Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Is faster or slower better or worse? Or is it simply different timing and rhythm? And are there advantages to changing the timing and rhythm? This past week I was in an office in a different city. Frustration, angst, and generally a lousy week of poor productivity. Just before the week ended, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Outsiders, drifters, those who aren’t like us. These are the persons we need the most. We need people here and now who don’t belong here and now. How else would we learn anything? This is pretty simple. With a little thought, most of us would agree with it. Most of us, however, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Before embarking on a new database, or any new system, learn what it is we want and need. “Let’s create a database to track this,” said an eager and well-meaning person. “But,” interjected another well-meaning person, “do we know what we need or want or anything?” My livelihood has been technology. Of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We are talking about this because this is what we are talking about now. The preacher—the person on TED talks, the motivational speaker, the person next to you at the bar— preaches on the topics that we talk about in the parking lot, the hall ways, the grocery store, etc. At work, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The clipboard and the pencil are perhaps the simplest yet effective tools for doing something important: recording history. And if we don’t have our history, we will repeat work and waste resources. I was in high school—a long time ago in a place far, far away. It was the train station (no […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Adding to something can be difficult. The result is often less beautiful, less structurally pure, less this and that. Behold, however, the beauty of the “add on.” You see them in houses. At least we used to see them. We still do in some rural areas where construction isn’t regulated too much. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When will the curve bend? When should I change? Will I be willing to change? There are curves we can draw that show cost, performance, and lots of things. Take note of them. Take note of the bend in the curve… when USB thumb drive air gap is faster than a network […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Present and past weave together. New tools or old techniques? I am a bit slow on the uptake of “new” things from time to time. This past week or so I stumbled across this thing called Jupyter. It is a type of “notebook.” Some call it yet another implementation of the “notebook” […]

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