Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Here is another term that people tend to confuse in the world of building and using systems. I can connect my Panasonic camera to my Apple computer quite easily. Both systems have USB ports. I simply connect the two with a standard USB cable. Wow! Magic! Who cares? Now lets consider connecting […]

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by Dwayne Phillips As a job seeker, I often run into inexplicable confusion between these two job titles. I am a systems engineer. I do systems engineering. I am not a systems administrator. I do not do systems administration. A quick read of the two Wikipedia articles linked above shows that the two professions are […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Is this person who and what they claim? Is this person authentic? The term “authenticity” is being tossed about much recently. I once worked in a job where determining the authenticity of a person was important. I struggled to understand what that meant. Here is some of what I learned. Is this […]

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by Dwayne Phillips To gain approval for an endeavor, you must “sell” it to those who decide such things. Then, as work progresses, you must continue to engage those who decide and keep the project “sold.” I hate this topic. That is because one of my worst experiences in my career was due to my […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Every now and then we remember that we can allow a person to help another person and that we have the technology to enable that. Be My Eyes is a combined application and service that helps sight-impaired people see things clearly. The impaired person points their smartphone at a thing and is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Don’t look to the provider’s user manual; look to the rest of us. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to write about this topic. Almost everyone already knows this, but for the record… I ran into this situation again this week. I was learning how to use a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It may come as a surprise to many, but laws against libel and slander still exist. I write this five days before the 2015 Super Bowl. The big topic of conversation in the football world is about under-inflated footballs (yes, western civilization has come to this). What surprises me (at least a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Yet another reason for brevity: the more the words, the more the mistakes. There must be some statistic somewhere that shows the number of mistakes per 1,000 words that writers make (is it a mistake to end a sentence with the word “make?” Did I put my punctuation marks in the right […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We each get one chance to share an idea with others. I cannot overemphasize the need to be ready for that chance. I have been working with a colleague for several years now. This colleague has an idea he wants to present to others. He has been talking about the one idea […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Life is full of challenges and frustrations. Some of these are normal. When encountering normal with a person who has not encountered it before, explain to them that it is normal. I once tutored a young man through a frustrating process at work. In the middle of the pull-out-your-hair and smash-your-head-through-the-wall day, […]

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