Davin's blog

Month: September 2006

  • I’m geeked

    My department at MSU had a day celebrating 50 years of computing at MSU. So, in the MSU Computer Store, there was a Mac II plugged in and running, tiny monochromatic monitor and all. I couldn’t help but look, and lo and behold, the hard drive had TeachText and NCSA Mosaic, the first publically available…

  • What does it take to be an evangelist of good interface design?

    Reference: The Art of Evangelism, Guy Kawasaki Here are Kawasaki’s list of ten ways of looking at evangelism and my interpretation of them as someone who might be an evangelist within an organization for good interface design. 1. Create a cause. We need to do good interface design on our products, because it makes life…

  • I educate

    Slightly over a year ago, I switched careers from website producer, consultant, and business owner to technology educator. I entered an organization in the midst of its ongoing, subtle identity crisis. Do we think of ourselves as trainers? We are called that, sometimes, because we give short courses and workshops on various computing topics, and…

  • Praise God for food!

    I ate well again today! Whoo hoo! It was another salmon dinner, like a prior post. Except this time it was salmon, white rice, and a roma tomato, sliced and seasoned with salt and pepper. I thought the meal looked great on the plate. It was on a green dinner plate (thanks again Anne), with…

  • Authenticate, commenters!

    I upgraded to MovableType 3.32 recently, and just turned on TypeKey authentication, so as to avoid comment spam. This means that you will need to have a TypeKey profile in order to comment here. Sorry for the hassle! It is pretty easy to get a free TypeKey profile, so just do it 😉 This will…

  • Where does chicken come from?

    We were just eating our dinner of mac and cheese and baked beans, and Lila saw the piece of pork in the beans. “What’s that?” she asked. “Pork,” I said. “Do you know where pork comes from?” So ensued a conversation of how ham and pork are meat from a pig and how hamburger is…

  • Lila painted this in Photoshop CS 2

    Lila (my five year old daughter) painted this line art using Photoshop CS 2 on the Mac laptop I have from work. Yes, I I’m bragging a little. She used the color-picker, paint bucket, eraser, swapped the foreground and background colors a few times, used the Undo command and generally used the basics of the…

  • Global nav is phooey?

    I guess I’m a little behind, but I just read this October 19th, 2005 post by Jared Spool: Global Site Navigation: Not Worthwhile? Jared makes the quick claim that global navigation is unnecessary and rarely helpful. Naturally, a discussion ensues. Some in favor of global navigation argue that it is needed for people to form…