Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

O’Reilly creates a large section of “free” books on technology. Once again, they have raised expectations of other publishers.

I have long liked O’Reilly publishing. At first, the books with the excellent sketches of animals caught my eye. The content was usually as good or better than the covers. I attended a few conferences the O’Reilly held. They spoiled me as to how good conference presentations and presenters could be.

O’Reilly has recently put many books online for reading at no charge. Here is a link to the programming section of free books. At the bottom of the page, there are links to free books on other topics.

This is excellent. I applaud O’Reilly. As a writer, I cringe a bit because the writers are not being paid, at least I don’t know how they could be paid when the publishers gives away the books. Well, they don’t give away the paper books, but allow us to read them without charge.

This is excellent. I applaud O’Reilly. I know several would-be college students who have no money and don’t want to be in debt to the taxpayers for the rest of their lives.

by Dwayne Phillips

This is what I find to be the biggest obstacle to managing knowledge in an organization.

Knowledge management is pretty simple: when someone learns something, record that information. When someone else needs that information, they don’t have to learn it again for themselves. The expense of learning is not repeated.

I have tried to do knowledge management since the early 1980s (no one called it knowledge management back then). The great majority of knowledge management efforts fail. In my experience, the reason is simple:

job insecurity

What I know, what I know how to do, those things make me valuable to this organization. If my knowledge is stored and available for other people to use, what use am I? I am expendable.

Silly thought? Maybe, but people believe this thought and act accordingly. They don’t participate in the knowledge management efforts. They would rather repeat knowledge-seeking exercises that costs tens of hours of time. They are paid to be at work, so they are paid.

Why work yourself out of a job?

Want a knowledge management program? Find a way to ease the job security fears. That isn’t easy, but I find it is worth it.

by Dwayne Phillips

Today is election day. Our long national horrible nightmare concludes. Tomorrow we will awaken after a restless sleep and trudge through four years of wondering if we are still asleep and dreaming tortuous dreams.

The major party that “loses” this election will have the opportunity to correct itself and occupy the White House for 12 or 16 years thereafter.

by Dwayne Phillips

I recount my first knowledge management effort in the early 1980s. Premise: knowledge cost resources, so save it.

I was a newly graduated engineer in 1980. The US government sent me to the end of the earth to maintain electronic equipment. We had a lot of that stuff, and it failed fairly often. Pull it out of the rack, open the top, find the bad component, replace it, put it back in the rack.

This was a time consuming process. You saw a symptom, you read the maintenance manual, you looked at this, you looked at that, AHA! Here is the trouble. Fix and move on.

Being young, naive, and trying to help our Federal government save money…I had a brilliant idea. Let’s keep records of all this. My first knowledge management project was born. We got a few stacks of 5″x7″ cards and a wooden box to hold them. Each card corresponded to a piece of equipment. If the equipment failed, we pulled the card, wrote the symptoms, the key page of the maintenance manual, and the fix. We had a record of maintenance on each piece of equipment and how to fix that equipment.

Save time. Save money. Good stuff.

The fundamental premise was that the knowledge gained in any one equipment repair cost the government money to obtain. Let’s save what we could of that knowledge so that we wouldn’t spend the money again on the same work.

We implemented the system. I used it. Few other engineers used it. Why not? Read the next post on job insecurity.

by Dwayne Phillips

People on the outside don’t know what people on the inside have discussed. People on the inside, however, tend to assume they do.

The situation is common, and defies common sense. A small group of persons meet and discuss an issue. They discuss it for hours, sometimes days, and sometimes weeks. They discuss it so much they know what the next person is going to say before they say it. They discuss it so much they develop inside jokes.

No one outside the group knows has any insight into the discussions. They’ve never heard the inside jokes.

The inner circle finally meets with everyone else and gives a presentation of what is coming next in the organization. The inner circle assumes the outer circle knows everything the inner circle knows. The issue has been discussed to death; surely everyone knows that and knows the discussion.

The inner circle members quip inside jokes and laugh hysterically. The outer circle members look at each other silently and shrug with embarrassment.

All subsequent efforts at addressing the issue flop miserably. The inner circle wonders why the outer circle is so dense and worthless. Maybe next time the outer circle won’t be so clueless.

Some Lessons:

• If you are on an inner circle and have discussed a topic to death, that is your problem. No one made you discuss a topic until you were sick of it. You did it to yourselves.
• No one outside the inner circle knows anything about your discussions.
• If you want the outer circle to know the inner circle discussions, you have to repeat them in full to the outer circle.
• Sorry. There are no mind readers.
• Sorry. The outer circle does not have blind trust in the genius of the inner circle.
• Life can be tough sometimes. Deal with it.

If you work with other persons, and I am pretty sure the vast majority of us do, you need to spend the time and effort to explain yourself. Once again, sorry, but that is life.

by Dwayne Phillips

These are my most recent and most favored proposal-writing tools.

In the past few years I have spent some of my time writing proposals for companies seeking government contracts. There are a lot tools available to proposal writers and all other types of writers.

Here are my most favored and most productive tools:

• blank sheet of paper
• sharp pencil
• table at Popeye’s Fried Chicken
• (large serving of red beans and rice—optional)

Not very high-tech, huh?

Effective? Yes.

Expensive? No.

Hard to sell this to proposal managers? Yes.

Why does this work? Most office environments are productivity and creativity attenuators, and I like Popeye’s red beans and rice. I also like the feel of pencil lead dragging across paper.

by Dwayne Phillips

The heartlessness of the common job advertisement. If you issue such ads, please consider your audience—the unemployed.

Join us!

…reads the job listing title. The listing continues with…

As we create wonderful wonderfulness in a wonderful workplace!

GREAT! When do you want me to arrive? When do I receive my first paycheck? Oh, what? You aren’t offering me a job? Then what are you telling me?

Oh, I get it. As I consider the two dozen job offers in my pocket, I should remember that yours is the top workplace in the market. Oh, sure, great.

But wait. I don’t have two dozen job offers in my pocket. The economy is a shambles. The economic recovery doesn’t exist. My experience is irrelevant. Touting the wonderfulness of your workplace sounds heartless.

by Dwayne Phillips

A look at the Lenovo Yoga Book. This look concentrates on writing with a pen.

Lenovo may have reinvented the portable computer with their new Yoga Book. A previous post tested the Halo Keyboard for typing. This post examines how the Yoga Book captures handwriting.

The flat plastic panel on the Yoga Book serves as a keyboard and a writing surface. The Yoga Book comes with a pen that Lenovo claims is paired with the computer (you can’t exchange pens). This is nice, but also a pain as I think you should be able to use any old pen or pencil to write. Maybe one day.

The Lenovo’s pen has a changeable tip. You can use a no-ink plastic tip to write on the flat panel and have your writing appear on the screen. That works pretty well for drawing. It doesn’t work well for me for writing.

You can insert a fine-point ballpoint pen tip into the plastic pen to write in ink. You can only use Lenovo pens for this. The computer comes with three ink pens, and you have to order replacements from Lenovo.

Writing on paper in the horizontal mode. This is the easiest to use.

I include two photographs showing how I wrote on a piece of paper and the writing appeared on the screen in a simple Lenovo-supplied, note-taking application. (Click on the photos to enlarge and see the correct orientation.)

The Yoga Book provides a writing surface that is 8″ by 4″. The “horizontal” writing mode is easiest to use as the 8″ width works nicely with standard 8.5″x11″ paper.

The vertical mode of writing is more difficult to use as the writing surface is only 4″ wide.

The “vertical” mode is more difficult to use. Turned this way, the writing surface is only 4″ wide. That takes some adjusting to use.

The Yoga Book comes with a paper writing pad from Lenovo. It is the size of the writing surface. It is easy to use, but using your own paper is also easy once you adjust to the writing area.

The Lenovo pen works on proximity, not pressure. This is bad in that you have to use Lenovo’s pen—nothing else works. The good part is that you can put a writing pad or a short stack of papers on the writing surface. I used a stack of twenty pieces of paper, and the device worked fine.

The Lenovo note-taking application saves your hand-written notes as a PDF. That seems to work.

I can use this to write notes on paper and not have to scan them. The orientation is a bit clumsy at first, but you become accustomed to it in the first hour.

No other portable computer on the market does this. Will people jump on it? Some who love to write with a pen will. Most of us? I don’t know.

by Dwayne Phillips

I complete yet another certificate program. This time it is in Data Science and from Microsoft and EdX.

I just finished the Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science. This took about 12 weeks and cost me about $500.

The Good:

I learned…

• cool tricks with MS Excel
• how to write SQL queries (an awful “programming language”)
• how to use the MS Azure Machine Learning tool (it has a lot of bugs still)
• some R programming
• I knew a lot about data science already, but we didn’t call it data science when I learned it
• (some) college professors are still good at obfuscation
• never believe anything you see in the media about such-and-such percentage of such-and-such did such-and-such so we all MUST do this and that

The Bad:

• see my post about MOOCs
• They use many non-English speakers to lecture. It is difficult to understand what they are saying.
• fuzzy screens shots
• lots of busy work that has nothing to do with the subject at hand
• general laziness in the production and presentation
• Microsoft won’t officially recognize completion of the program until January 2017

The Ugly:

Customer service is very bad.

Me: I have a question

Answer: ask someone else

The learning program is a partnership of EdX.org and Microsoft. No one claims responsibility for the product. Ask EdX a question, and they tell you to ask Microsoft. Ask Microsoft, and they tell you to ask EdX. Ask an instructor, and they tell you to ask other students on the discussion board.

Conclusion: I made it through to the end. I have yet another certificate. Maybe it might mean something to some potential employer.

by Dwayne Phillips

A look at the Lenovo Yoga Book. This look concentrates on typing on the Halo Keyboard. Next up, let’s try writing with a pen.

Lenovo may have reinvented the portable computer. We’ve come a long way since the days of the KayPro CPM lug-able computer. Lenovo’s Yoga book is thin. See the first photo showing the thickness compared to an Apple MacBook Air and a paper Moleskin notebook (sorry for the orientation).

The Lenovo Yoga Book between an Apple MacBook Air and a Moleskine notebook

The key to the thin computer is the keyboard. Lenovo calls it their Halo Keyboard. It is a flat black piece of material. When activated, keys illuminate. (see second photo).

The Lenovo Yoga Book showing the illuminated Halo Keyboard

This is a fascinating piece of hardware. There are no ridges on the edges of the “keys” or any physical features to let you know that your fingers are on or off the keys.

Flat. Thin. Great.

But can you type on it? Because if you can’t type on it, you might as well toss it away and use the basic tablet virtual keyboard, which I despise as a writer.

Typing Test: Out of the box, I went online and did one of those typing speed tests. I scored 35 words per minute. I then took a test on the same web site on my usual Apple keyboard and scored 65 words per minute. The Halo Keyboard fails out of the box.

Let’s practice a little. After a couple of days of a few practice sessions (about an hour total), I increased my typing score to 50 words per minute on the Lenovo Yoga Book. I have to pay attention, especially to the pinky finger on the left hand (where is the “a”?).

The Halo Keyboard provides good feedback. The obvious feedback is sound. You can be quite annoying to everyone else in the coffee shop by adjusting the sound to 11 and hearing a beep on every touch of the keyboard. The ingenious feature of the Halo Keyboard is the tactile feedback—the entire flat panel vibrates to let you know you have pressed it with enough force to register a keystroke. That works well for me.

Conclusion part 0.1: The Lenovo Yoga Book is the smallest, thinnest, adequate writing machine I have ever touched. The iPad and other tablets work, but with a separate bluetooth keyboard.

The Yoga Book works, and it is practically thin as opposed to thin and theory and thick in practice.

All the Lenovo details are on their web site.