My things

I noticed something this morning while dropping Viorica off on her way to work. It was nothing spectacular: no new shopping centre, no enormous construction project and certainly nothing that would normally justify stopping to take photographs. The pavement around one of the bus stops had been renovated. More importantly, the bus-stop area itself had been included in the work, and when I looked further along the avenue I realised that this was not an isolated patch. A much longer section of the pedestrian infrastructure was being replaced. This is one of those small changes that I probably would not have noticed as a visitor. Now that I live here and repeatedly drive along the same streets, however, I see Chișinău changing in increments. A road is resurfaced. A kerb disappears and comes back new. An old stretch of asphalt pavement is removed. A bus stop is rebuilt. A few days later, what had looked tired and unmistakably inherited from another era suddenly looks considerably mo...

Business concept: This article is associated with my business idea for Remote Heart-Failure Monitoring. Moldova is making significant investments in the modernisation of its healthcare system. Digitalisation, electronic health records, telemedicine and better access to healthcare outside the country's largest medical centres are increasingly part of the national discussion. There is, however, an important difference between digitising healthcare administration and changing how healthcare itself is delivered . Heart failure provides an excellent opportunity to make that transition. Instead of relying predominantly on periodic consultations and waiting until a patient's condition deteriorates enough to require emergency treatment or hospitalisation, Moldova could introduce a nationally supported remote heart-failure monitoring programme . The principle is straightforward: allow medical teams to observe important changes in a patient's condition while that patient is ...

My family-tree project has become considerably more complicated than entering names and dates into genealogy software. I am now dealing with civil records, parish registers, old photographs, certificates, correspondence, archives in several countries, translations, uncertain relationships, research hypotheses and a steadily growing collection of people who may or may not turn out to be relatives. As the project expanded, I realised that the difficult part was no longer simply finding information. I needed a system that could remember how I wanted the research to be conducted. For this I am using two large language models, ChatGPT and Grok. Both are connected, with the appropriate permissions, to parts of my Google environment, including services such as Google Drive, Gmail and Calendar. They can therefore do considerably more than answer an isolated question. Depending on the available tools and permissions, they can search material, examine documents and correspondence, help ...

 

Sunday is traditionally supposed to be a day of rest. Apparently nobody involved with our current life in Moldova has been informed of this. After yesterday's expedition around Chișinău, I could quite happily have spent today doing very little. The renovation, however, continues to generate decisions, shopping lists and things that need to be investigated, while family life produces another collection of tasks entirely. One practical difference I continue to appreciate in Moldova is that Sunday does not necessarily mean putting everything on hold. Shops, supermarkets, restaurants, shopping centres and many other businesses remain open, so if Saturday's list survives Saturday, there is still a reasonable chance of attacking it again the following morning. And our list definitely survived Saturday. Birthday season has arrived The first part of the morning was devoted to birthdays. Viorica's birthday is tomorrow, but by one of those interesting pieces o...

My latest hobby continues to get slightly out of control. When I returned seriously to my family tree, I thought I was essentially going to tidy up information I already had, fill a few gaps, attach some documents and perhaps push a few branches back another generation. Instead, it has become something much closer to historical detective work. One document produces two new names, those names produce another village, somebody gets married and introduces another family, and suddenly what looked like a small missing branch has become an entire collection of people I did not know existed. Today was another particularly productive day on the Italian side of the family. The descendant chart accompanying this post gives some idea of what is happening. The Pochettino and Ravera branches have been expanding, more relationships are becoming documented, and the colourful collection of boxes on my screen is beginning to look less like a family tree and more like the organisational char...