Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I consider that evil factor that kills the vast majority of great ideas: scale.

I recently read an article about how wonderful Google Fiber is in Kansas City. The data rates are high and service people actually arrive at a set time – not during a 16-hour window. I wish the Google service was available in my neighborhood. Google may take over the entire world of Internet service providers.

There is, however, one significant factor that stands in Google’s path:

scale

Scale asks Google the questions,

You can do great in one city, but how about 10 or 100 or 1,000 cities? How about two cities?

Scale kills the vast majority of great ideas. Consider:

• You can teach ten kids to read the newspaper in six weeks, can a thousand other teachers do the same?
• You can provide free online backup storage to a thousand customers, can you do the same for a million customers?
• You can ship telephones to 100,000 customers, can you do the same for one million or 10 million customers?
• You can administer one homeless shelter and provide a dignified, safe place for 20 people to sleep every night, can you do the same for 20 thousand people in a thousand locations?

The question of scale is one of those adult questions that face us as we try to build systems that work. Great ideas may work in some locations at some times, but will they work in most locations at most times?

The answers to the scale questions are usually “no.”

So what do we do now? One possibility is to work around the problems of scale. Provide one or two homeless shelters, but don’t promise anyone the ability to scale up a thousand times. Teach six kids to read, but don’t promise your methods will work for thousands of other teachers. Provide a technical service to a small clientele and be happy with the money you earn doing it, and stop there.

by Dwayne Phillips

A tribute to the single-board computer.

The engineer looks at the growing block diagram of a yet-to-be-built system and says, “Put a computer here.”

What eventually goes there is a single-board computer. We don’t design computers from scratch as the would be wasteful. Instead, we buy an already built computer, write software, and put it in that block on the diagram.

So what? No one cares any more. Still, back in the 1980s, the idea of a drop-in computer was revolutionary.

And the single-board computer is still important and is still evolving. See this and that from Wikipedia.

And if that isn’t enough, look at the new developments:

• Raspberry Pi
• Intel New Unit of Computing
• Cubieboard
• PC-On-A-Stick

The last one in the list floors me. What could be better?

The future of the single-board computer looks bright. The next “board” may be the size of my granddaughter’s fingernail.

by Dwayne Phillips

I have observed people change their mind from one extreme to another. Is there a name for this behavior?

I have observed something about people and I am searching for a name for this behavior. I have observed this across decades, organizations, and areas of endeavor. Here is how it goes:

Consultant: Let’s try something new – it is called Practice A.

Affected Persons: No, no, no! Practice A is too much of a bother.

Consultant: Let’s try Practice A. I think you will see that it isn’t too much of a bother.

time passes

Affected Persons: While doing Practice A, I think we should also do sub-practice a, sub-practice b, sub-practice c…and sub-practice z as well.

I hope the above summarizes the behavior. Affected persons don’t want to try a new practice. Once, however, they are into the new practice, they want to do another dozen things inside it. They have flip flopped from one extreme to another concerning a practice.

I don’t understand this behavior, but there are many human behaviors that I don’t understand.

Regardless, I would like to know what you call this behavior. Surely someone has a name for it – something better than “flip flopping to extremes.”

by Dwayne Phillips

Everyday I select a few teachers. Note, no one else selects them for me. It is all my selection. As with most aspects of life, there are good and bad points here.

We all have teachers – people from whom we learn things. Tiny, rural Loranger High School graduated me a few months before our nation celebrated its 200th birthday. I went to college (a few times), but the majority of time since departing high school I have continued to have hundreds of dozens of teachers. The vast majority of these teachers have never stood at the front of anything that resembled a classroom.

Let’s define some terms in a sort of backwards way:

Teacher: if anyone learns anything from you, you are a teacher.

Student: if anyone influences you in any way, you are a student.

Hence, if I spend more than a few minutes listening to a person or reading something written by that person, I have selected that person as my teacher. Hmm, now we are starting to wander in the valley of the shadow of death. “Yeah,” you might mumble low and slow, “now and then I watch whats-his-name on TV or listen to whats-his-name on the radio, but they aren’t my teachers, right?”

See the above definitions. Ouch.

Everyday, we select teachers. We select people who influence us. We imitate people who we have selected from an almost limited supply of choices. So, I end with a little question for myself:

Which teachers will I select today?

by Dwayne Phillips

I try to write a few six-word stories and learn a few things.

I have heard about six-word stories and stories written with only a few words. Okay, enough thinking and waiting; here are a few attempts.

• The window broke; I jumped out.
• I woke, he died, me too.
• The grandchildren visited. My pains disappeared.
• I ate fruits and vegetables undying.
• Tight shoes caused frequent migraine headaches.

Thoughts:

I had to search for words that carried more meaning. That was a good exercise.

I wrote five stories in two minutes. That is some sort of prolific record for me.

This wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be.

I was searching for a beginning, middle, and end.

This was a learning exercise, and that is a good thing.

by Dwayne Phillips

Embarrassed but harangued, I reveal how I do some things on the computer so darn fast.

I am not enjoying writing this post. It is about how I manage to do things quickly on the computer. As odd as it sounds (to me at least), people accuse me of working too quickly on the computer. Silly me, I thought accomplishing work quickly was a good thing. It seems that many people disagree with me.

So here it is: my tip for working quickly on the computer:

Keep both hands on the keyboard

Not impressed? Me neither, so let’s delve deeper into this subject. When I have repetitive tasks on the computer that I cannot program, i.e., they have 10% thinking mixed in at inconvenient times, I learn a series of keyboard strokes.

For example,

• command-L
• command-V
• Return
• command-C
• arrow
• arrow
• Return
• control-Tab
• N command-V
• Return

and so on. I memorize the string of keystrokes and, as mindlessly as I can, punch them one after another as quickly as my 50+ year-old hands allow.

When I have to perform a computer task, I learn the sequence of keystrokes, keep my hands off the mouse (mouse movements take far too much time), and go go go. I finish my task and …

People complain that I finish too fast.

They are embarrassed because I finished in a third of the time they required. Hence, I must have done a very poor job of it and at heart I am a goof off.

Oh well, sometimes, many times, it is not a good idea to work quickly.

by Dwayne Phillips

I look at a $3 program that enables making video explanations using the iPad.

Two days in a row, I bump into a presentation program. This time it is called Explain Everything. It costs $2.99 and runs on the iPad.

In the program, you create a few “slides” which become the background image for your explanation. Press the little red RECORD button and start talking. While talking, you can draw lines and such on the screen. These annotations will appear in your video explanation. Move from slide to slide while talking and annotating. This all goes to your final video explanation.

You can practically do all this using Microsoft PowerPoint 2010. PowerPoint 2010 allows you to narrate each slide you have one at a time. Then PowerPoint 2010 will create a video for you from your narrated slides. A major difference is that PowerPoint costs much more than $2.99.

The video output of Explain Everything is an mp4 file. You can put that file into DropBox or email.

If you have an iPad, the $2.99 is well worth trying Explain Everything.

by Dwayne Phillips

Following the suggestion of several friends, I take a look at Prezi – a new(er) presentation-making application.

Several friends hit me recently with, “prezi prezi prezi.” First, I didn’t understand what they were saying. Second, I didn’t know how to spell what they were saying. I can’t mimick their pronunciation in my blog, so forget that. It took a while of Google searching to learn how to spell it.

Go to prezi.com for the application. For free for 30 days, you can try it. Since I am associated with George Mason University, I can use a version of the program free forever (or something like that).

Prezi is an alternative to PowerPoint, Keynote, and the like. Some claim that it is a vastly superior alternative. You build a presentation like in PowerPoint, but you don’t build a linear set of slides. Instead, you build everything on one big piece of paper. Your presentation, i.e., what happens when you hit the “next” button, jumps around the big sheet of paper and zooms in and out.

The zooming in and out is the heart of the presentation. It can be dizzying if you zoom in and out too much, but if you do it well you will have a nice presentation. Your prezi will get a lot of attention – at least until the product is successful and then people will be accustomed to it and not think anything of it.

That is the situation prezi finds itself. Success will kill their product as it won’t be novel. Plus, if it really succeeds, Microsoft will put an army of programmers on the job and allow PowerPoint users to do the same thing.

At least for now, prezi offers a different way to create a presentation that will garner more attention than the usual PowerPoint. Here is an example Prezi on youtube.

by Dwayne Phillips

Children use excuses. Adults speak candidly.

Children love to use convenient excuses. Adults state what is actually happening. Some people call that being “blunt” or “candid.” I tend to like “candid.”

Convenient excuses allow us to “be nice” and talk around situations instead of facing them. Candor, however, exposes the real issue and allows us to work through the issue.

An odd thing about this is that some of us approach a situation with an attitude of, “I don’t want to hurt so-and-so’s feelings, so I’ll just tell them fill-in-the-blank-with-a-convenient-excuse.” That is so adult of us to ease the pain of another. Isn’t it? Well, it is probably arrogant because we “adults” know that those other people can’t deal with adult things – not like we “adults.” So we use childish excuses.

Funny, in trying to be adults we act childish.

by Dwayne Phillips

Hurricane Sandy missed the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. Still, we lost power for 20 hours. Here are a few things to have to help get by.

The hurricane hit the New York area much harder than the Washington D.C. area. Still, we lost power in my house for about 20 hours.

Here are a few things that help in such cases.

A Portable Power Source

Portable Power Source – I have this Black and Decker device. I have no illusions that Black and Decker actually make any of this other than the name brand sticker. Charge this thing before the storm. I used it after the power went out to power the cable modem and WiFi. That put me in touch with local authorities about closings and such.

Gas Grill – We have a gas grill that uses propane bottles. When my wife woke to a dark house, I had boiling water so she could have a cup of hot tea. That may sound a bit silly, but it does make a big difference to have a hot drink on a cold day.

A Mr. Heater Heater

Gas Heater – We have one of these portable Mr. Heater things. Again, you have to have a propane bottle, but keep a couple around. It heats a room just fine.

Cans of Food – self explanatory, I guess. Have a lot of this stuff.

These things cost money. They are part of the cost of living for my family. If you can afford these, buy them. If you know people who cannot afford these, buy these for those people.