Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Praising the most successful education project in the history of man: the Raspberry Pi. Nobel Prize? Why not? Two years ago the Raspberry Pi was launched. 2.5 million units later, it is still going. Two years is a long time in technology—a very long time. (Wikipedia has a good article on the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I build my own little LibraryBox2. I stumbled across this project recently and, since I am fascinated by libraries and distributing content, decided to try to build one. I am not good at this sort of thing, but why not try it? It worked! I have my own LibraryBox2 (see photo). LibraryBox […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If possible, assist instead of advise. I worked in a government bureaucracy for over 25 years. A favorite practice to this day is the review board. Some unlucky and usually young engineer works really hard for weeks and then brings the work before a group of older engineers. The older engineers pick […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Focusing for a long period of time is contradictory, but it is possible. Graduate school in 1983 (yes, I am that old): I had to study a text on a new concept called object-oriented software. I don’t mean read the text, I mean read it, study it, master it. I faced a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A description portrays what is now; a prediction estimate what may come. Sometimes we confuse the two at our peril. Some words are predictions. We use to them to portray our estimate of the future. Few of us are satisfactory as predictors of the future even though most of us think we […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I read a classic management text. It is as true today as it was in 1969. When in college in the mid-1970s (yes, I am that old), an English professor spoke about the Peter Principle. This was a relatively new concept about how people rise to their level of incompetence. Work was […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes smartphones and the like only come in one color. There is more to adding colors than meets the eye. I used to work for an organization that built little gadgets. Every little gadget came in the same color: black. One year I worked on a project where I thought I was […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Those people who love you the most, may try hardest to stop you from becoming something you want to become. I recently read a blog post about how your friends and relatives may try to stop you from becoming a writer.  This is not a surprise, and it does not speak badly […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I am a problem solver. Sometimes, however, solving a problem is the worst thing to do. This story made the rounds recently about how our military is experimenting with small jolts of electricity to keep sleep-deprived troops awake. The electricity might have fewer bad side affects than the current treatment — lots […]

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