…and all through the house, everything was going to hell in a handbasket. Our twelve-year-old son threw one of his trademark temper tantrums (for which we can’t really even begin to get him help until the middle of January, since, when we called at the beginning of November, that was the first appointment the psychiatrist had) because a new toy was released today and he’s mad that he won’t be getting it for Christmas. In the middle of his fit, my mother-in-law called to tell us that she’s canceling the traditional Christmas Eve celebration at her house. My parents just called and decided that we won’t be able to have dinner with them on Christmas day, because it’s too much stress on my dad, who has to work on Wednesday morning.

I completely understand where he’s coming from, and don’t fault my parents at all for their decision. They’ve spent the last week (with a little bit of help from us) moving my great aunt out of the house she’s lived in for 15 years and into a new house closer to us. She officially moved in yesterday, and my parents spent all day over there today helping her unpack a very small portion of the things that are in boxes. I’m sure my dad will probably be back over there again tomorrow, at least for a short while. Then, on Christmas day, my brother and his wife are flying in sometime around noon. Then, as I mentioned, my dad has to go back to work. For anyone that would be a lot of stress, and for my dad (and, to be quite honest, for myself) stress is usually multiplied exponentially by the fact that we do not cope well with things not going according to plan.

Anyway, just felt like venting for a minute. Any of those things by themselves wouldn’t be all that bad, but all together, it’s a terribly drastic change from Christmases past. My parents are still planning to come up and share breakfast with us on Christmas morning, but they’ll be heading back home before lunch. Then, we’ll probably have our “Christmas dinner” with them, and my brother and sister-in-law and my great aunt, on the day after Christmas.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

I found an interesting article/slideshow on Wired.com the other day. Working in a small cube farm myself, I was curious to see what kinds of suggestions they had. While the majority of the suggestions in the article are a bit outlandish, the “takeaways” with each picture are generally rather inspiring. I’m curious, though, if anyone that works in a real office would be able to pull off any of these ideas. What do you think?

The power of images in making a sale has been well known in traditional marketing for a long time. This becomes even more important online when there’s no physical product for users to handle. The images on your website alone have to work even harder to convey the true look and feel of your product.

Although the following guidelines focus on ecommerce imagery, they can generally be applied to most websites.

1. Professional quality

The quality of photographs is one of the few clues available online for users to judge the quality of your products. The importance of quality shots can’t be stressed enough, especially for luxury goods. And it’s an investment worth making - conversions have been known to more than double through improved imagery.

Ensure images are professionally shot and of high resolution. Put as much care and thought into imagery as you would your window display. If you’re aiming at the luxury market, it’s important to create a feast for the eyes to draw your site visitors in.

2. Alternate & detailed views

Offering alternate views is crucial to convey the full sense of the product. An important alternate view is the detailed one. The range of alternate views available should aim to provide a viable alternative to viewing the product in a physical store. It’s a good idea to allow the full range of imagery to be explored by providing cues such as arrows in the gallery area.

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My Internet connection at home has been kind of screwy for the last few days. I was able to access some Web sites but could not access others. For a while, I was able to access Google with no trouble, but could not access Yahoo! Then, however, I can’t access Google or Yahoo! for some reason.

I looked into it and was finally able to resolve the problem by simply power-cycling the modem and my router. I don’t know what the problem was, but it sure was annoying.

Yesterday we had the first snowfall of the season here in the D.C. area. The snow started at about 7 a.m. and had already made things really nasty by about 7:30. I was on my way to work and actually decided to turn around and head home because of how bad things were getting.

It was very strange. At the beginning, the snow wasn’t actually sticking to the roads, it was just laying on top. When the wind would blow, the snow would blow around on the road, too. Unfortunately, when the wind would blow, the cars would blow around on the road, as well.

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Well, I’ve been sick for the last three days, and I’ve pretty much decided that it stinks. I don’t get sick very often, but when I do, it knocks me on my butt. I went to bed on Sunday evening feeling pretty bad and woke up on Monday morning feeling horrible. Throughout Monday and Tuesday, I felt like I had the flu (no nausea, but the serious body aches, fever, etc.). Then, I woke up this morning (the first day I actually stayed home from work - but that was planned for a different reason) feeling terrible in a different way. The body aches had slightly subsided, but now I had a terrible pain in my throat, jaw and ear. I’ve been coughing all day, which makes my whole body hurt.

Hopefully I’ll feel better soon, but until then, I’m not getting a whole lot of writing or coding done. I look forward to seeing you all when I get back on my feet.

Let me preface this article by assuring you that, as far as I have been able to ascertain, no one was harmed in the incident I am about to discuss. Further, let me assure you that everyone in my family is okay.

With the Columbine shootings nearly 10 years behind us and the much more recent Virginia Tech shootings almost six months behind us, I am extremely disappointed in the way crisis communication still seems to be so lacking in our schools.

As parents and as employees at learning institutions (I work at a community college and my wife works at my children’s middle school), we both are rightfully concerned about how our schools will react in the face of a crisis. Being a key player in my college’s crisis communication plan, I have a great deal of faith in the way things would be handled at work. Up until today, I had no real reason to doubt how things would be handled at my children’s school.

Today changed all of that, though.

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OpenOffice.org (OOo) is an amazing suite of open-source, freeware applications. OOo is not quite ready to overtake Microsoft Office, but it is certainly nice to be able to use those types of tools on all operating systems without having to run complicated emulators and pay extravagant licensing fees.

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Just a quick, funny note for the blog today.

I checked my bulk mail folder today to make sure no legitimate messages had popped in there. Oddly enough, I came across a junk message from a time-traveling celebrity. Apparently Vanilla Ice has gone 31 years into the future, and is sending me e-mail messages from that period in time.

If Vanilla Ice really did have the power to travel through time, don’t you think he’d go backwards rather than forwards? At least if he went back in time people might know who we was.

Provided she has experience with a server-side scripting language, of course. The main point is simply that AJAX, although it is a technology that relies heavily on JavaScript, really only requires a few lines of JavaScript in order to work. Once you start the AJAX function with the teeny bit of JavaScript, everything else can be (and probably should be) handled on the back-end through a server-side language.

So, for all of you that are as afraid of AJAX as I was, here is a quick post to teach you everything you need to know about the JavaScript side of AJAX.

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