JK’s Journal

I screwed up my sleep schedule tonight by taking a 2.5 hour nap when I got home after work today. My brain’s been locked in half-sleep/ zombie mode for a couple hours, so I did some work on the Family Tree, JK’s Journal, and played with 3-D Chat for the website.

My current family tree software* was purchased many moons ago for a whopping $5. The user interface is a little clunky and obviously graphically-designed in the 90′s, but it wasn’t until my cousin Munchkin started using it heavily that the flaws really started to surface. So far we’ve determined that it has issues displaying single-parent families and multiple marriages. It really annoys me that the software won’t let us add a marriage between my grandmother and grandfather because it’s a second marriage- they’ve been married for something like 40 years. I looked long and hard into using Geni.com, and decided to try it despite a few privacy concerns. I attempted to upload our GEDCOM file to Geni, but their upload process wouldn’t let me identify myself in my own family tree (!) and I wasn’t able to finish the upload. I e-mailed their tech support, wish me luck.

After hitting that particular brick wall, I decided to goof around with Google’s new software, Lively, which is 3-D avatar chat. I created an avatar and a room, and then linked to the room from a new PlanetJK page: The Lively Lounge. I doubt I’ll use it much, but it’s fun to play with. If anyone else is using Lively, feel free to join the room. Here’s my Lively Avatar:

Last but not least, I researched a plugin for JK’s Journal that will let me block access to the public but still allow me to test and redesign. I settled on Maintenance Mode by Michael Wörher, which worked out really well. Expect to see this a lot in the near future as I finally choose a new theme for the Journal and do some overhauling of the back-end:

Without further ado… G’night.