at DH. I think I'm about half-way through.

To fix this problem, run
sudo update-alternatives --config javaws
and choose the java 7 version

NOTE: OpenJDK doesn't come with javaws by default. You need to install the 'icedtea-7-plugin' before you can do the config bit above.

Reviewed and commented on the first of two white papers for MVP.

Leaving early.

Created an SVG map for use in the presentation on dating in July.

Created XSLT to add long s to transcriptions, based on previous work on Stow, and ran it on TRIU1. Note to self: it needs to exclude editorial notes. Also did a lot of semi-manual cleanup of encoding in the document, ready for KMF and ZV to start work on it. Noticed a lot of remaining @rend attributes; I've now added a Schematron warning for those, so people convert them to @style.

Another mockup for the Guidelines TOC page rewrite.

Hiya, I spent most of my day on the phone, slowly going through my list. It seems most of the Anglican churches have office hours early in the weeks, so I didn't get a hold of too many, but I have been invited to the Colwood Historical Association meeting on Monday as well as to Dick Emory's house to see his private collection of artifacts and newspaper clippings from when his father served and was wounded in France! That is probably the most exciting, although I located many churches from the 1910's and learned a bit about the Anglican mission in the 1870s from a very chatty Rector's Assistant. I also located the church where Pearkes is burried and another whose reverend served with the 88th Regiment, Victoria Fusiliers. All churches seemed interested in circulating a poster in the coming weeks.

Another vital piece of information is that the Anglican archives close for July and August, so I'm hoping to arrange multiple visits but may want someone to join me for some of them as those archives hold a lot of info and are only open two half-days a week. I will keep you posted. I guess that takes away all my show and tell for tomorrow, but I'll see you all then!

Ben

PS: because I'm contacting so many groups, I've made a new email for myself just for CGTW. If you want to make this your primary contact info for me it will help me keep things all in one place. It is ben.cgtw@gmail.com