Author: Davin Granroth

  • A Walk in Ringwood Forest

    We spent about 2 hours in Ringwood Forest yesterday. Lila and Eva carried sticks to fight off the evil fairies and demons that inhabited the woods. You could tell they were attacking when the wind moaned through the treetops and yellow leaves swooped down to us. Luckily, we made it back to the car.

  • How to aim with iron or open sights

    How to aim with iron or open sights

    A guy in his 50s a few benches to my right was thumbing .40 cal cartridges into a pistol magazine. He had arrived when I was about to box up my gear and head home. But, I had seven rounds of .22 leftover, so instead of letting them roll around in my gun box, I…

  • Many stories in user experience

    I just watched this TED talk, “Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story.” Please, take the 18 minutes to watch it, then continue to read. Watching this talk brought to mind two thoughts related to user experience work. First, in a recent edition of Interactions magazine there is an article “Stories that inspire action”…

  • A Sad Tale of Pagination

    I imagine some professional chefs are accused of over-analyzing a bowl of soup now and then. Like that, as a user experience designer, I get caught up in little pieces of user interface on a regular basis. This particular story concerns a navigation system that utilizes pagination in what at first seems an obvious choice,…

  • UserVue review

    UserVue is an application from TechSmith. At work we’ve used it recently to do remote user interviews, where we’ve had people who use our services talk us through some emailed reports they received from us. It allows us to view and record a user’s screen, and save it as a WMV or Morae file. Additionally,…

  • Pistol practice, Aug 15, 2009 and notes on iron sights for Ruger Mk II

    I went to the Saginaw Field & Stream pistol range this morning and fired a practice 900 bullseye course with my Ruker Mk II .22. A couple months ago I upgraded the iron sights on the gun. Up till this point I’ve shot with the original Ruger sights, except for a couple years in the…

  • Vacation in the Keewenaw

    For the past week I’ve had Lila and Eva with me up in Keewenaw in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I grew up here, and we’ve been staying at my parents’ house. We’ve spent the last few days at our family’s cottage (we call it a “camp”) on Portage Lake. The photos of the ducks…

  • Amazing Grace: The Journey, new YouTube video from Adam

    My friend Adam posted this rendition of “Amazing Grace” to YouTube yesterday.

  • Question from Eva about alarm clocks

    Eva just asked me: “Daddy, why do people say the alarm clock is going off when it’s actually going on?”

  • Young Earth Creationism—huh?

    In my last post, I ended with the thought that I may settle into a small Baptist church nearby. Well, last weekend I attended the evening service and the pastor used the message to express his belief that the earth was created between 6 and 10,000 years ago. Now, I’ve never looked into the young…