Stefani Twyford's Blog (127)

This is the second year that Texas Monthly has hosted a short film contest during the annual Austin Film Festival. The contest provides a platform for Texans to share their Texas pride by making a film 10 minutes or less about Texas, your experiences in Texas or other insights into our amazing state. You do not have to be from Texas in order to enter, and you do not have to film this in Texas but it must be about Texas. Pretty simple right?

The deadline for submission is June 1st,…

Late last year I started a family genealogy tree on Geni.com and blogged about what exactly Geni is.

Recently my parents were in town visiting and my dad and I sat down for a couple of hours at Geni.com, armed with an old genealogical tree that I had roughly put together about 20 years ago. My intention was to get the remaining tree fleshed out…

I was recently telling someone about the work I do and I got some interesting feedback. He said, “you’re an interpreter.”

I have been spending some time with that statement and find it very intriguing. I guess I have always collapsed an interpreter with a translator. But when you look up the definition an interpreter is someone who facilitates communication. From the dictionary… “The interpreter will take in a complex concept from one language, choose the most appropriate vocabulary…

I was at a Bat Mitzvah this past Saturday and the presiding rabbi gave a sermon on the gift of time. He had seen an ad for a famous jewelry company that depicted a graduate in cap and gown, with a new watch on her arm. The caption was, “There Is No Present Like The Time”, which of course, is a twist on the old idiom, “There Is No Time Like The Present” to show that the watch was the gift of time. But the watch is also a metaphor for the larger definition of time. I wish I had the sermon to…

In the news yesterday is a story about a couple who are engaged and planning to wed soon. What makes this story really unusual is that they have the same name, Kelly Hildebrandt, and they met on Facebook.

One night (female) Kelly was bored and typed her name into Facebook to see what came up. Up popped Kelly Hildebrandt but it was a guy and he was in Lubbock Texas. She sent him a note that said “Hi, We had…

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything here and while I have been very busy with work and new clients, I have felt a missing of my creativity and inspiration. It occurred to me over the weekend that the source of my ennui was the recent deaths of 4 people I knew within the time-span of two weeks. These were not old people, peers of my parents, who were battling long illnesses and the gentle creep of old age, but my own peers, (give or take a decade) that left suddenly, with little…

These days, many of us take photos with our phones and send them to each other via email or post them online to various photo sharing websites such as Flickr and Twitpic. I’ve also got photos on my Facebook profile and there’s some video clips of me speaking on my website. I don’t have photos of my…

As I write this, I am sitting on a plane returning from a family reunion in California. My cousin celebrated his 70th birthday yesterday and several family members flew in for the occasion. My cousin's grandmother and my grandmother were sisters, so while I see him all the time (since he lives in the same building as my parents), his sisters and their…

Last week I blogged about how I have been organizing and tagging all my digital photos during frequent 3 hour flights. I received several comments and questions from readers about what to do with those photos once they are tagged and organized into a meaningful architecture.

I find myself once again sitting on an airplane and thought I would take this time to…

I spend a lot of time flying back and forth between Houston and Los Angeles to visit my family. The flight is 3 hours and last year I made a commitment to spend that three hour time period working on sorting, identifying and tagging all of my digital photos. By the time we take off, get our complimentary beverages, prepare for the descent, it probably works out to about 2 hours but that time I have totally dedicated to this task. I decided to focus this time on this…

We received an email from a reader suggesting we write an article comparing the cost and time it takes to create your own keepsake video as opposed to hiring us to create a Legacy video for you. We thought this was a great idea.

When you walk into your local computer store, you are met with aisles of the newest technological toys. They are enticing…

I have been watching “In Treatment“, an HBO drama about a psychotherapist, Paul Weston (with award winning performance by Gabriel Byrne). Each episode is a session with one of his patients, including one session with his own therapist, Gina, at the end of the week. The session with Gina covers some of the things that are going on with his patients…

Growing up and living in the United States, I had never heard of Ted Grant or been exposed to his photojournalism, so I was not really sure who this keynote speaker was at the Association of Personal Historians 2010 Conference in Victoria BC earlier this month. For some reason, his name kept conjuring up the news anchor on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. ( Then I found out I had been confusing the editor, Lou Grant and the anchor Ted Knight and created my own…

I recently returned from the 2010 Association of Personal Historians Conference held in Victoria, British Columbia. The theme of this conference was “Voices of the Elders” and was named as such to “honor the First Nations, the first peoples of Canada, on whose traditional territory we met, as well as the elders of all nations, whose stories we help preserve.”…

I was just reading about a woman whose computer was acting up so she called a computer technician out to her home to save her from the dread ‘blue screen.’ Apparently she had 10 years worth of genealogy research stored on her computer and NO BACKUPS! Just thinking about that makes me shudder.

If you’ve ever lived through a hard-drive crash, you know it is one of the scariest and most humbling experiences. We tend to relate to our computers as…

Since 1995, Ira Glass, one of the greatest storytellers of our time, has been the host of the radio show “This American Life,” a weekly hour-long show that is primarily journalistic non-fiction but also features essays, short fiction and occasionally memoirs.

I had the pleasure of seeing Ira live this past weekend at Jones Hall here in Houston. My experience was less like sitting in a…

We recently completed a video that we were hired to do by Bright Sky Press, a Houston-based publisher of fine books for national and international trade distribution. The video explores the message of Venerable Master Miao Tsan, abbot at Vairocana Zen Monastery in Garden Grove, CA, lecturer and author of several books including his newly published, “Just Use…