Christmas Cards and the Internet

Last night, the wife and I were in a bind... Christmas is coming up quickly, and we hadn't even started on the Christmas picture. It was approaching 8pm, which is get-ready-for-bed time for child(1) & child(2). (software engineers tend to refer to their children by ordinal position by order of birth...) But, we decided, we must do something about this picture problem.

So we hurriedly dressed the kids in their Christmas garb, grabbed the "Elf" (digital camera), put the kids in front of the fake, white-lighted tree, and commenced an impromptu photo shoot. The results were great! We probably took about 50 pictures in the span of about 10 minutes, then downloaded them onto the computer for editing and selection. We took a brief intermission to actually get the kids into bed, and then got back to work. We were able to remove red-eye, crop, and rotate the pictures ntil we were satisfied with our final choice. Then, it was on to Costco.com to upload the image and choose our card's style & orientation. After making those selections, we were able to center the picture to our liking in the "card template", and then add our 3 line, 60 character custom message. Finally, we could preview the result, and place our order. We pick them up tomorrow evening at 4pm.

This is amazing stuff! We were able to go from zero to order-placed in about 45 minutes. From the comfort of our own home! For you older folks out there, did you ever think you would see anything like this in your lifetimes? It frightens me to contemplate the kinds of things that my children will be doing before I'm gone.

One idea for the Costco folks... it would be great if I could upload my Christmas letter and a mailing list, pick out some stationary and a font, perform a mail merge, have the cards and letters stuffed into envelopes, addressed, stamped, and dropped in the mail. I'll give 'em until Christmas '07 to get this ready.

Thank You Al Gore!