Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Ornamental objects are preserved. Practical objects are frayed and discarded. It is easy to confuse the two. Ever see a coffee pot from the 1940s? Except in old photo collections, I haven’t. Ever see a coffee service made of silver and engraved by a master craftsman? Yes I have. Museums are full […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Maybe one day I will know what “any good at it” means when applied to writing. I heard the title used as a line in a movie recently. Yet another young, earnest person was confessing to an acquaintance about how they spent their idle time. They wrote. They were trying to write […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I am happy to learn that embarrassment still exists. We still aspire. I recently read an article about how people are not asking Siri and the like questions in public by voice. They type the questions instead of saying them aloud. They are a bit embarrassed to let other people hear their […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Let not check a communications channel using that same communications channel. It is pretty silly to do so. Since the great pandemic of the early 2020s, I have been part of countless ZoomerTeams meetings. Almost every one starts with, “Can everyone hear me?” Let’s pause and think. If a participant cannot hear […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes it is worth the effort to make the output “look good.” Sometimes this pretty printing is a waste and only aggravates those involved. This past week at work I spent hours and hours pretty printing. We had “done the work” and were trying to make a printout of the work for […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes I find projects that are over organized. There is a good long-term reason for such. It still is a pain for the rest of us. I recently started working on a project that was over organized. The computer files were arranged by this criteria and that criteria and the other criteria. […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Despite the celebrity appearances of celebrities, the vase majority of folks just do their jobs (for better or worse). As I write, the months-long antitrust trial of Google may draw to a close. As this article reports, the vast majority of Google employees aren’t giving that thing the slightest bit of attention. […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips In our brave new world of remote working and such, one thing remains: evidence of work. A: What are you doing? B: Working. A: What have you done? B: I read three books and six papers as assigned. A: Uh, why should I believe that? There is no evidence of work. All […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Take caution with negative statements as they often contradict themselves. “There is no crying in baseball,” is a famous line from the movie A League of Their Own. (My wife says that is a movie about sisters. I say it is a movie about baseball.) That is a self-contradictory statement. One person […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips A partial list of boo boos I have seen in published documents over the years. If anyone had read these things, surely they would have found these things. Right? I guess an editor or someone like that should have read this, but it appears that no one did. Here is a partial […]

[Read more →]