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Students and sheriffs keep connected to local people
Substations get high-tech with help from their friends
By REBECCA RAY
To Deputy Kevin Greig, a patrol car that blew up a bad guy's car seemed a bit much. So the students who designed the cop car graphic changed it to a patrol car that zapped and pulled in the bad guy's car with a tractor beam.
The three Saratoga High School freshmen who designed the graphic, Jeff Arnold, James Nguyen and Albert Wang, created it for the website for the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office Westside Substation which serves the Cupertino area, but is located in Saratoga. For the past two years, Arnold, Nguyen and Wang's web design teacher at Saratoga High, Barbara Reeder, has chosen students in her class to modify the site, which Greig created two and a half years ago.
Last year, students Bradley Block and Clara Yang, who were then seniors, designed the site.
Arnold, Nguyen and Wang created the graphic of the patrol car by adding pictures to a graphic that Bradley and Yang had on the site last year. While Bradley and Yang's graphic, which showed a patrol car chasing a bad guy's car, consisted of five or six pictures, Arnold, Nguyen and Wang's consists of 28 to 30. Bradley and Yang's graphic can still be viewed below Arnold, Nguyen and Wang's.
The freshmen also created alterable frames within the document, added an animated rotating Sheriff's star, changed the font, coloring and background, improved some of the graphic capabilities and made them more palatable to the public, for all 12 pages that make up the site, according to Greig. In addition, Arnold, Nguyen and Wang added photos of the substation to the main page.
"It's much cleaner than it was before and much easier for people to read," Greig said.
The students also added a Powerpoint demonstration that Deputy Noah Brommeland created about Internet safety. The demonstration tells children how they can be safe when they chat on the Internet and why they should be safe.
Recently, the substation also acquired wireless Internet service from Sprint Broadband. Substation personnel decided to attach the Sprint Broadband dish to the substation roof because Saratoga was too far from a DSL center for the substation to get good DSL service.
The wireless Internet service made it possible for deputies at the substation to be hooked up to an email network for the first time. Residents can now email deputies directly by clicking on their names on the webpage. Previously, Greig would receive messages to all deputies at his Hotmail account and would print them out and stick them in their boxes. Now, deputies have more direct contact with residents and can respond to their messages more quickly.
With the wireless Internet service, sergeants, who have laptops in their cars with portable scanners that allow them to send pictures from crime scenes to the substation and will be able to send pictures faster.
The Sheriff's Office Westside Substation website is www.santaclarasheriffwest.org.
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Cupertino, California Since 1947
