Davin's blog

Month: January 2008

  • MSU English Department Film series, ICS file

    The English Department at Michigan State University is promoting a film series over the next few months that looks interesting. It is called Cinema under Siege: Imperiled Visions from Beirut to Baghdad. The screenings will be held on campus in C20 Snyder-Phillips Hall and are free and open to the public. Here’s a PDF of…

  • Using Javascript to add instructive text for input and textarea form fields

    OUTDATED POST: HTML5′s placeholder attribute creates the behavior that this javascript did. Just use the placeholder attribute. UPDATE 2008-04-13: This code has been refactored. Please view the updated posting. Over the last year or so, I’ve worked on a number of websites where I wanted to add instructive text to form fields, but didn’t want…

  • Nephtali

    Oh! Nephtali! Alright, so if you look up “Nephtali” on thinkbabynames.com, you see it listed as a variant of “Naftali.” The boy’s name Naftali \n(a)-fta-li, naf-tali\ is of Hebrew origin, and its meaning is “struggling”. Biblical: a son of Jacob and one of the ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel. “Struggling.” Apt. How many…

  • Design connections

    A couple days ago I stopped into the Com Arts building at Michigan State University to meet a new professor in the journalism program named Karl Gude. [Karl’s blog] I heard about Karl from my friend and colleague Liz Weber who handed me a clipping from the MSU News Bulletin which explained that Karl had…

  • Performing music

    Back in mid-December, I played a fun little coffee-house type gig over near Detroit (Southfield maybe?) with my friend Paul Tiseo and a small crew of other musicians. It was for a group of young adult Catholics to socialize after what I interpret as a prayer meeting. I was a little nervous going into it,…

  • Ye Olde Man

    On the same night as the Eastman Party Store commentary, Lila, Eva and I were at a restaurant. I have Lila bring her homework in to work on after dinner. She had some books to read, so she read to us. The story was a fairy tale and there was an inn and an innkeeper…

  • What do you look for at a party store?

    My daughter Lila has learned to read, and so when we’re driving, she comments on signs she reads. Yesterday evening I was driving Lila and Eva by the Eastman Party Store, and Lila asks, “Daddy, you see the Eastman Party Store?” “Yes,” I replied. “So, what do you think you’d see in there?” she asked.…

  • I’m a student again, and tardy already!

    After a nine-year break, I’ve enrolled again at Michigan State University! Back in 1998 or 99 I took a full-time job offer producing websites, and never finished my degree in English. So, finally, I’ll finish it off this semester. If everything goes as planned, I should graduate this May. I’m taking one class: REL 350–Buddhism…

  • Can robots.txt prevent a dead page from being removed from a search engine’s index?

    Problem: Pages taken offline 4 months ago are still indexed by Google and Yahoo! In the course of work this week, we discovered that Yahoo! and Google still have record of a section of a website we removed nearly 4 months ago. Surely the search engine robots had revisited the pages, repeatedly received 404-File Not…