Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

When people resist me, they are telling me something. Am I listening?

Dale Emery is an acquaintance of mine. I owe the topic of this blog post to him. See here and here.

When people resist me, they are telling me something. That something is valuable information. I can ignore the information or use it. I can be ignorant or informed.

Why would I choose to be ignorant?

Oooops, there is information there as well. Sometimes I do choose to be ignorant. I don’t want to know (1) that other people disagree with me and (2) there is a reason why other people disagree with me. I want to wander down the road believing I am right and there is no other way but mine. Oh foolish me.

Back to the topic at hand. People resist me for a reason. There is something they value that my direction is threatening or lessening. What is that? Why is that important to them? What can I learn from that? How can I combine what I wish with what they value?

Those are a few valuable questions that I can ask. If I can find the answers, well, I would be more knowledgeable and maybe improve my little corner of the world.

by Dwayne Phillips

Looks are often deceiving. Especially how you look when you are concentrating.

Many years ago, a college professor told a calculus class I was in something like, “People think you are wandering the campus absentmindedly when the opposite is true. You are in deep concentration.”

I often find myself standing to walk away from my computer unable to do what I intend. My muscle ache and are stiff.

I have been sitting still too long. I have been concentrating my  mental faculties on something too long for my physical muscles.

Sometimes, not often enough, I set a timer next to the computer. The timer pings me after 25 minutes. I then spend five minutes standing, walking, and stretching, a.k.a., reactivating my body.

When you see someone stand and freeze in pain, they have probably been concentrating. Ask them the subject of their concentration. The answers could be enlightening.

by Dwayne Phillips

The perfect time to write is one of the less expected.

I write a lot, everyday, day after day. I am writing now.

There are times when people like me don’t feel like writing. Those are the perfect times to write. Here is why.

I write a lot because I like to write a lot (makes sense, right?). When I don’t feel like writing, I am in an unusual mood, in an unusual state. I am off kilter (what does kilter mean anyway?).

If I were to write when in an unusual mood, state, or kilter, I am apt to write something completely new and completely different.

When I don’t feel like writing, I am apt to write something new and wonderful.

by Dwayne Phillips

A social robot is the last in a long line of attempts at building a digital assistant. Maybe we should just hire people to be personal assistants?

I stumbled across this little “social robot.” It talks to you when you talk to it. It makes phone calls for you. It takes pictures for you. It keeps your calendar for you. Isn’t it wonderful? Maybe it is wonderful. I’ve never seen one in person or used one.

It is, however, not a new idea. It is yet another attempt at the digital assistant. That magic thing that helps you do all the things that you do or want to do.

At work, the digital assistant will do something when I say:

• Arrange a meeting of all the people interested in project ABC.
• Collate all my notes from last week into a report.
• Categorize that pile of receipts on my desk.
• Find John Jones and get him in my office right now.

At home, the digital assistant will do something when I say:

• Find out what three-year-old girls want for their birthday and order one for my granddaughter.
• See what’s in the fridge and what dish can I make of it.
• Tell everyone on the soccer team that practice is cancelled today.
• See if I have enough clean clothes for the week.

Is the new social robot in the above link the answer? I doubt it. Perhaps it is a step closer.

And here is a new idea:

Instead of digital assistants, how about we hire all the unemployed as personal assistants?

by Dwayne Phillips

Competence evaporates when we are upset. There are some things we can do to work our way back to competence, but they are not easy.

I recently watched a group of otherwise competent people behave in a most incompetent manner. They had an excellent excuse as they were under great emotional stress.

Hmm, is this a coincidence? Emotional stress and evaporating competence? No, it isn’t a coincidence. I have seen it happen often on projects and especially with project managers.

The project is late, over budget, under staffed, etc. People are yelling. Smart people act like they were stupid. I’ve seen it too many times.

Calm down.

That is simple advice, but it just doesn’t seem to apply to people who are hurting, angry, and any other number of stressful situations.

Let’s try something more complicated.

1. Recognize that you are upset.
2. Find a checklist to follow.
3. Follow the checklist.

Of course this means that you have created a checklist when you were not upset. That is usually not the case, but if you are having a calm day, make a checklist. Still, the biggest problem is step 1.

Try this one.

1. Have a good friend.
2. Ask your friend if you are upset.
3. If the answer is yes, ask them to be your checklist.

Again, step 1. is the most difficult, but it is a start.

by Dwayne Phillips

I relearn that with hands on the keys, I can shut my eyes and still write.

Several years ago, I was trying to write in the evening after a long day at work of reading and reading and reading and a little writing. My eyes hurt. I had to shut them.

So I did. (I shut my eyes)

Then I kept writing. (with my eyes shut)

Funny it works, but I can write with my eyes shut. Yes, I make more typo errors than with my eyes open, but it is a computer editor and fixing typos is pretty easy.

I carried this trick to a seminar I attended. I learned that I could type notes while looking up at the different people who were talking. I couldn’t do that when I was trying to take notes with pencil and paper.

Just a few weeks ago, I re-tried this old trick. It still works. I am typing this blog post while looking at a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial on television. I learned something new:

I type a little faster when my eyes are shut or when I am looking away from the computer screen. I can’t explain that, but that is my experience.

by Dwayne Phillips

After several recent experiences, I know a little about cloud computing.

I have been experimenting in several ways recently with cloud computing. The basic sales pitch from a cloud computing provider is:

We’ll buy and maintain the computers.

You rent them from us.

This takes us forward to the past to a day when people couldn’t afford to buy their own computer. Let’s go way back to time-sharing of computers (anyone remember that?). Even in the late 1970s, I would go to an I/O room (not Google I/O but simply the “input-output” room) and send my software to a computer that was somewhere else. I would have a couple seconds of that computer’s time after my “job” waited in line for a day or so. I was somewhat happy in that I didn’t have to try to buy my own computer. I shared a computer with a few thousand of my closest friends.

So here we are now. People still find computing problems for which they can not afford to buy a computer that is powerful enough. The answer: rent a computer from a cloud computing provider.

The difference today is that several companies, e.g., Amazon and Google, but they are not the only ones, have figured out how to be more efficient than anyone else was in the past. They have software that configures virtual computers, runs jobs, tracks time, sends bills to users, etc. with little or no (expensive) human intervention.

It appears to me that the vast majority of human employees in the cloud industry are in sales, but that is another blog post for another day.

And still, the cloud computer user needs a computer, albeit a relatively inexpensive computer—$200 may suffice. But, and this is the big but, the cloud computer user needs a relatively expensive link to the Internet. Yes, you can sit in your car in the parking lot near the Starbucks, but that wears thin quickly as a lot of those formerly nice free Internet access providers have smart software that kicks you off after an hour with little or no (expensive) human intervention.

Once we move past all these factors…yes, it is cheaper to rent a thousand servers for an hour or a week than it is to buy them. Jump in, try something, fail, jump out. If you have what may be the next great idea, this is a great time to be alive.

by Dwayne Phillips

I take a Udacity.com online course and find good, bad, and ugly.

I recently took an online course from udacity.com. As the post title suggests, I found…

The Good: I was excited about the nanodegree program that udacity—one of the big players in MOOC—was about to offer. Companies were creating courses to teach what they wanted new hires to know the day the walked on the job.

Great! Something practical and practice-able. Take someone who works at Adobe (one provider) and let them tell you, “This is what I wish I knew when I was hired.”

The Bad: I wanted to work through the Data Analyst nanodegree. I often see job openings for data analyst, data scientist, data systems engineer, etc. and I wanted to apply for those.

The bad was that the first course in the series is Intro to Computer Science. This isn’t a bad course in itself, but it fits badly into the idea espoused for the nanodegree. This isn’t a course created and led by someone in industry. It is a college course. As a freshman college course, it is fine, but not for real jobs.

The course has video segments followed by quizzes. There are about a dozen items in a lesson, and seven lessons in the course. Thankfully, the longest video segment is five minutes. I grew weary of the hand writing on the white board or smartboard or whatever they use. I could read the writing, but please, just show powerpoint fonts. And the drawings—please, show something drawn with software so the circles are round, the rectangles have 90-degree corners, and the straight lines are straight.

The lessons build on one another as you build a web crawler.

The course is an introduction to Python programming with some web concepts and general ideas tossed in.

It seems that college computer science professors haven’t changed much in 35 years. They still love little questions where they can say, “Aha, tricked you. You always have to allow for the case where there may be a space after the comma when preceded by two spaces and a period in collusion with a semi-colon…” Who cares?

The word that kept coming to mind regarding the course was tedious. Then again, I’m old and don’t have time for games and minding commas and periods and spaces and all that.

The Ugly: I completed the course in ten days. Udacity expects the typical student to be working a full-time job and spending about an hour a day on the course. They estimate the time to complete the course at seven weeks. I was unemployed and worked hard at finishing quickly.

My motivation for working so hard and fast was that I had two weeks free. I wanted to finish before my two weeks were done so I wouldn’t have to pay the $150/month fee for this class.

I submitted my Final Project and was told that I had to pay a one-month fee to get a certificate for the course. Earlier in the course I had asked a Udacity coach about receiving credit for the course. I was told that all I had to do was complete the Final Project. So much for that. I never received credit for the ten days of hard work.

The Summary: Udacity does a good job of presenting material. They have good videos and a nice way to submit computer programs in their browser to test the code.  You could always argue that Python is a bad language for teaching, but you have to pick something and, even though I have yet to see a job advertised for a Python programmer, well, you know.

I am still upset about not receiving a certificate for my work. I guess I should have read the 11-page Terms of Agreement to find the sentence tucked at the end of a paragraph near the end of page 8. Then again, “You always have to allow for the case where there may be a space after the comma when preceded by two spaces and a period in collusion with a semi-colon…”

by Dwayne Phillips

If a workplace is full of fear, nothing else matters. Drive out the fear.

I recently attended a presentation where the topic was trust. The presentation reminded of something, i.e., it helped me re-learn what I knew:

If a workplace is full of fear, nothing else matters.

Years ago I worked in a place full of fear. People were afraid to laugh at a joke. People were afraid to tell a joke. People were afraid to answer any question with anything other than “yes” or “no.”

I hated going to work. Most people in the place hated going to work.

This hit me hardest one day when half-a-dozen of us who had known one another for ten years were in a room with the door closed. We talked for half an hour. We laughed a lot. At the end of the time, one person stood to leave for another scheduled meeting. Before he opened the door, he turned to the rest of us and said something like, “I haven’t felt this relaxed in a long time.”

For a few moments, he had been in a safe place—a room without fear.

After many months, I left that job for another. After many more months, other people left as well. Fear disappeared. There were a few people who roamed the halls wreaking havoc. They frightened the rest of us. The rest of us allowed them to frighten us.

• Drive out those who bring fear.
• Encourage those who are full of fear to toss it aside.

Easy remedies that are not so easy to implement.

by Dwayne Phillips

Twitter and the World Cup show that the world changed. Most people, didn’t even notice.

The world changed. When I show people, they shrug. “Of course. What’s the big deal?” is the usual response.

This web page has a story about how 300 million people tweeted about the FIFA World Cup. So what? Note:

• Most of the world is watching the same event at the same time
• Most of the world is corresponding to each other in real-time
• These two activities occur via a handheld, battery-powered device

The first item has been available for a couple of decades. The second item has been available for maybe a couple of years. The third item is what I consider the magic. I walk about in the woods and follow the world each second. I hear the “official” version of history. I also hear the version from the guy standing on a street corner in Cairo or in the woods of Washington. And I tell these two guys what I think.

The world has changed. Did you notice it changing?