Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Philosophy and utopia are great until reality punches everything in the nose—philosophically speaking of course. Philosophical discussions are great. They may stretch the mind to see other points of view or possibilities. They may lead to better ways. Philosophy, however, is philosophy and not reality. We need to keep that in mind. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips You would think by now that we would have straightened out all this mess with computers not quite working right. Sigh. Maybe one day. Over 30 years ago, (yes, I am that old) I was loading software onto a computer via 5 1/4″ floppy disks (yes, I am that old) and… kaput. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The systems we use at work are woefully behind what we use at home. This is especially true if we work in a government organization. At the time I wrote this post, OpenAI demonstrated their GPT-4 with ChatGPT. That means I see how to summarize lots of things and understand what is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Just because something survived and thrived doesn’t mean it was a good idea. There are other explanations. Good ideas bubble to the top. Market success shows those good ideas. Bad ideas fizzle. They don’t make it anywhere. Well, maybe these statements are true, but maybe the aren’t. I see things that have […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A basic principle in writing non-fiction is Don’t Repeat Yourself. Write it once and point to it. DRY means “Don’t Repeat Yourself.” This is simple, but not often used, and that causes us lots of headaches and heartaches. I have a background in computer programming. A fundamental part of computer programming is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Research is expensive. Someone pays the bills. Sorry about the lesson in economics. The future of companies is often in the research they perform in the back rooms. Not glamorous, but often necessary. And those smart folks in the back rooms cost lots of money. The company has to be making enough […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes research leads old guys to remember lessons from way back. Crisis helps us forget to our peril The other day at work, we were speaking with a thought leader in an area of technology. This person truly is an expert and a thought leader in the future of his area. The […]

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by Dwayne Phillips One function of systems engineering is to open the black boxes, look at the entire system, and apply some wisdom. We often build systems by connecting existing systems and subsystems. These existing pieces are black boxes, i.e., we don’t know or don’t care to know what is inside them and how they […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Knowing how to repair a system indicates something about its quality. I know how to start the MS Windows task manager. You press the Crtl-Alt-Del keys at the same time. A window pops and displays option. One option is the task manager. The task manager allows me to kill processes that are […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the best thing to do is put your seat in a chair, your hands on the keyboard, and type in all the data manually instead of writing software to do it. I experienced it at least half-a-dozen times in my 28 years in government: We need to track our inventory. Due […]

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