Davin's blog

Author: Davin Granroth

  • Phi, phi, design notes

    Just for the sake of me jotting this down somewhere… Phi (the golden ratio) is approximately equal to 1.6180339887498948482. phi is the decimal part of that: .6180339887498948482. When laying out two column widths on a web page, using phi as the percentage of the wider column often provides a nice visual balance. So, two columns…

  • Web Site Visibility class

    Today I taught a course in Web Site Visibility. It was fun. It is really the first course I’ve been able to teach that I was actually able to draw heavily on my experience with the web. It was a small course, and I realized after talking with the participants that the name of the…

  • Online services bypassing distribution problems in markets like music and videos, the Long Tail article

    The Long Tail is an interesting article. Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

  • Bears! Oh my.

    I was at RiteAid this evening picking up some cold and flu medicine for Chey, and the woman at the register warned me to be on the lookout for a bear. Yes, a bear. It turns out there was a bear down by Saginaw and Creyts Rd., which is not all that far from the…

  • Commuting! Oh ye bane of my time! Oh ye cursed destroyer of my schedule!

    So, I’ve found that I’m gone during the workday for eleven and a half hours, when I take the bus back and forth. I leave at 6:25 AM and get back home at 6:00 PM. When taking the bus, the total commute time for the day is about two and a half hours. When I…

  • What a change

    I’m at the end of my first week at this new job. Other than basic logistics (parking, orientation, setting up voicemail, etc.), my time has been spent mostly in classes and preparing to teach classes. So far, I’ve sat in on Access Database Design, Fundamentals of Web Development, and I’m in the middle of a…

  • my sad haiku

    “sorrow more, laugh less” my heart fears the icy wind “wise hearts know to mourn” there – in between a soft heart and no forgiveness – a wound festers, seeps our world is broken: fools know pleasure – but the wise are sad god, mend us

  • A job offer!

    MSU LCTTP called today with an official job offer, which I gladly accepted. I’ll be a full-time instructor in a technology training program at Michigan State University. I start next Monday, June 6th. I’ll have about a week to get situated and learn from the other instructors, then I teach my first course on the…

  • Rewrote the main page code and css of this blog

    Just a note, this evening I rewrote the markup and css for this blog. I basically just deleted both and started over. This page is now more lean and the css is much less bulky. I also ditched the monthly archive link list and the calendar. Instead, there is now a longer list of recent…

  • The ‘puter is dead

    So, that computer problem I mentioned back on the 22nd…the computer is finished. I can’t even get an OS to install. Sometimes, it doesn’t even bring up the BIOS. I figure there is one component or another that is fried, thus messing up the whole system. It isn’t the hard drive. I don’t think it…