For almost 10 years now I’ve been doing the Lowe Family’s web site. The Lowes are very dear to me and have been since I first met Doug in elementary school about 20 years ago. In fact, I ended up marrying Doug’s sister Korinne and have been working full time with the family since.
Anyway, their web site has been the same for about the last 5 years. After a lot of thought, design, and programming, I’m pleased to announce the completion of the Lowe Family’s new web site.
The site was written primarily in PHP with a mySQL database interface. I’ve watched and admired Flash over the years but have always been reluctant to implement it as not everyone had the plug-in installed. Although it’s cool, I didn’t want Flash to hinder the purpose of the site. Hence, I have opted out in the previous revisions of the Lowe Family’s web site. However, after all these years, I believe Flash to be widely in use enough that I did several parts of the new site in Flash—the header, navigation bar, videos, music, etc. I went under the assumption that most of our clientele has high speed Internet capabilities such as DSL or Cable. As a result, the videos are fairly large in size and dimension—but they look great! I am currently looking into streaming services for Flash to pretty much guarantee a seamless playback for those at lower speeds.
Consumer Beware! I just got a call from a foreign lady with a shady company called “Domain Registry Support.” She said she needed my fax number to fax me a notification of recent changes made to my domain name. I happen to be the technical contact for that particular domain but I’m not the owner.
I wasn’t born yesterday so I kept quizzing this woman. I asked her several times how her company is related to mine since I’ve never done business with them. She said they provide domain name notifications. I asked her what the heck that means? She repeated the exact same statement. I asked her if they were my registrar. No. My hosting company? No. Well then—WHATARE YOU? A company that provides domain name notifications. I could have just about pulled my hair out—but I kept quizzing her.
I eventually got the phone number out of her and while I was still quizzing her as I googled the number. Their site pulled up (domainregistrysupport.com) and it’s a very basic site with no information about the company or their physical location. Just the toll-free number 800-875-7198. Other google results included this wiki that confirmed my suspicions. They are a shady company out to take advantage of the ignorant and naive. I greatly despise companies such as these. Remember—if it’s not your hosting company or your registrar contacting you, there is nothing to worry about. Don’t let companies like this intimidate you into giving out personal information, or even worse, signing you up for their services.
http://www.jerrysartarama.com Great prices, slow customer service. Jerry’s has some very good deals on a variety of art supplies. Overall, I’ve been pleased with just a few bumps along the customer service response road.
As long as you do your ordering online and don’t need to call in, Jerry’s is a great place to get your art supplies. However, if you have a problem with any of your orders, you can only leave a message that will be returned at their earliest convenience (for me that was two days later). If you want to place an order over the phone, expect to wait in a call queue 10-15 minutes. Hence, as long as things go smoothly with your online orders, you’ll be fine.
On April 18th I ordered a case of foam board and 12 large mat boards. On about the 23rd the case with the foam board arrived damaged. Several tears and holes in the box as shown below:
The box was obviously damaged in shipping and four pieces of foamboard on that side were grossly punctured and unusable. A few days later the matboard arrived also damaged. UPS said I had to contact Jerry’s to initiate a damaged merchandise claim.
I called customer service the day the first box arrived damaged. When you call customer service, the only option they give you is to leave a voicemail message. Two days later, a representative called and left me a message as I was not in my office. I spent the next five days calling her and leaving messages.
On the fifth day the representative called me back and we were able to reach a solution that we were both happy with. Needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled about the slow response but I was happy with the final outcome. At least they did what they could to make sure I was satisfied.
If you do shop at Jerry’s, be sure to sign up for their promotions as they do have several good promotions (like 10 percent off coupons) each month.
I just had a wonderful idea for a comedy. Last Saturday my wife and I went to a large seventeenth century-style theme park in Branson, Missouri called Silver Dollar City. The ‘city’ is only about 15-20 minutes from our home and we’ve been trying to make it out there for the last two years. Well, Saturday we finally took the plunge and went. Had my brain been functioning properly, I probably would have rethought the decision had I realized it was indeed the weekend and the most beautiful day of the month.
We left the house around 10:00AM and were just about 5 minutes from the theme park when we hit major traffic on highway 76. It was at a standstill and wasn’t going anywhere. Being a local, I knew exactly what to do. I turned the car around and went the back way (I’m sooooo smart). About 8 minutes later we were coming around the corner at which point we would be only 5 minutes from the park when BAM—we hit traffic again and ended up waiting just as long as we would have waited had we stayed on the main road in the first place (not so smart after all…) We wait, and wait, and wait and after what seemed like an eternity (35 minutes—and yes, I could have walked faster since it was only 2 miles), we arrived at the parking lot they directed us to. Well, I use the term ‘parking lot’ in the most general term since the real parking lots were full and we were directed to park atop a green grassy hill. We then walked a mile to the entrance and waited in line to get our tickets.
After we got our tickets, we waited in yet another line to get into the actual park. After that line we were in!! Yes! From this point forward we spent our time walking around and looking at all the lines. It then occurred to me that we just spent a good portion of time and money to gain entrance to a place where you either wait in lines or spend whatever money you might have left in overpriced shops for cheap merchandise made in China. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself as my mind caught hold of that thought. In my mind’s eye I could imagine a sitcom about nothing (like Seinfeld) spending a full half hour having the ‘theme park’ experience.
Like I told my wife that day, if she ever wants to see me in any kind of theme park with our kids, it had better be on a non-peak day with no lines. Even better, the theme park could pay for me to get in!
I purchased a new Dell computer about 2 weeks ago for my job and it came with Windows Vista. Granted, had I wanted, I’m sure I could have ordered a system with Windows XP but I figured, “Hey, why not embrace the future instead of lingering in the past?” After all, Windows XP will eventually go by the wayside as with all the previous versions of Windows.
I’m usually hesitant about using a new OS when it’s still new in the market but when I first turned it on, the system wooed me with its Aero interface. Finally after six different versions of Windows, Microsoft has made one with an aesthetically pleasing graphical interface. In fact, it reminds me more of a Mac’s OS than anything else. Granted, Windows still hasn’t caught up to Mac in that regard, but they’re finally getting closer.
After the coolness of the Aero interface wore off, and I started using the system, the real fun began. The first thing I noticed is that Windows Explorer (the file explorer—not Internet Explorer) would crash every so often (so much for stability). Users in the Microsoft forums are all up in arms over the issue and apparently it’s caused by unknown file types from certain applications. I have noticed that mine always seems to crash when I go to a directory with Adobe Illustrator files. You would think that after 12 years of development, Microsoft’s file explorer could display a simple file list without crashing.
Because Microsoft recognizes their faults now days, they have a built-in manager for Vista that tells you how many problems it actually does have. It’s quite nice seeing as you can keep track of all the crashes, freezes, and other problems Vista has. Perhaps Microsoft built this to save users from writing down each problem they have with Vista. ;) The screen shot below is taken from my actual computer. To see the full list, click on the image.
That was the first bump. The second got even better. I have dozens of QuickTime files that I use regularly on my system for video work. Imagine my surprise when the latest version of QuickTime wouldn’t play a single quicktime movie file. Quicktime would open, but when I opened a quicktime movie in Quicktime, it would freeze the entire system for about 2 minutes before Vista would come back and say, “buffer overrun.” Lot’s of fun. As of this writing, Apple knows Vista is a little funny from users’ feedback, but no solution has yet been published. Microsoft admits compatibility issues, but, of course, that’s Apple’s fault.
Since last week I have installed dozens of applications that I own and used on Windows XP. I could honestly say that a third of them either don’t work or are crippled with Vista. Compatibility is a big issue with Vista. It’s still too new and third party application developers haven’t had time to rewrite their programs to work with it. So I sit here and patiently wait for new versions of various programs to come out. I have been using Windows since version 3.1 and I must say that this is the first time I’ve had such a problem with compatibility with programs written for the previous version. Vista is none too forgiving.
Besides the compatibility issues, I have an annoyance to report. It seems like every action I take on my computer, it wants me to confirm it. Every program I open, every time I install something, every time I open admin preferences, Vista wants me to “Allow” or “Cancel” the action. It gets extremely annoying, taking me twice as long to do things as I now have to tell Vista every time that “YES!!! I want to open this file or otherwise I wouldn’t be clicking on it!!” In fact, Apple made a commercial accentuating this annoying new ‘security feature.’
To those who are considering upgrading to Vista: wait. Wait until you have no other choice or at least until the software programs you use have been updated to work with Vista and Microsoft takes care of all its bugs and internal program errors.
I just finished writing the “About Me” page of my site. I don’t have time to give any blog worth a bother right now but I didn’t want to leave the site without any content. So here it is! Hello World!
