UTF-8
In last night's entry posted the old family name, Suwała. Shortly thereafter, it occurred to me that I had to switch the log's HTML header to use the UTF-8 character set by default, instead of ISO-8859-1. I post to the log via PGP-crypted mail. I was expecting something to break along the way, if not in the MIME encoding, then somewhere along the procmail piping, but it didn't. I'm generally impressed by how well UTF-8 works at this point. No need for funny encoding types or ampersand-notation; I could easily insert Russian or Japanese throughout my text. До свидания.

My Ancestry
Today was a calm, cloudy day, with one 10 minute spurt of very heavy rain. Of course, it was when I was driving. The photo shows how it was, with the wipers going full speed. In fact, the EXIF data tells me that the exposure time was a 1/100 of a second. It's remarkable how quickly the rain was coming down. I probably should have been paying more attention to the road...

The highlight of the evening was my grandfather giving a history lesson on the family roots. This is a subject I greatly enjoy, and he has done extremely meticulous research into our ancestry. Last time he was here, we mapped a detailed family tree, and scanned in all available photos, dating back to the very beginnings of photography. At that point, I had cleaned up many of the photos, and they were archived on CD. This was 1996/7. Now, I plan to scan all his notes and create a proper archive that can be distributed throughout the family.

The most interesting point of the discussion tonight was that my roots have been traced back to 1644. It is believed that our family name originated around then, as Suwała. The name has evolved since then, as names tend to, but remains true to its original meaning.