Dana Bell

Below are four (4) questions. You have to answer them instantly. You can't take your time; answer all of them immediately. OK? Let's find out just how clever you really are. Ready? GO!!!

First Question: You are participating in a race. You overtake the second person. What position are you in?

Answer: If you answered that you are first, then you are absolutely wrong! If you overtake the second person and you take his place, you are second! Try not to screw up in the next question. To answer the second question, don't take as much time as you took for the first question.

Second Question: If you overtake the last person, then you are...?

Answer: If you answered that you are second to last, then you are wrong again. Tell me, how can you overtake the LAST Person? You're not very good at this! Are you?

Third Question: Very tricky math! Note: This must be done in your head only. Do NOT use paper and pencil or a calculator. Try it.
Take 1000 and add 40 to it. Now add another 1000. Now add 30. Add another 1000. Now add 20. Now add another 1000. Now add 10. What is the total?

Answer: Did you get 5000? The correct answer is actually 4100. Don't believe it? Check with your calculator! Today is definitely not your day. Maybe you will get the last question right?

Fourth Question: Mary's father has five daughters: 1. Nana, 2. Nene, 3. Nini, 4. Nono. What is the name of the fifth daughter?

Answer: Nunu? NO! Of course not. Her name is Mary. Read the question again.

Last week I started riding the city bus again. I used to depend on the bus several decades ago when I lived in Iowa, Illinois and California. In those places, I could walk out the front door, up to the next corner and wait a few minutes for a ride. At that time, it was my only transportation other than the soles of my shoes.
While I do have a choice now, the choice is between grumbling gas-guzzlers with over 100,000 miles and the bus I have to walk about a mile to catch. That mile is a nice bit of exercise, so I don't mind so much. It makes working out at the gym a little less urgent.

Do Stuff
One of the nice things about riding the bus is I can do stuff. I can review some notes, open the mail, or read. Or, I can watch other people riding the bus. Riding the bus is just another way to meet people, make friends, sightsee. I did notice some problems with the experience, though, so this is now my analysis of Tyler Transit.

Analysis
I prepared myself by getting a schedule, and showed up at the stop with minutes to spare. The first time went well. The second time I noticed that the bus was at least five minutes early. The third time it was also early but since I was a block from the stop, I missed it. I watched it go by and caught the next one thirty minutes later. I don't ever remember missing the bus in the other towns because it was 5-10 minutes early.

The schedule
The first thought might be to look at the driver, but after a little study I concluded that the problem was with the schedule. At different times of the day, the stops were spaced at different times. For example, on one trip it takes 20 minutes to get between stops and then 12 minutes on the next trip, then 20 minutes, alternating throughout the day. There doesn't appear to be any logic to this anomaly. On some of the other lines there are occasional variances, but they may be due to "rush hour" considerations.

Transfer Point
Another thing I noticed was the amount of spent waiting at the transfer point and the short routes. Depending on the route, the bus waits at the transfer point, 5-10 minutes every trip, with the trips only about 40 minutes apart. With a little research and planning, the waits could be shortened, and the coverage area widened. The main transfer point, is also a bit impractical. Instead of the transfer point being closer to the populated center of town, it was next to an old shopping center, Bergfeld. Now that is just my observation of that one transfer point. There are three other minor transfer points, all relatively close to each other, and even a stretch between two of them where two routes overlap, and I don't know what they are like.

Short Routes
But, back on the subject of short routes, it makes no sense to me why they have separate buses for Red North and Red South. If each driver traveled the entire Red route, riders wouldn't have to get off one bus and get on another in order to go from south Tyler to downtown. There may be some logic behind designing it that way, but it seems like flawed logic to me. In all, I think the routes could be redesigned to improve service and make the most of the federal dollars that are probably dished out to the city to have a transit system.

Bus Stop
Then there is the idea of the bus stop. On buses I've ridden before, unless you were on a major road without traffic lights, every intersection was a bus stop. On my first trip I tried to get off at one such intersection, where the bus was stopped for a traffic light and the driver said I had to wait until the next bus stop, which was past the next traffic light. In contrast, on the bus that I missed the driver told me I should have waved and he would have stopped, so to him any potential passenger was a bus stop.

30 Day Pass
One of the nice things that Tyler Transit makes available is the 30 day pass for $30. Of course, if all you use it for is to get back and forth to work, at 75c a trip, or 1.50 a day, with 20 workdays, you're not saving anything. The goofy thing about that is I drove down to the main office to get the thing. One of the buses probably goes by there, but it's not at the main transfer point, as it was in other cities.

Improve!
Now, don't get me wrong. I think it's great to HAVE a transit system and I appreciate it. But it is in my nature to find things wrong with most anything. I look at them as things that could be improved, and there are several areas where it can be improved. But, then there are also some pet peeves I have. One of them is the signage. If I were to have my way I would like to see the graphics improved, both inside the bus and without. The paper signs posted inside the bus are ragged and sometimes illegible. On the outside, on one of the buses the name of the bus route is scribbled on a piece of paper and placed in the front window. In a city that is so interested in beautification, that kind of stuff stands out.

Over a week ago, I got my layoff notice at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler. I was one of 60 people selected for that privilege. Today I began the long process of updating my resume.

It is a long process because there are so many things that I can do, and because I have so many interests. One thing leads to another and that to another until after three decades I'm all over the place, and can adapt to any number of situations. In printing I developed an interest in design as well as operation management. Then when I started using computers in the 1980's, I developed interest in programming. Computers merged with design and business interests, and Design evolved to include photography. And, of course, I began writing when I was in high school, and now I have so many things to write about.

I suppose I inherited a lot of that ability from my family. High levels of intelligence, and good business skills are characteristic of my extended family. Then there is the fact that I was raised by my grandparents who instilled in me a strong work ethic. And, finally, I suspect my faith has something to do with my choices, and willingness to serve. That's not to say that my independent nature didn't have something to do with it. I didn't need to take a class in Photoshop to learn and get certified in it, or InDesign. Everything I learned about computers was before I took any computer classes. I don't need a teacher, or a class. Give me a book and I'll learn from it, and figure out the rest. That's not to say education is worthless, but to me it is so slow, and boring.

It will also be a long process because it might be easier to start my own business. Diversified Business Services is the name I used for much of my previous after hours work, and I could easily (relatively speaking of course) expand that. So I will be working on both.

And, finally, off-line resume development will require that I create separate resumes for each area. Employers don't understand the concept that a person with a broad range of skills can learn and adapt to most any job without having specific job qualifications. I've spent enough of my time cleaning up after some of those qualified applicants to know better. But that is another discussion topic.

This post is really a plug for my resume. If you are local and want to contact me about a position, use the contact form on my resume. In the past couple of years I have discovered that it is difficult to solicit response on a web site because of the amount of form spam. I get as much as 30 spam messages a day on one of my email accounts. I could employ more vigorous spam control, but then there is the risk of losing valid email messages. So be sure to use a name, subject and content that doesn't look like spam.

This week I started updating a website for a local non-profit organization. The most important part of the project was studying the site and understanding how it is built. As I studied this site I learned a little about why it can be difficult for an amateur to maintain their own websites, or for an outsider to come in and work on an existing site. First is the organization or lack of organization and second is the massive amount of code and files, and in particular, unnecessary code and files. Keeping a website's style cohesive makes it more attractive, but it should also be easier to maintain.

In this site, some of the links on the main page had been changed to refer to updated or moved files, but the same links on inside pages were not updated and gave you the 404. The main problem in this case was when the page file was put in a folder, the document relative links didn't work. The Javascript menu references were also an issue on those moved pages for the same reason.

Another problem I found was that some of the files were present in both the root folder and a folder for that section. Many of these files were identical. Which file you linked to depended on what page you were on. They would seem to work, but instead of linking to the file you intended, it brought up one of the duplicates, from which other links didn't work. This setup just creates confusion and when dealing with someone else's system, you need some clarity. I'm actually one that prefers sections and a logical hierarchy, but it order to simplify the mess, I worked with the files in the root directory with a plan to create sections when I had everything defined.

The graphics were created by a Fireworks function with an image for each section of the menu. I've used these before, in Imageready, and they can be nifty if you don't take all of the shortcuts. However, there were multiple versions of the full image. They were also named with numbers based on which section it was.

The plan
With Dreamweaver in hand, my first priority is to repair and organize the site files. Once that is done I can do some creative work.

Tread softly. Because this was an active site, I started the redesign by creating all new files. The names were not an issue since all of the old files used the htm extension instead of html. Everything would work for the old site until I renamed the home page. Of course, I also made a backup copy of the old site.

If you want to simplify the current site, you can do that by downloading the site and moving things around. Dreamweaver will help you keep most document or root relative links working. That's not part of my plan. I have the time to do a complete rewrite, and that would just take more time. New wine, new wineskin.

Establish order. Following the adage, a place for everything and everything in its place, I defined the structure I was going to use. Very simply, all images go in the images folder, and all html files go in the root folder, for now that is. For a simple site like this, the css file could stay in the root folder, but since it was already in a separate css folder, I defined it that way. Should the site grow and require more css styles, they have a neat place to go. Files that are downloaded from the site alse need a separate folder, so I used Documents, although there are other commonly used names.

Create templates. Second thing I did was create a Dreamweaver template. With Dreamweaver, templates can be used to define the appearance of a page. When a page is created from the template, it can be set up to be automatically updated when the template changes. This will solve the problem of keeping the menu links up to date.

Simplify and name the images. Use a simpler set of graphics. Instead of using the numbered image files, I copied then to names that reflect what the graphic was. If it was the word "About", that was used to go to a page about the organization, I named it about.jpg, about.gif or about.png.

Name the css properties. If you mark some text and start formatting it, Dreamweaver names those styles numerically as style1, style2, etc. For a simple page, this can work, but for a larger, more complex site, these styles make for a massive amount of code you would have to sort through to understand the pages. For those who don't reference css styles explicitly, the problem is not visible.
For the designer that is creating a standard style for the pages, css styles are very useful. Having a folder full of the automatically generated css styles can be confusing. You might, unknowingly update a style at one location that affects another location. Name those styles and you will know what it is used for when you want to format another section the same way. This also helps maintaining cohesion on a site.

Creating pages. All of the above is done only on the template. There is only one thing that's left to do on the template, create the links. I don't do that yet, because I haven't created the files that I will be linking to. At this stage, I will create the pages based on the template, and add the content for each page. I can simply copy and paste from the old page or any new content that has been added, checking all of the style references.

Create the links. Now, back to the template. Reset all links and references to use document relative links. There are advantages and disadvantages to this, but using Dreamweaver, the disadvantages will be taken care of. Don't forget to check the javascript menus. When you save the template, Dreamweaver should ask if you want to update the pages. Just say Yes.

Clean up and upload. This is something that should be done in a full session. It sounds simple, and usually is, but if something goes wrong or there are other issues to deal with, you need to have time to restore the previously saved copy of the site. The clean up has two aspects. One is clean out the Dreamweaver site folder of any files that you don't want to be uploaded. Second, as a part of the upload or after you do the initial check, delete any files on the server that don't need to be there. This will create less confusion for the next web guy.

Check your work. Clear your cache, then view the site and try the links on multiple pages. Closely watch all graphics including the mouseover graphics. Ask someone else to check. This may be where you show off your work, depending on your confidence level.

Once the site is functional, you can use Dreamweaver to move the files where you want them. Dreamweaver can update all of the document relative links. So, if I want a separate folder for all files related to donors, I could create a Donors folder and move them there. Dreamweaver will then update the links.

In the future, if you want to create a new page, create it based on the template, then change the template to link to it and allow Dreamweaver to update all of the other pages. Do a synchronized upload and check it in a browser. Simple.