Dwayne Phillips ' Day Book

Items I happen to view each day. Science, Techonology, Management, Culture, and of course Writing

This is my day book for this week. I have modeled this after science fiction and computer writer Jerry Pournelle's view, or as he calls it, his Day Book. I encourage you to see Jerry Pournelle's site and subscribe to his services.

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This week: October 31-November 6, 2016

Summary of this week:

Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday

Monday October 31, 2016

Today is Halloween in the US.

Should we go to Mars and probably ruin the place?

Every generation someone stands up and screams about the need for the learning organization.

Apple issues suggestions for how developers should and shouldn't use the Touch Bar display.

A Swedish court decrees, "No cameras on drones."

Travel tips from a 23-year-old. Short, inexpensive world travel.

The world has turned upside down again with Microsoft, Apple, and their technical approaches.

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Tuesday November 1, 2016

Our FBI director was loved by the Democrats in the summer, but is hated by them in the fall.

Women wrestlers star in a WWE pay-per-view event. What's next? A woman president?

Mac power users and programmers are moaning about the latest updates to the MacBooks.

System76—a purveyor of Linux laptops—sees a jump in sales after disappointing MacBook update.

Google reports a Windows 10 flaw to Microsoft and then to the whole world only ten days later.

The Chinese surprise everyone and show their new J-20 stealth fighters at an air show.

A closer look at the Tesla solar roof and battery.

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Wednesday November 2, 2016

SudoApp and SudoPay: create, use, and delete one-time identities to buy things and email.

Some dirt about life inside Facebook and exclusion that would close a government contractor's company.

Facebook releases Gameroom so we can play games on our PC inside Facebook.

Our lameduck President gathers the semiconductor industry. Who has been President the last 7.9 years?

Apple drops the prices on its older portable computers. Time to buy.

AWS now has a version of Amazon Linux that you can run on your servers on your own premises.

Forget Black Friday and Cyber Monday. China's Single's Day is the biggest shopping day in the world.

Now Americans can legally hack our own devices. Wow. And all this time we thought we owned them.

WikiLeaks finds Eric Schmidts master plan for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

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Thursday November 3, 2016

Baseball's worst franchise, the Chicago Cubs, wins baseball's World Series for the first time since 1908.

While the Cubs were in the baseball playoffs, Chicago had 78 murders, 353 shootings and 427 shooting victims.

Fitbit had a worse-than-expected financial quarter, and its stock fell 30%.

Microsoft officially releases Teams. It is a Slack competitor that integrates with Office 365.

Slack publishes a full-page ad giving Microsoft not-so-friendly advice.

The 25 richest, healthiest, happiest, and most advanced countries in the world. US at #17. New Zealand at #1.

Facebook's stock price falls 8%.

Those folks on Wall Street are pretty smart; they won't use email or anything else that goes to disk forever.

88% of smartphones sold worldwide in the last quarter are running Android.

Despite all the moaning and groaning about the updated Apple portable computers, sales set new highs.

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Friday November 4, 2016

Cartoonist Robert Weber dies at 92.

Amazon-labeled generic products are gaining market share on Amazon.com.

GoPro had bad expectations and reality was lower than those financial expectations.

Fitbit's stock price falls 30% after a worse-than-expceted financial quarter.

Google's Home beats Amazon's Echo in answering nagging questions at home. Scientific results?

NFL Films teams with Google on a VR series.

22-cent goofy glasses trick facial recognition systems into classifying you as someone else. ooops

Amazon Rapids: sending stories to kids one text at a time. It is reading, and someone is writing the stories.

Actions are louder than words as our government admits the Russians have hacked next week's election. Why don't we back out of this mess and use basic election systems that are disconnected and not prone to hacking?

FBI leaks are blamed on personal animosity towards Hillary Clinton. What does around comes around or something like that. Still, government employees are supposed to do their jobs regardless of who is or isn't in elected office.

Brexit may not happen after all.

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Saturday November 5, 2016

Can anyone explain what is happening at the FBI and the Justice Department?

When the Russians disrupt our election next week, we will disrupt their, uh, hmm, er, well, there is some advantage to not having elections.

Code.gov: open source government projects. Actually, if it isn't classified, it is public domain.

Apple is cutting prices for Christmas. Apple cuts the prices of USB-C adapters.

Apple cuts the prices of the big LG external displays.

Technical skills+free time+fun=Amazon Alexa+Billy the singing fish

Technical skills+lots of sun+coffee beans=solar coffee roaster.

Apple: technical excellence, style, and perhaps too much success.

Mark your calendars: November 14th will have the largest full moon in 68 years.

The obvious health benefits of quitting alcohol.

The Orange Pi Zero: a $6.99 competitor to the Raspberry Pi. Wonderful.

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Sunday November 6, 2016

Today we return to standard time for a few months. Only Congress and other illiterates can make standard an exception.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the tech world will return to hard technology and away from apps that let you order fast food.

The online high school. It fits for some kids—especially if you are rich $$$. Like most education experiments, this benefits those who need it the least. If you have money, travel all the time, live in fenced-in communities, are a danger for kidnapping because your parents are in the .01%, and so on.

Get ready America. Here comes marijuana. We think we are ready for this.

Unemployed? You missed your chance this campaign season. You could have been making pro-Trump websites for money.

Revealed: the NES Classic is a $60 single-board computer running Linux. That is all.

Beware of your jokes. Our FBI spent two years investigating a "church" that didn't exist.

"young and non-traditional workers" = "you old guys are fired, bring in cheap, foreign labor"

Western civilization is safe: we can now order McDonald's from our smartphones.

Productivity tips in writing—basically, stop doing everything but writing.

Trying to find the core vision of your story in writing.

Using family histories in historical fiction. We all have family histories, even if it is only me and my history.

Sometimes a writer needs to stop a piece for now, go to something simpler, and come back later.

Make every word count; remove redundant words.

NaNoWriMo begins! I was going to do that this year, but changed my mind at the last minute. Instead, I will strive to write a technical white paper each week.

Tips on creating a daily habit of writing.

Brevity: this post has good tips on how to write shorter sentences.

Writers, read this post. It has much-better-than-usual tips on writing and finishing big projects.

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