Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I have a new Scottevest jacket. It has 20 pockets, and I love it.

This is a first for this blog – a post about fashion. Well, I think it is about fashion. It is also about utility.

I now own a ScottEVest Standard Jacket. I looked at these on the Internet for months and finally took the plunge and bought one.

Notes:

1. It is not very warm. This means I can wear it in the fall and the spring. If I wear something warm under it, I can wear it in the winter.
2. I put my iPad inside the left side and my notebooks in the right side and my glasses in the glasses pocket and my pens in the pen holders and phone in the phone pocket and … you get the idea.
3. All that stuff in the pockets feels odd when I sit, but I grow accustomed to it.
4. My hands are free as everything I have is in pockets.
5. I can bring my iPad with me, and my grandson doesn’t see it because it is hidden in my jacket pocket.
6. At the airport, I take off my jacket and all my stuff is off my body.

Fashionable? I don’t care. I’m an engineer.

by Dwayne Phillips

Micro-Management has been given a bad name. What is bad is nit-picking management. Used properly, micro-management is a good practice.

Micro-management is a good management practice. There, now fight the urge to stop reading while I explain.

Here is what micro-management is about: A senior manager bores down through several levels of bureaucracy to a key element of a project. The senior manager pays close attention to the key element to help the project succeed.

Some may protest now. That is not micro-management. Yes, it is. It was invented to do that to help projects succeed.

What most of us know and have experienced is nit-picking management.

Nits are the eggs of lice. Nits are really small. The literal practice of picking nits is when someone, I guess they are using a magnifying glass and a tiny pair of tweezers, picks the eggs of lice out of your scalp. That takes a lot of time, prevents you from doing anything useful, and is generally painful for you and frustrating for the nit picker.

Now that we have covered actual nit picking, we can all imagine what nit-picking management is. We don’t want it.

Micro-management, however, can be quite helpful when practiced correctly.

by Dwayne Phillips

Some people in my life have been very discouraging. Some people in my life have been very encouraging. It is not difficult for me to choose which type of person I want to be.

I can remember it like it happened yesterday. I was a graduate student working on my PhD. My major professor looked at me as I was leaving campus and going back to work. I was going to work on my research in the evening and on weekends.

He told me, “You won’t finish. People who leave campus never finish.”

Not very encouraging.

Several years later I was back on campus for a few days to talk to my committee. They wanted me to do a lot more work before they approved my dissertation. I was dejected. I was sitting in the office of another professor.

He told me, “You will do this and then that. You will finish those things in a month and be back for final approval and then graduate. You can do that.”

Very encouraging.

I sat across from a PhD student a few weeks ago. She was struggling with writing her dissertation proposal. Several people had told her that she didn’t write well enough in English to complete her assignments in pursuit of her PhD. I wanted to kill those discouraging people.

I pointed to a page she had written. I showed her how well that one page was written.

I told her, “You wrote this page. It is excellent. You can write all these other pages just as well. You will finish this.”

by Dwayne Phillips

There are times when a customer calls for a technical solution to one of their problems. They may, however, have a management problem instead.

I work for a technology company. When our customers call, we deliver technical solutions to their problems.

Sometimes, however, the customer comes with a fuzzy problem. We investigate to learn that they don’t have a technical problem – they have a management problem. This takes the form of:

One manager dislikes another manager and manipulates the system to make the other manager look bad.

Requests for technical services sit in someone’s in box for weeks.

Programmers are bored with servicing customers, so they ignore requests the first couple of times they arrive.

Someone is ill for a long period of time, so nothing is done.

Now we, a provider of technical solutions, have to walk in and tell the customer that they don’t need us. They “just” have to straighten out their own silly problems. There is always the chance that they will hire us for management help, but that is outside our specialty and is often too politically damaging for them.

by Dwayne Phillips

Same old story – it is not what you know, but who you know that counts.

People can’t measure performance. Let me restate that one – people don’t want to measure performance. That is too much work.

Instead, people go to their feelings. They ask, “When I consider Dwayne’s performance, do I like him?” They do not ask, “What is the quality of product given me by Dwayne?”

This all goes back to,

It is not what you know, but who you know that counts.

I hate that. I truly hate that. The trouble is, that seems to be reality.

I noticed this many times in my 25+ years working in government. We had “promotion panels” or what I called “demotion panels.” Groups of people, a.k.a, a committee, would meet to discuss employees and their performance. Oooops, I wrote performance. Let’s change that to “meet to discuss employees” period.

The final answer was to the question, “Does someone in the room know and like the person under consideration?”

Hence, promotions were not determined by performance. They were determined by sponsorship. Who in the room was sponsoring the person for promotion? How well did they speak? What position of authority did they occupy?

by Dwayne Phillips

Computers still have three basic parts: (1) processor, (2) memory, and (3) input/output (I/O). The latest addition to the I/O is the camera.

This post is a little late – several years late, but better late…and so on.

In the early 1970s, I was introduced to the computer. There were and still are three basic parts to a computer:

1. the processor
2. the memory
3. the input/output or I/O

There have been many advances since that time long ago. The area with additions not just advances is the I/O. New media types (remember the Zip drive cartridge and the 8″ floppy disk?) come and go.

Something that has come is the camera. If someone once said, “I want a new computer because it has a better camera,” we would have carted them away. A better camera? Computers don’t have cameras, do they?

Yes, computers have cameras.

Just last night I was sitting at a table at an event. The speaker gave everyone a piece of paper as a handout. (Yes, he is old.) We didn’t cover all the material on the piece of paper. He told us to hang onto the paper until next week.

Do what? Hang on to a piece of paper for a week?

I took a photo of the piece of paper with my pocket computer, a.k.a., my iPhone. Next week, or whenever, when we talk about the piece of paper, I will look at the image on my pocket computer.

That is all because one of the better I/O devices for that computer is the camera.

by Dwayne Phillips

One reason for blogging is to clear ideas from the mind. Put them in the blog and they no longer rattle around up there. That makes room for the next ideas.

Why blog? There are many reasons. Here is one:

To clear the mind.

This is one thing that writing, any type of writing, does for me.

Ideas come to me. They come from many sources in many places at many times. This is something that I learned from writer and consultant Jerry Weinberg. He called it “noticing,” and that seems to be a good term. I notice things, lots of things. I have to disengage my “noticer” now and then to give myself time to clear my head.

Most of the time I record my noticed items on 3×5 cards. I carry these in my shirt pocket. Yes, I look like a nerd, but appearances have long ago disappeared as something that garners my attention.

Sometimes I blog about these notices.  Blogging clears my mind, and an empty mind is ripe for new notices. Now that this one is out of mind, on to something else.

by Dwayne Phillips

I recently went on a cruise with Royal Caribbean. The broadband service was relatively slow, but quite usable at 40 cents a minute.

In late February 2012, I went on a cruise with my wife and 16 in laws. We took a seven-day western Caribbean cruise with Royal Caribbean cruise lines. I enjoyed the cruise and the fine service provided by Royal Caribbean.

A "Writing Desk" on Deck 11 (click to enlarge)

I could review the cruise and the line and all that, but their are such reviews everywhere. Instead, I’ll write about the broadband service on the cruise ship.

• I was on the ship Voyager of the Seas.
• I pre-paid $100 dollars for the week (40 cents a minute). That gave me about 35 minutes a day online.
• The broadband was usable, but relatively slow with download speeds of 1 megabit per second.
• The Internet library was unmanned.
• I couldn’t print in the Internet library as promised. The guest relations desk, however, went out of their way to help me with printing, scanning, and faxing.
• I couldn’t find any good writing desks on the ship. The chair height and table height weren’t good for writing.
• The views, however, were excellent (see photo).
• I performed almost all the Internet-based tasks I wanted during the week.
• There are plenty of nice places on the ship to sit, browse the Internet, and write. See the photo above for one such writing places on deck 11. No, that was not in my cabin.

Recommendation:

Bring your laptop or tablet with you on Royal Caribbean. Use one of their pre-paid plans to reduce the per-minute cost of using the Internet.

by Dwayne Phillips

The iPad and its apps are the latest tech gadget that can help in the classroom (any kind of classroom in almost any setting). One issue is that once a student loves the iPad, they ignore the teacher – the person. Persons have feelings and sometimes persons have hurt feelings. Let’s employ the gadgets that work and appreciate the persons who make them work.

My grandson, now three years old, continues to teach me. I have an iPad (the first model). There are neat applications made to help little kids learn their numbers and letters and such. There are applications that help little kids learn all sorts of things. I have been told many times by many people,

but if they use an iPad for that, they won’t pay attention

These people don’t add the two words that I added in the title of the post. The eager-to-learn little kids, and what little kids are not eager to learn, will pay attention. They will pay attention to the lessons on the iPad. They will pay attention to the iPad.

This attention to and adulation for the iPad is crushing for the in-person, in-the-classroom teacher. I understand what it is like to be a distant second best.

Let’s consider someone else here. Let’s consider the person who created the iPad. Let’s consider the person who created the iPad app that enthralls the eager-to-learn little kid. How do you think that person feels to see the little kid delighted and enlightened? I know how I feel when I make something that enthralls and enlightens my grandson,

Greatest feeling in the history of the world!

Maybe some of this anti-tech gizmo in the classroom feeling is about who is receiving the credit. I understand that. As I wrote earlier, I understand what it is like to be a distant second place. I know rejection.

What I find to be a shame is that much of what happens in classrooms is not about how much learning is happening, but about who receives the credit. That, however, is part of the human condition. People want to achieve the mission of the group. People also want to be recognized. Let’s try for both.

by Dwayne Phillips

Long scorned by kids, especially teenagers, the nerd dad is now the hero.

This story brought an idea back to mind. I had this idea first a couple of years ago, but didn’t blog about it. The time has come.

The story linked above from  The Telegraph bemoans that many parents don’t understand the electronic devices their kids use. This situation occurred first a few years ago with devices and teenagers. They had iPods and iPhones and mp3 players and cameras and parents couldn’t understand them.

Most parents couldn’t understand all these digital devices. Engineers, however, could understand them. Yes, the nerd dads (and a few moms, but mostly dads), those guys who didn’t coach basketball or soccer or anything else because they were, well, nerds, those guys understood digital stuff.

“Sure,” one would say, “that’s basically an Unix system. We just get into the terminal and see if it is Bourne or Bash or maybe even C-shell and then we ftp files across and then you…”

Teenagers were impressed. Their dad could hack their iPod and move songs to computers that no one else could. Free songs, free movement, great fun. Those formerly “cool” dads who wore shorts to soccer games to show off their muscles were all thumbs and didn’t understand how to circumvent the rules.

Well, time moves on and so does technology. Now, it isn’t just the teens who have bewildering technology. Pre-schoolers have the tech. Their gamer, computer science, nerd dads (and some moms) understand the kernal of the OS and how to move apps and songs and videos and all that.

“Don’t worry, son,” proclaims the nerd engineer parent, “This is using the old version of cp and that has a hole in it here so that we can do it all in one command. Just a minute…”