Today was a day out of the ordinary. It was not my typical day at the office. This morning Del-Dot trucks and police cars were abundant in town and a casual traveler passing through would note that several Georgetown streets were blocked off. Yes the streets were blocked off, children were off from school for the day, and yesterday’s mud-slinging political adversaries rode in horse-drawn carriages together for a festive, 200+ year-old, traditional, biennial parade. Only in Sussex County, Delaware will you find such a spectacle and rare day known as Return Day.

During the early morning hours it rained on and off with heavy downpours from time to time. Although it was quite a misty morning it rarely did more than just spit rain during the parade. Inclind employees, friends, family and even clients celebrated pre-parade in the morning with a fantastic corn hole toss tournament which Trey can tell you more about. The rain made for a more challenging and slick game as our projectiles frequently skidded off the board robbing each team of much needed points. Also, the trees in the front yard altered the course of several high flyers.

After spectating for a few games of corn hole, I decided to take a walk from our Market Street office in the 200 block towards the Georgetown Circle with my family. The closer we drew to the circle the thicker the crowds were until we found our selves inside of a barricade. Not just any barricade either; it was not a flimsy police line but a interlocked barrier of metal bars like those you might see in New York City at New Years on TV. What a change from the Return Days’ of my childhood! Not only were we behind a crowded barricade but we found our selves waiting in a line like we were entering an international airport. The crowd funneled into a small white tent which housed a metal detector that everyone, I mean everyone, had to go through to get the contents of their pockets examined and wanded before stepping foot into the Georgetown Circle.

On the circle it was crowded but not as jam-packed as I remember it years before where the judges stand and the food vendors were a bit closer together. I stopped a random guy and asked him where he got his slice of pizza to which he replied “Through that metal detector and on down the street”. I deduced the homemade dishes being served up at our office would be warmer, easier, and cheaper to access than the food I would have to pay and hassle for through the tight security. On the walk back to the office, a nice guy from the Seaford Fire Department informed me that although it was just a few minutes shy of 1:30 the parade had a 45 minute delay. I could only guess that this ment maybe “Joe the Biden” was late.

Then I managed to read an official program and learn Chuck Snyder along with my Uncle Leonard were the official photographers and also that the stage plus sound system were provided by our friend Kevin Short at Mid-South Audio. After a few cookies and a hot dog, I was completely ready for the parade and it turned out to be quite worth it by watching from a front row seat on the end of the office’s driveway.

The last time I attended Return Day, I was a high school sophomore, enjoying the day off from school. I missed the celebration 4 years ago while I was at the university since This is mostly due to the fact that this is uniquely a Sussex County tradition so you’re not given the day off at the university for the occasion and also it is not celebrated by Marylanders or their schools or employers (no day off for you). Although I went home today after the conclusion of the parade (with no Santa Clause at the end) and missed the OX sandwiches, I had a great out-of-the-ordinary day at the office.

Last month, I did a sit-down interview with an aspiring web designer, fielding all sorts of questions and offering my own insights as I enter my fourth year in the industry. At one point, we hit the subject of the importance of web standards, structuring and coding layouts to work in every browser and future-proofed to an acceptable degree, and why tables should not be used to do layouts anymore.

This is where I heard a statement that kind of jarred me.

“Oh I know, I make MySpace layouts….” - it brought my brain to a halt.

It wasn’t anything personal with her, but it was the realization I had that there are likely 1000s of young people just like her also doing the same. Some people are even making a career / making money off making MySpace layouts.

So why is this harmful to impressionable minds?

For starters, MySpace was never designed with the intent that a user would be able to toss the site theme in favor of something of their own design. To make one, you basically have to unlearn everything you knew about HTML and CSS in regards to site layouts or themes. For those who haven’t done anything with websites before, learning all the ins and outs of how to get a myspace layout to work are filling their heads with useless crap. Other social networking sites such as Virb are designed to allow the user to apply their own stylings in a non-insane way. I was actually quite impressed with Virb because it also allows you to disable all custom layouts at your discretion- something MySpace can’t do.

My best advice to her was to ditch MySpace layouts all together, and purchase a cheap web hosting account with Wordpress. She would then at least have full access to change anything in the site layout while learning invaluable knowledge and design at the same time. That’s how I got started 12 years ago on Geocities (remember them?).

Could you imagine if there were sites that let you code your own add-ons, and it required you writing some screwed up PHP or Coldfusion that wasn’t accepted anywhere else in the world? How about a home builder who didn’t follow industry standards when building your home?

Can you believe some colleges still teach web design using tables and code generating software? Crazy isn’t it? It was like that when I was there and from what I’ve heard, not much has changed.

The thought of people having to do absurd CSS and table structuring just to make the myspace layout look a certain way just disturbs me. We have standards for a reason, and one of those reasons is to not repeat the sordid browser wars of the 90s which is where a lot of that mess stems from.

So for all you folks out there looking to get into web design, young or old, if you’re going to do something do it right. Refer to the giants: Zeldman, Meyer, Snook, Cederholm, etc… strive for greatness.

Thanks to my liberal arts education, I am a well rounded person. I’ve read some rather random books like those by Douglas Adams and Chuck Klosterman. This all leads to my tendency to be a collection bank for odd or useless facts. This week however, I came across one that is a little more interesting and a little less useless. Actually I found it to be down right alarming given the time I spend at my desk in a day. Also in consideration is time I spent recently out sick with the flu like so many other Americans on the East Coast.

Contrary to most germophobe’s beliefs and according to the New York Times Best Seller “Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You’d Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini“: “…Yes, Occasionally you can catch something from a toilet seat but this isn’t all that common…[according to one] microbiologist at the University of Arizona.” While I find that striking there’s some quite more impressive: “…the typical office desk harbors around four hundred times more disease-causing bacteria than the average toilet seat.”

Yes, that’s right! Your keyboard is so dirty that it’s filthier than a toilet seat. Gee, what a comforting thought in these cold winter months. So don’t touch my keyboard; it contains 511 germs per square centimeter. Please, I wouldn’t touch the mouse either with a lovely 260 germs per square centimeter. Oh and by the way that chic telephone on your desk has 3,894 germs per square centimeter! This confirms that you would be ill advised lick the conference room keyboard. Do you concur Doctor?

Today was a pretty busy day, with the eagerly awaited launching of the new version of the Prudential Gallo Realtors website (http://www.prugallo.com). The new version of the site catches it up with its recently upgraded intranet, and introduces a significant number of new features and capabilities that we’re all proud of.

When the day was over, we got down to the next order of business: a proper preemptive bon voyage to one of the most despised burdens of the web development world: Internet Explorer 6.

Today was a bit of a milestone, with Microsoft having announced a decision to roll out Internet Explorer 7 as an automatic upgrade to certain corporate users still using IE 6. For more insight about the roll-out, about why IE 6 sucked so bad, and why the upcoming IE 8 isn’t much better, head over to Kevin’s blog. To celebrate the approaching demise of IE 6, we decided to host an “IE 6 is Dying” party, complete with subs, chili, beer, and of course, an IE 6 pinata/unholy effigy.

Graphics Designer Tom Brown (who has probably been tormented by IE 6 the most, having to constantly come up with creative ways to get IE 6 to render websites correctly) did the honors of annihilating the demon-logo with a wooden handle while Shaun held on for dear life keeping it steady. We certainly hope that someone from Microsoft will stumble upon these pictures and take our frustration to heart when deciding whether or not to make Internet Explorer 8 finally comply with decade-old standards.

In any event, it was a fun end to a productive day.

From Wikipedia:

Every business requires teamwork. It doesn’t matter what field you are in. Music, medical, law, military, web development, even marriage. Nothing is successful without the mutual backing of each other toward the end goal. Support comes from respect, not the requirement thereof based on a job title. Command it, don’t demand it. It starts with you!

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I’ve blown through ~20 books in the last 2 months, many years ago I was a voracious reader and now it’s hit me again. I’ve wrote a little bit about what I have been reading over at my site.

www.kevinquillen.com

I am waiting on a few more books to come in. I now have roughly 3 on order every 2 weeks. I should be getting in ‘No Country for Old Men’, and ‘Slash’ this week.