Working Up

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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by Dwayne Phillips The success of many endeavors should lead to dissolving the endeavor. It is unfortunate, however, that the result is often bureaucracy. I have seen it many times. Let’s start an association: to improve the performance of X, to increase the awareness of Y, to teach the practice of Z, or some such […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We often pay the tuition for learning, but neglect to learn anything. I have blogged about this before. (From January 2010) I suppose I will stop blogging about this when the practice stops. Sorry, I guess that means that every few years I will blog about it again. Is there any least […]

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