Working Up

Working Up in Project Management, Systems Engineering, Technology, and Writing

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Entries from July 2014

Writing with My Eyes Shut

July 31st, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I relearn that with hands on the keys, I can shut my eyes and still write. Several years ago, I was trying to write in the evening after a long day at work of reading and reading and reading and a little writing. My eyes hurt. I had to shut them. So […]

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Tags: Adapting · Writing

Cloud Computing Thoughts

July 28th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips After several recent experiences, I know a little about cloud computing. I have been experimenting in several ways recently with cloud computing. The basic sales pitch from a cloud computing provider is: We’ll buy and maintain the computers. You rent them from us. This takes us forward to the past to a […]

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Tags: Broadband · Communication · Computing · Technology

Udacity.com: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

July 24th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I take a Udacity.com online course and find good, bad, and ugly. I recently took an online course from udacity.com. As the post title suggests, I found… The Good: I was excited about the nanodegree program that udacity—one of the big players in MOOC—was about to offer. Companies were creating courses to […]

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Tags: Education · Learning · MOOC

Drive Out Fear

July 21st, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips If a workplace is full of fear, nothing else matters. Drive out the fear. I recently attended a presentation where the topic was trust. The presentation reminded of something, i.e., it helped me re-learn what I knew: If a workplace is full of fear, nothing else matters. Years ago I worked in […]

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Tags: Fear

Did You Notice the World Change?

July 17th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Twitter and the World Cup show that the world changed. Most people, didn’t even notice. The world changed. When I show people, they shrug. “Of course. What’s the big deal?” is the usual response. This web page has a story about how 300 million people tweeted about the FIFA World Cup. So […]

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Tags: Change · Technology

Commitement, Control, and Risk

July 14th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Simple yet oft-forgotten principles: commit to only what I can control. If I commit to things that are outside my control, I am assuming risk. I ran into the situation recently There are many times in my life when I am surprised to find people doing things that go against time-proven principles. […]

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Tags: Risk

The em dash and Learning

July 10th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I still learn new things. I still want to learn new things. I recently learned how to make the em dash and en dash characters in OS X with keyboard shortcuts. I no longer have to go to the “insert symbols” function to insert these special characters. One of the disappointing results […]

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Tags: Education · Learning · Writing

Change and “Fixing” Things

July 7th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips A change in the behavior of a system means that someone has changed something. We as people, often love to ignore this. Here is a situation I experienced a few years ago in a digital signal processing laboratory. One day, a piece of software didn’t work. A user ran the software, and […]

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Tags: Change · General Systems Thinking

Change and Cause and Effect (or the other way around)

July 3rd, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Any change to a situation will change the situation. It is often difficult to discern which came first. When a new person walks into an existing group of people, that group changes. There is no way around this—at least I know of no way around it. To have a new person without […]

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Tags: Change · General Systems Thinking