* *** PW_MANUAL_H_2008-10-26 TXT - 26 Oct 2008 04:35:07 - JKNAUTH Comments on 2008 PollWorker Manual Section H, dated 10/20/08 -------- -- ---- ---------- ------ ------- -- ----- -------- It looks like a lot of progress has been made with the laptop programming. Appendix H should be very helpful. Here are my comments for some future version, assuming you don't have time to make fixes for 11/4/08. Page H-2: I'll bet a lot of people will try to press some #2 key on the laptop to get help instead of the #2 on the phone. This might need some clarification in the two boxes. Page H-4: I sure wish they had taken my suggestion to display the VRN credit-card-number-like, e.g., as "0000 1020 8831" instead of as "000010208831". Grouping the digits makes it MUCH easier to copy onto a yellow ATV. Having it as one long string definitely slows me down. The grouping change would make yellow ATV processing both faster and less error prone. This is purely a simple display issue; of course the internal data does not have to contain the spaces. Please make sure this comment is passed on to the appropriate NC state programmers. I know you don't have anything to do with the programming yourself, but the people who do have the responsibility won't make such desired changes if you don't request them. Page H-4: The next time round it might be better to have the screen shot show a James Smith search, as in the text above on Page H-4. When I first saw the "In the example below" words for the James Smith search, I looked right to the screen shot, which shows a %BRIEN% M% search. It took a moment to realize that wasn't the "example below" that you were talking about (or was it?). Page H-7: In TIP #1, "slow" should be "slowly". Page H-8: I understand that some of my HTML/CSS formatting in http://nbtha.org/WakeBOE/wildcard-2008.htm could not be transferred easily into Word. However it can be done. Word allows individual characters or strings of several characters to be formatted differently than adjacent characters in the same word. Unfortunately that takes a lot of work in Word if there are many highlighting strings scattered around. You lost information by not showing the bold blue text thruout; the bold black doesn't stand out as clearly in the PDF file, and probably in the color printout from that file, which I haven't seen yet. Note also that even in a black and white printout you can achieve a similar emphasis with background shading. HTML/CSS allows the same text to be formatted differently for display vs. printing. Unfortunately, if you use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, you won't see this in a printout. Maybe someday IE will have that capability. As you know, I use Firefox. Page H-8: In the bottom paragraph, there is an extraneous "the" at the beginning of the second line. Page H-8: AHEM! You added a "Donavan" in the "%van" search results. It shouldn't be there since there is no "Donavan" in the database at the top of the page. I didn't show any Donavan in http://nbtha.org/WakeBOE/wildcard-2008.htm in either the database or any of the search results. Were you possibly using some live data and got the result you show, but forgot to add the name to the sample database at the top of the page? However, if so then "Donavan" would then have shown up in the "%van%" results as well. You should just delete the "Donavan" from the "%van" results; restore it to the way I had it. In my example I just made up a database (mainly from the Raleigh phone book because I didn't have the PC and your database to experiment with) and then showed what the resulting searches would have produced. The good old O'Brian/O'Brien/etc. example wouldn't let me show all the % cases I wanted to exhibit, so I went the "van" route, which has a lot of possibilities as it turned out. I hadn't thought of Donavan or I would have added it; it's a good one. However it isn't in the sample database and or in all the appropriate search results, so it is confusing (wrong) to show it under the "%van" results. I had the word "only" in the first line of the file to make clear exactly what data was being worked with for these searches. Do people who detect this error win a prize? First prize is one day of Help Table duty. Second prize is two days. Can I declare myself ineligible since I am an "employee of the station" and receive no days. Please.