We’ve seen so many big companies announce massive layoffs lately that it won’t be long before that pain trickles down to small businesses (I’m sure it already has).  Of course, most of these big companies will survive this economic crisis but there is a good chance that many of these small businesses won’t, which is why they need our support now more than ever.

Next time you plan to go out to eat or do some shopping, try to remember to support your local businesses first.  Instead of eating at a chain restaurant, eat at your favorite local restaurant, even if it means having to go a little bit out of your way.  Otherwise, that local business may not be here after this crisis has subsided.

If we don’t support our local businesses today, they may not be here tomorrow.  Let’s start today!

I have to wonder then…does “normal” still exist?  Is it only a concept that exists in the “real world” now or are the communities being built online carry over to the “real world”?

The idea of what is “normal” and what isn’t will probably always exist, but it seems as though the internet is beginning to break down that concept.  In fact, maybe the internet is making stronger individualism “normal”.

• Having a baby (baby to come in 2009).
• Had a great time vacationing in San Diego.
• Harakiri is still moving towards that next album (a little slower than I’d like, but we’re still moving).

Hmmm…I’m sure there was more but that’s all that is standing out in my head right now.  I’m looking forward to 2009.  Some big changes are coming (the baby) and I know I’ll sleep less but it’s still exciting!

• First full year of being married.
• Finally got a dog that has been almost the perfect dog for us.
• Playing the first Harakiri shows back after a very long hiatus.
• Having 8 songs for the next Harakiri album. More songs to come.
• Going to User Experience 2007 conference in Vegas and learning so much good stuff.
• Lost some weight.

Overall, 2007 was a good year. I’m looking forward to see what 2008 has in store!

I’ll admit, I got way too frustrated early on during the game so I spent most of the game working on a website instead of watching the game. I did watch the first five minutes and the last five minutes of the game but that’s all I could handle. That’s still more than what I watched of the playoff game versus the Patriots. I didn’t watch any of that game. Of course, my wife and some of our fiends were here watching the game (the playoff game too) so I could hear the good and the bad from their screaming. Oh well, I did get a lot of work done though.

Anyway, this is definitely an exciting time to be in Indy! People are going crazy in Indy right now! Congratulations Colts!

As of yesterday, I’ve been married for one month. I also became an uncle for the first time last Saturday.

Things are going really well right now!

Making the Wedding Ours

Angi and I spent a lot of time and effort into planning this wedding. We wanted it to be very much “ours” and to reflect our personalities well. I know there are a lot of guys out there that leave much of the wedding planning to the bride, often because many brides have planned their dream wedding from an early age it seems, but my Angi wasn’t like that. I tried to stay involved with every aspect of the wedding (finding/choosing the church, reception hall, caterer, florist, rehearsal dinner, etc.). I think the only part I wasn’t involved with was the dress part; I wasn’t allowed.

Branding Our Wedding

On top of all that, I wanted to brand our wedding by designing the invitations, programs and website myself. This was something that was inspired a little bit by Jason Santa Maria (Branding Your Wedding).

My goal was to have invitations that were unique and like no one else’s wedding. I looked at a lot of samples of invitations and was unimpressed with the bulk of them. Far too often, the invitations would use one font and often only one text size throughout, which made nothing stand out.

When I took this project on, I knew my work project was supposed to be complete almost three months before the wedding. Unfortunately, my work project started a little later than planned and took longer to complete so the two overlapped. There were days that I spent a long day working on that project and then a long night working on the wedding stuff. That was an extremely stressful time!

How Did It Turn Out?

Overall, it turned out well! I didn’t spend as much time on the website as I would’ve liked, but it still turned out ok. I’m little happier with how the invitations and programs turned out design-wise. Unfortunately, while I’ve been doing some graphic design (completely self-taught) for almost 10 years now, most of my designs have been for the web; print is not exactly my area of expertise. They both printed out fairly well though, but they could’ve been better.

Of course, I’m kind of a perfectionist so I always think things could’ve been better. We did get a lot of compliments on them though and they were unique.

One semi-major problem with the invitations turned out to be the dimensions when we tried to mail them. It turns out that the USPS started charging $0.13 more for mail that isn’t the standard elongated rectangle shape so a large stack of invitations were returned to us. Even worse though, was that for some of the invitations they didn’t return, they made the person we sent them to pay $0.13 to get their invitation. I’m only aware of that happening to a few people, but it probably happened to more and they just never had heart to tell us about it. That was super embarrassing!

So How About The Rest?

The rest of the wedding turned out great! I think it was very much us. For the ceremony, we used a lot of really cool music done instrumentally on the piano. We used some Journey (“Open Arms”), Lionel Ritchie, Kenny Rogers (“Through The Years”, a favorite of my mom’s), The Beatles (“Here, There and Everywhere”), Billy Joel (“She’s Got a Way”, for the bride, which was incredible!), John Lennon (“Grow Old With Me”) and finally, we left on Queen (“My Best Friend”), which was fun! We were very happy with how all the music worked out.

The reception was cool. The place we had it had a very cool feel to it, the food was good (what little we actually got to eat), the cake was good, the dancing was good (the DJ was a friend of Angi’s and a great DJ), etc. With the exception of us being pulled in a million different directions all night, we had a great time.

The Details

The idea behind this redesign was to start over from scratch and rebuild everything. Our old database that was originally setup about five years ago was getting to be pretty messy. It had been through two redesigns and with each set of improvements, it became more and more cluttered. With this redesign, I decided it was going to be better to start over from scratch and for us to convert and migrate as much data as possible.

So, for this redesign, I not only created a new database, but also built a complete administration site so others in the company could manage the content. After that was started, I build the entire front-end site. Needless to say, it was a huge undertaking. Of course, I didn’t build the entire thing by myself or anything, but I did the vast majority of it, database, back-end and front-end. The one part I didn’t create was the visual aspects. Marketing oversaw that part; I just put it over my code.

The Focus

The focus on this redesign was to make the site much easier for user to find what they are looking for. In the past, we always focused on our product lines, but realized that the average user has no idea what the differences are between the product lines. This time around, we focused on more generic terms like Home Audio that breaks down to Home Theater Systems, Speakers, etc. At the bottom level is where you finally see the product lines. We also used to have a focus on News-type items, but realized that over 80% of our traffic was directly to the product sections and most visitors didn’t care about the News items. So, we made products the main focus with News and other things as secondary options.

Another focus was to make the site more search-engine friendly. We used url-rewriting to make the urls easier to read for humans and to hopefully get the search engines to rank our pages a little higher. The urls match the page titles and the titles on the page which they supposedly like.

So, How Did It Turn Out?

Overall, I’m very happy with how the site turned out. It’s faster than I ever thought it would be. The code is clean and very easy to work with now. Plus, I learned so much planning and building this site. I’ll post some of the cooler things I learned soon. Now it’s time for me to take some time off because I am so burnt out right now.

Oh yeah, the url: Klipsch

When it comes to learning, I’ve always been at learning by reading rather than lecture. I can’t handle lectures; they put me to sleep. Being able to learn like this has been a great asset to me through my career as a programmer.

A little history… With the help of one professor, I started teaching myself HTML in 1996 because it was something I was very interested in. I created a web site for my band at the time (Birthright). From there I took the few web-related classes the college offered but found each time that with every class, I had already taught myself what they were teaching like a year prior. Eventually, I taught myself ASP with some database backend.

Despite not having my degree yet, I felt like I knew enough to make a career out of my passion for the web. So, I started looking for a job as a web programmer in late 1999, early 2000. It took me a little while, but I got a job at Klipsch (where I still work 6 years later).

Over the years, I’ve taught myself so much and have really enjoyed it. I love having a job where I have to constantly learn new things. It keeps my brain from turning into mush. The draw-back, as I mentioned to before, is that some days I don’t feel like a “real” programmer. The reason is that I’ve learned how to do many things without always learning why they work. That’s usually because I needed to find a solution to make something work but didn’t have the time to really learn why it worked. Of course over time, using the same code over and over, I eventually learn the reason why.

But then again, if you can make something work right, the why doesn’t matter quite as much. I know it can sometimes mean that the code might not be as efficient as possible, but as long as it runs quick enough and does what you need it to do, it’s not a huge deal.

I find myself working on some very complex web-based applications these days and I feel more like a “real” programmer now than I ever have. That’s a good feeling!