Blackstone buys Ancestry.com

[yogi]

https://gizmodo.com/worlds-biggest-land ... 1844630685

For what it's worth, since I know you have an interested in genealogy, apparently the worldls biggest landlord has now gone into family trees. It kind of makes you wonder why they would want to, and the article makes some suggestions. Regardless of the motives, it's a curious situation for people with an interest in it.

[Kellemora]

Interesting article, thanks for bringing it to my attention Yogi!

Looks like they only bought 75% which gives them the controlling interest.
If anything, that influx of money to Ancestry might help them add some more Commodore 64s to their computer lineup, hi hi. Ancestry always has problems causing them to bog down or not do something, Try Again Later, hi hi.

[yogi]

The comments in the article which I found interesting had to do with Stephen Schwarzman and his company, Blackstone, apparently have a record of being mean landlords. Buying Ancestry was probably just a whim purchase, but now this shady real estate investor owns family records and DNA analyses for millions, if not billions, of people. It might be the kind of thing people do when they have more money than they know what to do with. However, going into website maintenance from real estate investments suggests there might be an ulterior motive.

Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed the article.

[Kellemora]

I never did one of those tracking DNA tests and never plan to do so.

Maybe they bought it to get access to the LIVING people which are blocked from public view?

But who knows, it could just be another one of their investment strategies.
Heck they are major stockholders in Hilton and many other companies, many associated with food and entertainment.

[yogi]

I know genealogy is popular to a select group of people. It never occurred to me that one could run a business and be worth billions of dollars dealing in genealogy. Those DNA tests are highly suspect in my opinion, but a lot of people have it done; just for giggles I presume. So, in other words, ancestry.com always came off as an amusing but not necessarily practical web site. Apparently it has way more value than I imagined because people with serious amounts of money are showing an interest in it. I am skeptical and still think there is an ulterior motive. It certainly is a business investment decision, but I have to wonder about the true value.

[Kellemora]

It costs me 180 bucks a year to keep getting updated data from Ancestry.
Trouble there is, I haven't had the time to do many updates, sometimes for months on end.
You don't need to pay to keep the stuff up there, but you don't get the updates and hints.

As far a DNA goes: Did I tell you my wife has a new niece she never knew about.
She did but had forgotten because it was a taboo subject until DNA pulled her from the woodwork, hi hi.
What happened is SHE had a DNA test done trying to find her birth parents.
Debi's son had is DNA done also, and it showed him as a cousin to her, so she checked it out.
The info was given to Debi by her son and she called her sister to tell her the jig is up, hi hi.
When Debi's sister was a teen, a boy after months of dating finally got into her pants, only one time.
Well, that's all it took, and her sister had to move away for a few months.
She gave the baby up for adoption, and of course the adoption agency does not give out the name of the mother.
But now, she's a welcome member of the family.

One of Debi's older aunts who's kids had their DNA tests done found out there dad was not their father, hi hi.
But they should have known that since she didn't even meet the man they called father until they were like 1 and 2 years old. The girls was already 2-1/2 when she got married. He of course adopted them so they had his last name.

[yogi]

Sounds like you cannot be faint of heart when you agree to have a DNA test performed. LOL

There are a few adopted cousins in the family. One gal decided to try and locate her biological family. She started the search a couple years ago after she reached retirement age, which to me seems kind of late in life to try and find out who your ancestors are. DNA testing was the first thing that came to my mind and I passed that idea along to her, but she had other plans. There is a group called Catholic Charities who deal in adoptions, and they are the people who arranged her adoption 60+ years ago. It took a long long time before she heard from them, but they found at least one surviving biological sister living in Kansas City, KS. I don't know how Catholic Charities came up with this information after six decades, but apparently it was valid. The charity group contacted the long lost sister and told her about my cousin. She was shocked but interested in getting in touch. Eventually they began communicating by e-mail only. Apparently there is also a brother still alive but my cousin's parents have all passed on. But, sister in KS sent pictures of mom, and the resemblance to my cousin is unmistakable. After that initial flurry of e-mails, all has gone quiet. They don't do computers in Kansas, but they all now have accounts at ... you guessed it, Facebook. So now they all are one big family again via Facebook. And, as distant families go, they don't communicate very much. At least my cousin now has an idea from whence she came.

[Kellemora]

I volunteered at the Family History Center in St. Louis County for around 8 to 10 years.
You would not believe the amount of information they have, nor the number of sources they can glean from.
Some of the sources are public info, but many are not, but the data was at one time public, often only published once.
Such as an obituary in the newspaper, or public notices in small newspapers designed for legal notices, and most libraries do not get those particular newspapers. So once it's published, it is then forgotten and often not available anymore.
Since there were so many of us working there, I usually lucked out and got all the wedding announcements to glean info from. Most of the time at least one of the two people were already in our files so I could double check what was there already to see if the info lined up, and if so, I could add the new info from the announcement.
The thing I hated most to have to work with were microfiche of census records. Now that will drive you nutso, hi hi.

[yogi]

I've seen microfiche and used the reader. Thinking back on it I don't recall what I was looking at, but I do recall doing it. LOL. There are many pages of documents on a single plate of film but I can't recall how it was organized. You had to get all the reference material ahead of time so that the proper film can be picked out of the archive. Once you had that slide film, the document you are looking for may or may not be on it. I'm thinking my experience was medical related, but maybe not. Now and days they give you a CD if you want to dig up some old medical records. Then, we found out that they don't keep those records forever as we once thought. My wife was looking for a 23 year old document at one time but they only kept her case on file for twenty years. I don't think it was on microfiche, but it may have been. It's about the only media that can last that long.

[Kellemora]

I used to have a Microfilm reader, a cheap plastic one, hi hi.
But for Microfiche I had to use the readers at the libraries.
I was no longer at the Family History Center when they started putting all the Microfilm and Microfiche on digital files.
But now that they do, nothing wears out or expires anymore. So I guess that is good.
I have had rolls of Microfilm that crumbled when you tried to view them.
But you report a bad roll to the FHC and they would order a new copy for their files.
I never had a bad Microfiche though. They were always clear and crisp.
Much better than Microfilm ever was.
As you said, it was hard guessing as to which page number of Microfiche you needed.
Just because it might say from D to G, it may start at Du and end at Ge.
So it was always best to get C to E, and H to J also.
One more reason I love computers, hi hi.

[yogi]

When I was a kid I had a darkroom and played around with b/w film. Eventually I tried color and got the chemicals and paper directly from Kodak. Quit doing that because it was very expensive and I wasn't that good at it. LOL Anyway, the b/w film emulsion was silver nitrate crystals. The grain depended a lot on how the film was developed, but the quality of the film also was a factor. The smallest and finest grain was from Agfa film and imported from Germany if I recall. For best results you had to use their chemical pack, of course, and that was outrageously expensive. More than the color from Kodak. Anyway, the ultra fine grain was good, but the regular stuff I could get at the photo shop from Kodak was good enough for my purposes. I'm thinking of microfilm when I say I don't understand how they did it. The size of the silver oxide crystals could never be as fine as the negatives on the microfilm demanded. Yet, when you projected the document on the reader it was all pretty clear. Amazing stuff. And then the microfiche was even better. I can't imagine how the made that film. Then, too, there are microdot cameras and its film. It boggles my mind.

[Kellemora]

I used to develop my own 620 film, black n white, never tried color.
They all came out just about as well as what the photo store did.
I could make prints on paper with this cheap little box, but it was direct print, not an enlarger.
I thought about buying an enlarger, but the cost of it meant it was much cheaper to use the photo shop to do it all.
Just a fad I had to try!

Microfilm and fiche is so low a grain they don't even go by grain on it.
If I recall, if they had to put a grain number with it, it was well over 12,000 or more.
Been a long time since I saw the specs on it. But I do remember it was a gelatinized silver they used.

[yogi]

I read up on it and was only slightly surprised. Apparently they take raw silver and dump nitric acid on it to produce the light sensitive Silver Nitrate. Halide salts seems to be part of the mix at that point so that they go through a filtering process to take out the salt. What is left gets mixed with the gelatin and applied to the celluloid film. The article I read never said how they determine the size of the crystals, but they do say the smaller the better.

My first piece of equipment I owned was that box that makes contact prints. The camera I had at the time used 127 film which was detailed enough but very small for a contact print. The larger Kodak Brownie used the larger film size, but that too was not like the 3x5's you could get from the photo shop. I knew all along that I could have somebody process and print the photos a lot cheaper than I could do them myself, but cost was not the reason I got interested in the hobby. I used to tell my girlfriends "let's go to my darkroom and see what develops." Only one thought I might be serious and I did manage some developments with her. LOL My crazy uncle who lived next door had similar ideas and he bought an enlarger for $50. I still remember that price because I could not afford one on my own. He let me use his equipment and I accidentally discovered what he did with his girlfriends. Very interesting.

[Kellemora]

Good one Yogi!

I still have my Brownie Hawkeye sitting here on a shelf, unfortunately the flash attachment got damaged when I moved and I tossed it. Probably should have kept it even though it got cracked and bent.
I wish I still had my Kodak camera with the bellows, that thing took excellent pictures, and you could focus and set the f-stop too. It also used 620 film.

[yogi]

Some of the old 35mm cameras I learned on were all manual. The first one had a split image range finder for focusing. I never figured out how that worked. There was a viewfinder as part of the focus knob. Looking in there at the subject showed the image split horizontally. The top half was tinted blue. All you needed to do was pick something to focus on and turn the knob until the top and bottom split image lined up. It worked perfectly but demanded that you have good eyes. I could never use that thing now. As I got more and more into photography the cameras became more sophisticated and automated. The Nikon I currently own does it all automatically. I can put it into a manual mode and adjust the shutter speed and the aperture that way too. I might attempt that if I still had my light meter, but I tossed it when I replaced the camera before the Nikon. The clever phone takes the best pictures of all the cameras I ever used. They cheat, however, and correct the image digitally before they display it. The good news is I get some perfectly great night shots under the stars. The bad news is I can't play with the settings to create special effects.

[Kellemora]

That's the first thing I missed when I bought a digital camera, no f-Stop, which is why I rarely used that camera.
I later bought another slightly more expensive digital camera that had what they called a depth setting, which was supposed to emulate an f-Stop, but it didn't exactly do that at all.

For example, if I wanted to take a photo of someone in front of a tree with other things in the background, I wanted only them and everything else blurred out big time. You can do that easily using the f-Stop, but that depth of field sure didn't do much, not even close really. I think it actually worked the opposite of what they intended, it would blur the face while keeping the background sharp, hi hi. I ended up giving it to my son when I was visiting him in Florida while he lived there. He had dropped his in the sand just as a soccer ball hit it and drove it further into the sand. It didn't work at all after that. It was a much more expensive camera than the one I gave him, but it just had way too many open areas on it where sand got in.

At one time I owned a 5 x 7 Speed Graflex. I got it from Francis Scheidegger who is the photographer who bought it new.
After he retired, he had all of the thousands of glass plates in his storage building brought down to a large historical photo lab, but the law prohibited him from giving them the identification cards that named who all those photo's were.
I thought that was strange at the time, but now that I'm older, I do understand the privacy issues involved.
I only had about two dozen glass plates, and after making prints I would clean and reuse them, until I ran out of the stuff to do it with. I tried to sell it a few times but had no takers, so in the end I donated it to the Missouri Historical Society and they passed it on to some Historical Photographic Equipment Museum after a few years. My name did not appear after they donated it, but Francis Scheidegger's name was associated with it then.

[yogi]

The price you pay for aperture access is that you need to adjust the exposure time to compensate for the varying degrees of light hitting the film. Getting the right combination can be tricky. My Nikon has a macro function wherein I can do close up shots, very close up. In that mode the depth of field is very shallow, which is probably what you want anyway if you are only 2 cm away from your subject. Some of those macro lens shots are dramatic.

The Pixel 3 camera that has a clever phone attached has a blur mode. Apparently Google was not the first company to develop that technology. Basically it's intended for self-portraits where you want your face in sharp focus but the background blurred. I tried that a few times and it works quite well. Then I saw a picture taken by none other than Ivanka Trump. It was a selfie of a group and one of the comments suggest it might be fake. They pointed to a very small area where her elbow was near her body but not touching it. The slit of background light that showed through was in sharp focus compared to the blur of the rest of the background. A lot of to-do was made and I could not figure out why Ivanka would want to fake something simple like that, Then one comment came up that explained how imperfect Apple software is when it comes to blurring photographs. They claimed that the software did not detect that slit as being background because it was too small and narrow; it just assumed it was part of her clothing. I liked the way the guy explained it and it sounded way more credible than a dopey blonde trying to fake a photo of herself. The point to be made here is that blur and focus are all digital functions now with those clever phone cameras.

[Kellemora]

Debi's Schmartz-Fone takes great pictures, which surprised me.
My little Flip-fone takes decent pictures, but they are low resolution.
OK for website display but not so much for printing them out as 3x5 or even 5x7.
But her's I can print out as 5x7 and they are clear, no pixellation.

I have no idea what they were doing for sure, but up at the grocery store they were filming an ad.
The guy holding up the cans or boxes of product was wearing a green gauntlet glove that went all the way up to his elbow.
I figure this was so his arm would not show, and the can would be like floating in mid-air in the aisle.
Which is how some of their ads appear on TV or in the newspaper.
I just figured they superimposed a picture of the can over the background of the store aisle.
But on a TV ad, the can comes off the shelf to the center of the aisle with the label facing you and sometimes it dances or is waved back and forth like a tilt back and forth actually.
Now since only the guys arm was covered, this ad they are making probably won't show the cans jumping off the shelf like other ads.
One other thing I notice as well was he was not actually holding the can itself. Inside his glove was a rubber ring and I'm pretty sure it ran to a vacuum of some type to hold whatever he was holding with his hand behind it.
Hard to tell because they block off the aisle they are in for a short time. I didn't hear any pumps running either.

[yogi]

We celebrated a wedding anniversary in Boulder Colorado with my daughter one year. She took a picture of us with her iPhone that was really great. She sent me a copy of it and I don't recall exactly the size of the file but it was huge. I sent the file to a photographer who makes posters and had this blown up to about 24 x 36 inches. I was shocked when we got it back because I too could not see any graininess.

When I try to edit the pictures taken by my Pixel, I use Paint Shop Pro. Each time I open the file with PSP I get a warning that the color pallet is not standard. They offer to change it to whatever is in the software. I think that explains why some of the pictures are exceptional. Google, at least, is using some custom pallet and doing the gods know what digitally.

The green screen on television is used to project images. To be honest I don't know what happens if you have a green screen with no image projected onto it. LOL It could be transparent but I doubt it because the camera does not know what is behind the green screen. Thus I'm guessing the ad makers are changing the appearance of the shopkeeper's arm for some reason or another. They probably are going to put a female arm in its place. Men don't do shopping. Ha Ha Ha

[Kellemora]

Or they replace the green with the background image.

I saw a video once of how they made a couple of the Star Trek shots with the Borg who's arms are weapons.
They used Blue Screen back then. Which didn't work real well if there was that shade of blue in your clothes.
Remember how the weathermen had to be careful about not having blue in their ties or clothes?
Else it was like they had a hole in them and you could see the screen behind them, which really isn't behind them at all, because they were standing in front of a blue screen too.

Also so a clip on how they made a hoverboard ad for a fake hoverboard, hi hi.