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

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Entries from June 2015

More Eyeballs

June 29th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips The ever decreasing cost of technology enables more people to look at more of our problems. There is hope. Linus’ Law is disputed as to what it is and who said it and who published it and all those things that come with a quote that is often quoted and misquoted. I’ll […]

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Tags: People · Problems · Technology

Service as a Service

June 25th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillip The whatever-as-a-service has gotten a bit out of hand. I have lost track of where we are in the world of XaaS. Software as a Service was one of the early ones for me. Then I heard of Infrastructure as a Service (does that mean rebuilding roads and bridges? Perhaps not.) I […]

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Tags: Fable · Fun · Play

Technocentrism

June 22nd, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I post a piece I wrote 20 years ago on a nagging attribute many of us science and engineering types possess. It happened again the other day at work. Members of my technical group were discussing the possible movement of people within our organization. We all agreed that we did not want […]

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Tags: Culture · People · Technology

Stolen Garbage

June 16th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Someone stole a copy of the OPM database. That database is full of errors. The thieves might make good money with an algorithm that finds and corrects the errors. Someone recently hacked the OPM database. I am certain that all sorts of good information about me is in that database. I’m not […]

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Tags: Competence · Government · Privacy · Security

Economy Requires Neglect

June 15th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Unless we are rich, we neglect those persons and things that are far from the normal. Economy requires neglect; sorry. In schools, we have big classes. We try to reach the middle of the class, the group near the center of the normal distribution (we used to call this distribution the “bell […]

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Tags: Choose · Education · General Systems Thinking · Management

On the Critical Path

June 11th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips If you are on the critical path of a project, you often behave in ways that don’t seem to make sense. The critical path of a project means a lot of things to different people. Wikipedia has a good explanation of the concept. One way to think of the critical path is […]

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Tags: Management · Process

Two Side Notes from Apple WWDC 2015

June 9th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I watched the WWDC speeches on Monday. I noticed two things. (1) Everyone at Apple is a huge Golden State Warriors basketball fan. Funny, I don’t recall any mentions of that team in any of the past Apple big events. Either I missed those mentions or the Apple folks are phoney jump-on-the-bandwagon […]

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Tags: Apple

Proudly Inefficient

June 8th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes, we just plain do things that are inefficient by choice for the better. Sometimes we are going to do some things where we don’t care about scaling to gain efficiency. Sometimes we won’t video record the talk to play it later to millions of persons. Sometimes we are going to spend […]

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Tags: Authentic · Choose · Integrity · People · Scale

Systems Integration

June 4th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Here is another term that people tend to confuse in the world of building and using systems. I can connect my Panasonic camera to my Apple computer quite easily. Both systems have USB ports. I simply connect the two with a standard USB cable. Wow! Magic! Who cares? Now lets consider connecting […]

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Tags: Communication · Systems

More Memoir Tips from Marion Roach Smith

June 1st, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Tips from Marion Roach Smith. I recently finished reading The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Here are a few tips from the book. This is an x and the illustration is y. Much of the book uses this formula. For example, this is a piece of humor, […]

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Tags: Uncategorized · Writing