ohhh thats sad

I'm still working on getting together funds and manpower to arrange for a restoration of my great grandparents grave, its a slow process getting in contact with people who may or may not have documents needed to allow the restoration people to take the rather massive stone away and recondition it.

In the process though I've made contact with my cousin George, a 3rd gen Beuken to my 4th. He provided some useful information and sadly reported that the deeds to the plots are lost..hmm ok 

Well that just means a bit more effort to get permision to restore it

But he also let slip a nugget of info I didn't know, my own grandmother is buried next to them in an unmarked grave.

Whhhhaat??

Its no longer a big family secret, my father was raised by his grandparents(the ones in the grave) as a son, becuase his mother died very soon after giving birth to him, It was a bit of a scandal in 1935 Fauldhouse because grandad got her pregnant... so a swift marriage was arranged and they were sent out of the way for a bit to have the kid and wait for things to settle, well that was probably the plan. But she died of sepsis less than 2 months later..  Grandad let his parents raise dad as their own, and met his 2nd wife Alice (also getting her pregnant...what a lad) and he moved on, and everyone was sworn to secrecy... Later causing incredible family rifts when the secret was revealed by one of my dads "siblings" who probably using choice langague informed the stroppy teen brat in front of him of his origins. The fallout lasted years.....years...still going on really.

But...back to my grandmother, since dad was raised as a son, the story of his mum wasn't discussed, and it seems that the family allowed her to be buried in a family plot but  not to be remembered.. She was only 19 years old, thats so sad.

I found records of her marriage and death in the Scottish records office and now have info on her. Her name was Catherine Marshall Thomson McAlonan, she married Mick(Matthew), my grandad in Oct 1935 while about 3 months pregnant. Had dad in March 1936, and passed away mid May. not even a year married...so sad.

I'm now quite determined to ensure that this young lady is not forgotton, all we have is a few records, an unmarked grave and a single photo, she deserves a little more.

Ahthankyew

Maybe its an addiction?

Got a few more 5 star ratings on my book, no reviews that I can see but still nice to see the rating rise again after someone only gave it 4 stars because they thought they had to buy 1000quids worth of software (they don't its all free.. I doubt he read it), I now get all 5 gold stars instead of that annoying half white 5th star.

Its kinda done its thing though, and sales are very low, it was a very niche book and since the RPi4 came out it its lost much of its target audience.

But I can now announce I am writing another... as much as I didn't really enjoy the final phase of writing the 1st book I kinda felt I wasn't quite done with it and had a lot of content I needed to skip, so wanted to have another go.  Sales were not good enough to do a 2nd edition with edits, so I'm biting the bullet and doing a whole new book with all new content.

I'm about half way through, and its shaping up to be another big book, but I'm learning from my mistakes and not committing to a time frame with the publisher. I'll submit it when its done, and make sure all the software is uptodate and ready at launch. I've been playing catchup a bit with the older software and Raspberry's upgrades to the Rpi4 have made a lot of that redundant now.

So this books focus is mainly on the Rpi4 and lets me explain some of the cooler features of OpenGLES3.0, and some 3.1 and 3.2, though the RPi4's support of 3.1 and 3.2 is current very limited, I can use my Jetson to do that too. I'm pretty sure RPi4 will get the 3.1 and 3.2 stuff sorted by the time the book is ready.

Since the Rp4 is a proper linux/mesa libs system it will be a lot easier to do the cross platform stuff and wont' have to spend much time doing exceptions to rules.

About 200 pages of actual slightly meandering text done so far, but only outlines for the code and comparative content (I want to compare some good and bad principles and also how OpenGLES3.0 can do things a lot faster than OpenGLES2.0).  I'm also not going to spend too much time explaining set ups, as people sadly insist on using their own, even when VisualGDB is clearly the bomb for this stuff.

So its still a good 6 months away from being in a readable state for proof readers, I expect to finish in about a year.

I'll experiment a bit with my new 1st years in Block C and see how they cope with the projects I have planned for it.

Writing without pressure really is fun, but editing is still boring, I tend to write in a conversational style which makes sense as you do it, but looking back at it the day after, you can't always keep the train of thought going, so a lot can get chopped...still its nice, its fun, and I'm enjoying my hour or 2 sessions.

Probably won't do much updating about it on here, at least until I start the coding.

Ahthankyew