Gimme an ! Gimme an ! Gimme a !
Whazzat spell? ! ! ! Yay!
You are visitor number to actually bother to access the FAQ. (Somebody actually read this? Cool!)
An FAQ, or set of Frequently Asked Questions, is commonly found on a Web site (or Usenet group) in an effort to educate, enlighten, and generally remove the fog from in front of the eyes of (and between the ears of) the reader. As this is the ninth edition of my home page, I decided now might be a good time to write one. If you can think of any questions I should add, let me know at the bottom.
  1. Why nine?
    2. I think I covered this on the front page, but it comes after eight.
  2. Why is the background on the front page red?
    3. It's scarlet, actually. I was going to make it green, like pool table felt, to match the pool ball motif. The problem was that it made the letter "e" disappear in the headder image. Scarlet was one of the few colors which allowed all the different letters to be visible.
  3. Why did you use so many colors in that header?
    4. I like to be colorful.
  4. What is with the pool balls?
    5. Go get a tape of Multiplication Rock (from the old Schoolhouse Rock series ABC started in the '70s). Watch the one for 9, "Naughty Number Nine". It involves a cat (with a 9-ball on his tie) playing pool, and the balls are used a few times for the numbers. It just came to mind as appropriate, and I knew the balls would be easy to draw. I actually drew them all the size of the big 9-ball on the front page, then shrunk them down to 60x60.
  5. Who is Nosmo King?
    6. Robert Quimby asked the same question. Beverly Cleary wrote a series of children's books set in Oregon, mostly involving the Quimbys of Klickitat Street. Robert was a smoker, and he had two daughters (well, he had a third child in a later book, but I don't want to spoil the ending of that book), named Beatrice and Ramona. At one time, his younger daughter (Ramona) went on a crusade to get him to stop smoking. She made a large sign, intending for it to say, "NO SMOKING". Unfortunately for her, she wrote the first part too big, so all that fit on the first line was "NO SMO", leaving "KING" on the next line. Ignoring the intent of the sign, when Robert saw it, he asked, "Who is Nosmo King?" So the sign doesn't really say "Nosmo King"; it says "No Smoking, by order of Ramona Quimby".
  6. How does "HIDE ME! HIDE ME!" work?
    7. Way back in 1995, when I was still in Urbana, I tried to come up with a way to get feedback on my web page. This was before the mailto: URL was standard, so that wasn't an option; besides, I was mostly using lab PC's, and it was a pain (even for those of us who knew what we were doing) to configure the SMTP server in the browser's mailer. (Of course, this was also back in the good old days when anybody allowed you to dump mail in their SMTP server; I used to dump mail I was sending into a different server every day, just for fun. Spammers ended that, though.) Anyway, the chief option was to write a cgi script to process form data on my account. Unfortunately, I did not (and still don't) have cgi skills, so I didn't know what to write. (Since leaving UIUC, I have never had web space which allowed me to write my own scripts anyway; stupid virus planters wreck it for the rest of us.) I had to find some other way. At the time, the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District had its web site residing at prairienet, a Champaign County-based organization which provided web space and accounts to area residents and businesses. I noted that the comment form on the MTD's web site used a simple script running on prairienet.org, one which mailed form data to an address supplied in the POST command on the form. My first comment card used this same script, with my email address inserted into the input stream. At some point in the late '90s, I think it stopped working, but it works again now. When you submit any form on my web site (they all process this way), the form data is compiled by your browser and sent to prairienet. What I then get is an e-mail message from "Prairienet WWW Form" which has all the form data.
  7. Why do I have to wait for my score if I take the cliché quiz?
    8. See above. When you take that quiz (or submit any other form on my web site), I get an e-mail message which contains all the raw form data. I then have to (manually) pick out the real data (your answers), compare them to the correct answers, and compile the score. I also try to send an annotated grade report to my quiz takers.
  8. Why does this page say "Whazzat spell"?
    9. On the children's television show Zoobilee Zoo, most of the seven characters were written with more or less adult psychologies: Talkatoo Cockatoo, Bravo Fox, Van Go Lion, Lookout Bear, Bill Der Beaver, and Mayor Ben (in reverse opening theme order). One character, however, was intentionally written younger: a musically talented kangaroo with a curious and inquisitive nature. She was, appropriately, named "Whazzat". It's her fault.
  9. Why do the footers list the last modification in such a weird format?
    10. I'm lazy. That's why, in all previous versions, I failed to indicate last modification at all. I know it's a handy piece of information, and I'm trying to be sure I include it here in JEBHP 9. The format (which I don't care for, either) is an automated insertion in Microsoft Notepad. Pressing F5 in a document (I discovered this by chance while working on JEBHP 9; F5 in Internet Explorer is the refresh key, which I need to press every time I change the HTML file) automatically inserts the time and date, in h:mm TT m/d/yy format (my preference is ddmmmyy HH:mm). It should be therefore noted that the time and date listed are when I actually made the changes, which is not the same as (in fact, which is necessarily before) I published the changes.
  10. Why do all your pages look so plain? Why don't you use tables, frames, and stuff?
    11. In earlier versions of JEBHP (at least through JEBHP 5), I was concerned about accessibility. Keep in mind, when I started, the most advanced browser around was Netscape 1.12; most Macs I could find were running NCSA Mosaic (which actually looked a lot like Netscape 1.12). I wrote simple code that would look okay on those browsers. I also made my page Lynx-friendly; Lynx was a text-based browser from Kansas running on the UNIX boxes, and frames don't work too well in a text environment (although I got good at using Lynx even in hostile waters; I used it even at Lewis in 1999 on the UNIX terminals there). Another thing about my code is that I write it all myself. I actually write the HTML, and I always have. For example, the top of this page, when I first created it, looked like this:

    <title>Jason Elliot Benda's Home Page Frequently Asked Questions</title> <body bgcolor=gray text=white link=pink vlink=lightyellow> <center><font size=+6> Gimme an <img src="../drawns/gimmeanf.gif" align=middle>! Gimme an <img src="../drawns/gimmeana.gif" align=middle>! Gimme a <img src="../drawns/gimmeaq.gif" align=middle>! <br>Whazzat spell? <img src="../drawns/gimmeanf.gif" align=middle> <img src="../drawns/gimmeana.gif" align=middle> <img src="../drawns/gimmeaq.gif" align=middle>! <img src="../drawns/gimmeanf.gif" align=middle> <img src="../drawns/gimmeana.gif" align=middle> <img src="../drawns/gimmeaq.gif" align=middle>! <img src="../drawns/gimmeanf.gif" align=middle> <img src="../drawns/gimmeana.gif" align=middle> <img src="../drawns/gimmeaq.gif" align=middle>! Yay!</font> <hr>You are visitor number <img src="/cgi-bin/counter.gif?bendaje_9-root-faq"> to actually bother to access the FAQ. (Somebody actually read this? Cool!)</center><hr> An <font color=skyblue>FAQ</font>, or set of <font color=skyblue>F</font>requently <font color=skyblue>A</font>sked <font color=skyblue>Q</font>uestions, is commonly found on a Web site (or Usenet group)

    and so on. The difference now is that instead of writing the code using vi on a UNIX box (yes, I used vi, and I liked vi, so there. I used UNIX mail for my mail, too, rather than elm or pine, which might explain why I never liked pico or emacs), I now write the same code in Microsoft Notepad, save and test it locally, then FTP it to my web space provider's UNIX box. I do use tables every once in a while, when convenient, since I no longer care that much about accessibility (everyone with net access these days has access to Java-enabled browsers that make browsers from five years ago look like waffle irons). As for frames, maybe one of these days I'll go teach myself how to code frames. The thing is, though, I still don't feel like I have a use for them. Unless I have some specific user feedback suggesting frames, I probably won't bother ever putting them in.
Got a bone to pick? Click the bone to mail me directly, or "HIDE ME! HIDE ME!" to let me know incognito.
Lost? Click the magic 9 ball to go back to the front page of JEBHP 9.
This page last modified 09:40 05Feb01.