Christmas Shopping

Posted by Daniel Stout on Sat 15 Dec 2007 at 1:30 PM

I decided earlier this week that this weekend would be it. This would be the weekend that I finish up my Christmas shopping. I sense some reluctance though to face the crowds and deal with it all. I tend to go with a theme year to year for all the gifts I get. I’ve already decided on this year’s theme. It’s just a matter now of filling in the gaps in my shopping list and deciding on the perfect gift for each person. I like to customize as much as possible the gift to the person, but it takes time. It’s probably too late to go the online shopping route without paying extra for expedited shipping. But this is the weekend.

I made it to the coffee shop okay. It was relatively quiet for a Saturday morning. I’ve had some ideas for alternative gifts – things that I could craft that would be unique and meaningful to that person. My grandparents, for example, are in their late 80s. What to buy them? I thought about writing them a long letter reminiscing on good times with them. And I think I will still do that. The question becomes, should I expand that effort and rely less on consumerism and more on the work of my own hand. Letters take a long time for me to write – I tend to be pretty exacting – but I’m sure there are other things I could craft.

In other news, I spent a little time tweaking the blog. I changed the header from the big orange blob to something that eats up a little bit less screen real estate. I scanned in some graph paper and used that briefly as a background, but ultimately I decided against it – it didn’t really jibe with the rest of the design. I don’t think it totally done yet, but I’m finished with most of the changes I wanted to make. I should also note that I added the reCAPTCHA plug-in from Carnegie Mellon University to the comments section on individual blog entries. You have to enter in the two words shown. So far this has totally collapsed the comment spam, but more importantly it also removes the need for me to moderate comments. So when you post a comment now, it’ll appear immediately on the blog. I hope reCAPTCHA continues to work.

Tags: christmas shopping · gifts · recaptcha · redesign

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