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.
Anyway, I don’t mean to start rambling, but if you get a second, check out the Lowe Family’s new web site!
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!