Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Please tell me what we are doing. Please don’t read from a catalog. Person beaming with confidence: Look. Here is a block diagram of our system. You see we are using Snowflake, Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and toss in a little Excel for good measure. Person baffled but interested: Interesting. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Let’s revise that one more time. Okay, but will it be better or just different? Revisions. Edits. That is what writers do. Many prescribe to the notion that the first draft is practically nothing. The real work of the writer begins when the revising and editing begin. And how many revisions finish […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I express a bit of angst over the use of “geo.” This post may mean nothing to everyone else in the world, but I have to get it out of my system. I have been overwhelmed with the use of the term geo the past ten years. Just my personal problem, but […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Wait. Stop. Someone grab that person. That person is about to fall into the pit of endless details. Oh no. It’s too late! I know it’s about to happen. I should be able to do something to stop it. Oh no. It happened too fast. There is nothing I can do. The […]

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by Dwayne Phillips All this $$$ is killing AI. I used to work in AI. That means that I researched things that might allow us to do things that we couldn’t do. I attempted to instruct a computer or, as we used to say, I attempted to write a computer program to do something that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I often hear people speak with great certainty. Further consideration, however, reveals almost no certainty. People like to speak with great certainty. I write those words because I often hear people speak with great certainty. If people don’t like to do that, why do they do it almost all the time? Great […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Influencing behavior via modeling instead of coating with chocolate syrup. I recently read an article written by a mother describing how she had her children eat vegetables. The answer applies to all behaviors that are distasteful to some persons. There is an old joke about a farmer who fed his dogs spinach. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes I can do more than my job. I can exceed and excel. I recommend caution. I read an editorial recently about newspapers. Perhaps that editorial was agreeable or not as it delved into the politics of the English language (thoughtful and fraught with peril). The topic was journalism, journalists, and journal-ing. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes you concede or yield to another person’s experience in a situation. Folks seem to hate that. “You have more experience with this type of thing or this type of situation. I yield to your judgement here.” Seems like that is pretty reasonable and wise. Folks seem to hate it. What is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips An old book refreshes how to write to someone else. I recently found an old book—old meaning 40 years old. “How to use the power of the printed word” was published in 1985. It comprises a dozen essays from famous folks of that day about writing and reading and such. I am […]

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