Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips We are here; we are gone. Sorry, others will forget us. I’m sorry, but it will be forgotten, and I will be forgotten as well. Sure, computer technology can store my life, but someone has to pay attention, and that is where it falls apart. In some library somewhere are copies of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips First you work on a small problem set. Once you learn from that, you expand the problem set. Google recently started hiring speakers with accents to help train its speech recognition software systems. Why didn’t they do this sooner? Why did they only use middle-America, white-bread Americans, or some other Johnny Carson, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the cheapest and simplest part of a system is the one that fails and you may have to buy half a dozen of them to find one that works. I had a bad experience repairing that large appliance in the bathroom. Did you know that you can crawl under a toilet? […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Forget the old cliche about stupid questions. There ARE stupid questions, and hiring managers have asked me a bunch of them. I’ve been interviewed for jobs a dozen times There are stupid questions, and hiring managers ask them all the time. First, don’t ask the person to solve your problems. This is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Probably the best preparation is to be prepared to be unprepared. I prepare. I plan. I am ready. I drive some people nuts with these habits. Somewhere along the line I learned that I was never prepared for everything. Hence, I became prepared for that, too. I learned to be prepared to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We tend to love to live with our own problems. I read recently of a great innovation in fonts for programmers. Someone has just invented a new font that makes it easy to tell the difference between the number one and the lowercase letter L. Wow! 2015 and we’ve finally solved the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I’m caught in the aspirin illusion yet again. When will I learn? The suppression of pain instead of the eradication of the disease for which the pain is a warning. Gerald M. Weinberg Here is my story… I had headaches in the mornings. I took Excedrin extra strength, migraine, etc. which is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Kids today are anxious to move one to something better. That frustrates us old folks. We have a solution, if we choose it. This is one of things that bothers us old people about young adults: They want to move up and move on and do something else (too quickly) They haven’t […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Many of my big, but slow-to-learn, learnings in life occurred because I didn’t think adults would act like that. It was the early 1980s. A senior manager said, “Whats his name works for another-government-agency. Everyone who works for that-government-agency is stupid. Therefore, whats his name is stupid.” I couldn’t believe that an […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Technology appears to be changing so fast that culture and jobs cannot keep pace. This leads to a large group of people whose newly acquired skills never give birth to a new job. Culture adjusts to technology. The automobile displaced everyone in the horse and buggy industry. The culture and the economy […]

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