I went to the parade on Saturday morning in downtown Fort Worth. It was a beautiful day and it was nice to see all the animals and people dressed up. I forgot how much I loved marching bands, especially the drums. Here’s a guy riding a longhorn:
13
Jan 06
The kind of thing only I should be worrying about
I’m about ready to toss the current “look” of the site. I’m going to strip out the current theme and stylesheet and start with the basics. The cluttered nature of the site is really bothering me more and more lately, so here’s the plan:
1. Completely strip out the current styling. Reduce everything to the WordPress markup.
2. Keep two-column layout arrangement with some sort of header
3. Markup will contain only arrangement of DIV’s and content.
4. Develop new stylesheet
How the new theme will be different:
1. Main content (both columns) should fit within 700px or less.
2. Color pallette should be black and white, specifically black text on white.
3. Design will contain my own original drawings and art work. I want to create a more humanistic feel.
12
Jan 06
Roxette hair
Sometimes people are stuck in a state of suspended fashion animation. Spikey Roxette hair is still big in Dallas having survived since the late 1980’s. I have at least ten confirmed sightings including a jogger this morning on my way to work. Most of the women I’ve seen sporting spikey do’s have been in their mid to late forties, which seems about right. They found a style that worked for them and have been wearing it for twenty years. If you’re going to be anachronistic go out on a limb; wear a peruke or tight flapper curls. I always thought it would be neat to kick it way old school: 17th century breeches, powdered wig, and tri-corner hat. There has to be a market for this. Why are we stuck in the same old pants and shirt paradigm?
09
Jan 06
The Whore of Babylon
When they coined the phrase, “everything is bigger in Texas”, they were talking about Dallas.
Everything here is bigger and ten times more (insert adjective) than anywhere else. Right off of the highway you’ll see Silver City, a huge “gentleman’s club”, which appears to be at least two stories tall. Further downtown you’ll see signs advertising “the world’s largest gay adult video store”, the world’s largest condom store, etc. Most of the major highways have at least ten lanes. Even the McDonald’s restaurants are enormous. Near Valley View mall, there is even one shaped like a giant happy meal. I’m not kidding.
Dallas is Babylon. It is a world of extremes existing in an uneasy cease-fire. It is a modern gold rush town complete with throngs of pious Christians and painted, fallen men and women puffy with plastic surgery. In Dallas, there are multi-million dollar mansions blocks from low-income apartments and methadone clinics, giagantic churches next door to 10,000 sqare foot liquor stores with fifty foot neon cowboys.
One day, not knowing my way around, I drove a few streets south of Uptown and got stuck behind two guys in a truck buying crack cocaine. As shiny expensive cars passed overhead on the tollway, I felt my first pangs of love for this beautiful, ugly city.
08
Jan 06
JT Leroy is a woman
Via metafilter, JT Leroy De-Masked. JT Leroy is actually two forty-something women.
07
Jan 06
Strange thing about Pagerank
Pagerank is the proprietary method by which Google determines the relevance of your site to search results. The higher the Pagerank, the more often your site will appear for relevant searches.
I noticed today that the Pagerank of letterneversent.com is 4/10, while the PR of www.letterneversent.com is 5/10. That’s weird, but I guess Google does that because you can’t just assume that the “site.com” is the same as “www.site.com”. Occasionally, this is not the case.
07
Jan 06
Toll tag
One thing about taking the tollway in Dallas is that it helps to use a tolltag. Basically, this is a credit-card shaped plastic transponder you paste to your windshield. When you go through a tollgate it automatically debits funds for the toll from an account you have with the North Texas Tollway Authority. This ends up being quicker for everyone since you don’t have to scramble to find change for the toll. In exchange for using the transponder, you are given a slight discount on the total cost of the toll. So, for example, if the toll starts out at 75 cents when you enter the tollway, you might pay only 60 cents, which ends up being a sizable discount of around 20%. As you use the tollway, the funds in your account are replenished from the credit card you put on file with the tollway authority.
The North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA) is a self-supporting political sub-division of the State. The NTTA receives no tax funds from any source. Debt service, operations and maintenance are funded entirely from user fees (tolls).
I’m growing to like the tollway. It’s less crowded than the other major highways in Dallas and it is a straight shot to where I work up in Addison. It’s pretty much due north and it saves me about 20-25 minutes every day. Judging from the amount of traffic during the day, the tollways must be a big money maker for someone. If you figure each car is paying anywhere from $.75-1.50 per trip, twice a day you start to get some huge numbers.
Since the NTTA is a quasi-governmental entity you can review the financials on the NTTA website. From there you find some interesting information:
Total operating revenues were $165.3 million and $152.5 million for FY 2004 and FY 2003, respectively. System toll revenues for FY 2004 were $160.7 million, a seven point six percent (7.6%) increase over FY 2003 compared to an eight point two percent (8.2%) increase in FY 2003 over FY 2002. Traffic on the System continues to grow, with approximately 863,100 and 811,000 average daily transactions in FY 2004 and FY 2003, respectively, and almost seventy-one percent (71%) collected electronically. Collection of tolls electronically increased over 2003, which was sixty-eight percent (68%). Actual traffic on the PGBT continues to exceed Traffic & Revenue Engineer estimates.
It’s interesting to see what kind of funds are flowing into the system. Traffic and highway systems are hugely complex and important systems involving millions of people and trillions of dollars. Everything we enjoy about modern life is made possible by the ability to get people, goods, and services in and out of the city.