Davin's blog

Author: Davin Granroth

  • Removing words from the Microsoft Office Custom Dictionary

    In Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Entourage, or PowerPoint, when you do a spell check, you have the option to add a word to the custom dictionary. This is helpful, for instance, if your name is odd, like “Davin.” To stop my name from always appearing when I run a spellcheck, I just clicked the “Add”…

  • Hey look, Lee and me

    Photo of Lee Allis-Hayes and myself at the World Usability Day event at the MSU Union Building. The photo linked to above was taken by Betsy Weber. Betsy is the “Chief Evangelist” at TechSmith. I think that’s a fun title. It’s not just a job—it’s a calling. Lee, also from TechSmith, and I seem to…

  • [mutter]

    You know when you have those moments when you have a rush of thoughts and ideas that go so fast and there are a few that you really want to remember but when it’s all done there’s this mental let-down when you realize you lost them all?

  • MSU Usability & Accessibility Center

    Anne Hunt (co-worker) and I just went for a tour of MSU’s Usability & Accessibility Center, which is housed in the Kellogg Center on campus. Wow, they really did it up. From the ergonomics of the furniture and room layouts to the technology used to record audio, video, and motion screen captures, it all looks…

  • Spam: debjesusislord

    I keep getting this email called “People on the Move” from “debjesusislord”. I don’t know why I ever started getting it in the first place, and I surely hope that this seemingly ministry-oriented person isn’t knowingly running a spam-campaign. So, giving the benefit of the doubt, I tried sending emails to unsubscribe from the email…

  • [nav links above do not lay out properly in some browsers]

    I’m trying a slightly different layout with the nav links above, and they don’t lay out as I want in some browsers. They are fine in Firefox on the Mac, but not in IE or Safari on the Mac. I’m guessing there are some issues on Windows, but I don’t have the time to deal…

  • MS Manual of Style has no “open source” entry

    I was just drafting an email and wanted to know if there is a standard way of writing out “open source,” like, is it capitalized. I happen to have the “Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, Third Edition” on my desk, and I found no entry for anything resembling “open source” in it. Somehow,…

  • Diagram of XHTML, CSS, JavaScript as types of code in a web page

    I’m thinking of using this diagram in an XHTML class I may be teaching in a couple weeks. The idea is to put XHTML, CSS, and Javascript in context with each other—yet to also illustrate that they are separate types of code and often are actually different files altogether.

  • Stop gun laws. Strengthen enforcement.

    As a nationwide gun ban in Brazil is due for a vote, I’m left to wonder if the anti-gun movement is just simply off-target. The article linked above mentions that the armed police are feared more than the armed drug dealers who walk the streets. Take guns away from lawful Brazilian citizens? What’s to stop…

  • Why use CSS-based layouts?

    I was prepping for a Dreamweaver class a couple months ago and was fiddling around with the practice files that came as part of the course material. There is a whole lesson devoted to using html tables as a tool to do page layouts. This poses an issue for me. My primary job for the…