Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips It seems that many knowledge workers “work” four hours a day (and are paid for eight). This merely highlights our ignorance of what comrpises work. Slashdot recently surveyed 24,000 workers. 40% said they worked four hours a day. Another 24% said they worked maybe four to six hours. This means two-thirds of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips What do Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) have to do with engineering, project management, systems development? I am afraid that the answer is “too much.” Intellectuals are taking PEDs. College professors are the latest to join the crowd. They are using ritalin to extend and focus their concentration. I suppose the professors are […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I have seen many “critical” systems built with commercial products that are available at the mall, Best Buy, Circuit City, you name them. The result can be disastrous. Please be careful. About ten years ago I worked on a small project that built a data link. We were sending short, simple text […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Knowledge is difficult to obtain and precious to me. Therefore, I write notes in notebooks and I keep the notebooks. This photo shows my notebooks (click photo to enlarge). I have filled these with various types of notes since 1984. Yes, that is about 25 years of notebooks. I use three types […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I believe in employing specialists – people who really know what they are doing. I had an experience with experts this past month. Several of my friends have been working on another friend’s home for several weekends. I am not a carpenter, a plumber, nor an electrician. Regardless, I showed up and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips In part 1 of this post, I covered the mathematics and truth table of implication. Implication shows that If I accept something that I know is FALSE, I can prove anything else that I know is FALSE For example, if I accept that “1=2”, I can prove that “2=3”. I know that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is dangerous – I am splitting a blog post into two parts. Hang in there with me. People are not always logical. That bothers logical engineers like me to no end. There is a mathematical and logical method to prove the non-logical behavior of people. That math helps me understand the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I like uniformity. Expectations are met, there are few surprises, and yes at times it is boring. The boring parts are become more prevalent. I could use a little more variety and more choice these days. When I was a kid I discovered K-Mart. It was wonderful. It didn’t matter which K-Mart […]

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