Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes digging down into the hidden history of a project helps the project crawl out of a hole. And, of course, sometimes not. I used to do this frequently. I was given a project that had “lost its way” or “fallen out of favor” or simply been left to rot in the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Does expertise mean you are focused on a narrow area or that you have become narrow minded? I recently met with a few persons who all had PhDs. Perons with a PhD tend to know a lot about a little. That is the state of us. We study something in great detail […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Instead of trying the magnificent, perhaps we should try something we can accomplish. Many problems confront us everyday. These are all opportunities to excel. Really, not just for those silly posters, but these are actually opportunities for us to accomplish something and do some good for us and someone else. It seems […]

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by Dwayne Phillips How to write a computer program when you have no idea how to do it in a new language. I wrote a computer program this week at work. (oooops, I am supposed to write that I was developing because that is what the job recruiters call it nowadays.) This shouldn’t sound remarkable, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Let’s twist the meta-problem and meta-solution a bit to help reveal the underlying problem. It happened again this week… I wanted a software tool installed on my computer at work. Now the computer at work is on a network. We can’t just go installing software on networked computers willy nilly. We have […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The user interface and the user experience seem to be based on two, quite simple things. I love to look at the photos on the Analog Dreams posts in tumblr. Those big, beautiful round knobs. I owned a lot of the things shown in the photos, and there was something magical about […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Let’s reduce all this accountability business to a simple question. The Accountability Question: “What happens if I don’t do this? (thing you told me to do or some regulation or policy says I have to do)” If the answer is, “nothing.” Well then, we have no accountability. Or maybe this “thing” just […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we forget some of the fundamentals of “news.” Fake news: this is the stuff we used read in the grocery store checkout counter in The National Enquirer. My mother never let me buy one, but they had great headlines about then first lady Hillary Clinton having an alien baby and other […]

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