by Dwayne Phillips Things are better. Today. The statement is true for everyday if you make it so. Happy new year. Well, I guess according to the official calendar the new year starts tomorrow. That, however, is just some arbitrary thing. Let’s just act like today is a new year. The general consensus is that […]
Entries from December 2020
Happy New Year
December 31st, 2020 · No Comments
Tags: Alternatives · Choose
Skimming and Diving
December 28th, 2020 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we skim the surface to gather an overview. Sometimes we dive in deep to discover the details. I like an overview. I like the nitty gritty details. Which do we like? On which day? For me, the overview is easier. I learn the general idea. I tell people that “all I […]
Tags: Concepts · Energy · Fear · Ideas · Technology
Merry Christmas Everybody
December 24th, 2020 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips I write this on November 25th. What will Christmas be in the year of the virus? I don’t know. The big media—network news and cable networks, the big newspapers—have botched everything this year, and botched everything badly and obviously. Can’t look there for any accurate predictions. Fifty-one percent of the country is […]
And I was There
December 21st, 2020 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips We tend to inflate events when we participate in them. We do this at our peril in professional as well as personal situations. The 2020 election was one of the most important in history. And I voted in it. The pandemic was one of the biggest events in the history of mankind. […]
Tags: Self
The Mundane Necessity of Computing (Professionals)
December 17th, 2020 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Some things are so obvious that we all miss them for a long time. Moving from experiment lab to the real world requires some expertise. To do artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, etc. you do computing. This means a lot of software work. Though not as old as physics and chemistry, […]
Tags: Computing · Engineering · Experiment · Programming · Reality · Systems
Fiction and Disinformation
December 14th, 2020 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Fiction, when repeated enough, becomes fact in the minds of many. So why aren’t we trying to stomp out fiction that is far from reality? I have seen many movies on Hallmark Movies and Mysteries. 99% of murders in real life are not like that, nothing like that. 99% of murders in […]
Tags: Expectations · Fable · Fairy Tales · Information · Stories · Writing
Some Essentials for Writers II
December 10th, 2020 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips At last, I continue a series of essentials for writers. The first Some Essentials for Writers was posted December 10th, 2012. I actually promised that I would write some more parts to that post. Well, 7 1/2 years later, here we go. I have been working recently with things called Jekyll, Markdown, […]
Transience and Integrity
December 7th, 2020 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips I guess we haven’t changed much from the day of the snake oil salesman rolling through town with his mule-drawn wagon. There is something about transience and lack of integrity that tend to make the two close partners. If we have transience, we lack integrity. Back in the old days, or at […]
Tags: Competence · Integrity · Trust
Senior Leadership(?)
December 3rd, 2020 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips A bit of history and lost opportunity. The Android operating system is 13 years old in November of 2020. Gosh. Horrible memories back to 2007 and early 2008. Senior government managers looked at the mobile landscape back then and declared: The future was the Microsoft phone and its operating system. Junior government […]
Tags: Google · History · Judgment · Microsoft · Technology