Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Most people in America still see college as fun first and education second. At least education is in the top two.

Here is an article about the slow pace of adoption of online learning in colleges. The technology is here and has been here for years. Still, most colleges don’t go online.

And, most college students in America don’t go online.

Instead, they attend the brick and mortar schools. That is what they want. They could stay at home in their bedrooms and learn online.

And, most college students in America could earn a college degree in three years.

They instead take four, five, or six years to do so. Logical and practical thinkers like myself have to ask,

Why?

Kids want to have fun. Wow! That is a radical thought (not).

Face it folks, college is fun. A few thousand kids your own age, lots of recreational facilities, weekends, no working hours. Why would you want to shorten this or learn at home?

There are exceptions. There are kids who need a degree to find a job and they don’t have the luxury of delaying that job one day. They simply need the money. They scramble, take every online course they can, educate themselves 12 months a year instead of eight or nine, and finish sooner.

There are kids who work full-time jobs and graduate in four years. How is it that someone can work 40 hours and still take the same course load with the same grades as someone who works zero hours? Oh well, I guess motivation and determination and discipline and those dirty words have a role.

The majority of American kids are rich (sorry for that one as I know it disagrees with government figures that say that there are only few rich people). These rich kids can afford to stretch their college years by  a 33% or 66% (those are the numbers for when a three-year college experience becomes four and five years). To me, that is the definition of rich.

Rich kids like the fun of college. College is fun with some education. At least education is in the mix.

by Dwayne Phillips

There is a solution to IEDs. We have known it for centuries, but instead we look to technology.

I saw this post recently about a research project that will have lasers find IEDs. Neat technology. I like technology; I guess that is why I have three engineering degrees and view the web everyday looking for new technologies.

That written, let’s move to the real solution for IEDs. IED planters don’t like Americans. That is why they bury IEDs under roads and detonate the IEDs when Americans arrive.

IEDs lose their effectiveness when the people who live next to those roads tell Americans, “Hey, stop. There is an IED buried here. And I will take you to the house of the guys who planted it.”

This doesn’t happen because the people who live next to the road like the IED planters more than the Americans. Let’s see, the Americans are in a country where the local folks don’t like Americans. Perhaps the Americans are in the wrong country.

Of course this is a simplistic solution, probably the most simple solution anyone could suggest. I believe, however, that it works. We don’t hear much about this solution in the media because it isn’t interesting, not nearly as interesting as a billion dollar program to invent IED-sniffing lasers and IED-spotting satellites and other technologies.

Now and then, we will hear about some person who lives next to the road telling the Americans the locations of the IEDs and the IED planters. Those people like the Americans more than the IED planters. Those people solve the IED problem.

by Dwayne Phillips

I’ve sold a few short stories on Smashwords. I’m thrilled.

Back in February 2011, I declared that I was posting my short stories on Smashwords. To date, I have sold about $65 worth of stories. I am pleasantly surprised.

The key to selling as many stories as I have is the Smashwords Premium publishing program. To go into that, you have to format your entries in a specific manner and get an ISBN. Neither of these steps is difficult. There are templates that I copied to submit the proper MS Word format. Obtaining an ISBN is also easy through the Smashwords site.

Being a premium publisher means that the stories are available through Apple, Barnes and Noble, and others. About 90% of my sales have come through these non-Smashwords channels.

Note – I did not pay Smashwords a penny up front. Smashwords takes a little money from each of my 99-cent sales. Neither of us are becoming rich.

Also note – I wrote these short stories in 2008 as an exercise to see if I could write a short story every week for the year. I did. Hence, this $65 comes from something I did with no intention of making a penny.

I have a  few goals:

(1) Have a Hollywood producer discover one of my stories, make it into a movie, and I get a million dollars in royalties from the blockbuster.

(2) Sell a hundred thousand short stories every year ($60,000 or so in royalties) for the rest of my life.

(3) Have fun writing short story fiction.

I have already achieved goal number (3). The other two are a bit lofty, but a guy can dream.

For now,

I have started again writing short stories. I’m not on a one-per-week schedule. Some weeks I write three or four stories and other I am too busy with other things to write any.

by Dwayne Phillips

We need a touchscreen television that interacts just like an iPad. At least we need one in my house.

I have the original iPad with WiFi only. I like it and have learned a lot by having it. My main use for it is:

Showing kids’ videos to my grandson (2 1/2 years old).

Okay, that might be a little embarrassing for someone with a PhD in EE, but that is life. One problem with this usage is that I have to keep it to a minimum. My daughter-in-law tells me that my grandson thinks their television should interact just like the iPad. He stands next to the TV and swipes it with his pointer finger. He becomes agitated when the TV doesn’t act like an iPad. He has even started requesting that they get an iPad just like granddad has.

I hear rumours that Apple is going to release a TV of some sort next year. Perhaps…

by Dwayne Phillips

Technical projects have plenty of opportunities to misunderstand what someone else is doing. Help yourself. If something is different, give it a different name.

This is a post about a part of configuration management. But don’t stop reading yet. This makes sense and is not painful.

Things change in technical projects. Software is especially apt to change. You take a module, adapt it to a different situation, and use it. You have new functions without much new work.

Now comes the confusion.

The software module is different and it does something different. Then someone wants to use the old version of the software before it was different. How do they know if they are using the old version or the new, different version?

Here is a simple rule:

If it is different, give it a different name.

That isn’t too complicated, is it? This is the identification part of configuration management (see below for the four parts of CM). You have something that your are going to use, so identify it, i.e., give it a name.

The easiest way to give a different item a different name is with version numbers. This works with software, hardware, documents, and just about anything. “Document, Revision A” differs from “Document, Original Version.” Software module version 2.0 differs from Software module version 1.0 and 1.1 and 1.2 and so on.

The version numbering requires that you have a version number system that everyone understands and uses consistently. Often, that is not the case.

The next easiest way to give a different item a different name is to give a different item a different name. For example, “fft.c” becomes “fasterfft.c” and “motherboard” become “Fall2011Motherboard.” See – this isn’t difficult, and it removes a lot of confusion.

If you follow this advice, your projects won’t be free of misunderstandings. You have people working on your projects, so you will still have misunderstandings. You will, however, have fewer misunderstandings and you should sleep a little better at night.

NOTE: The four parts of Configuration Management are:

1. Identification – name items
2. Control – change identified items in an agreed-upon manner
3. Audit – look at your items to see what you really have as opposed to what you have on paper
4. Status Accounting – how are things going?

by Dwayne Phillips

I use PenDriveLinux to install Linux Mint on a 1GigaByte USB stick.

I had a little spare time one weekend, so… I had seen several people mention Linux Mint. (I can’t seem to remember if it is Linux Mint or Mint Linux or even Lint Minux, but that is another matter.) So, I tried to install it on a USB stick. I had a 1GigaByte USB lying around that someone had given me. That is usually not enough space to run a Linux version, but I tried it anyways.

It worked.

The key was going to PenDriveLinux. They have a universal USB installer that I downloaded. Then I downloaded the Linux Mint 11 LXDE from Mint’s site. Then I ran the Unversal USB Installer.

It worked.

Below is a screen shot of the Mint Linux running on a Dell Latitude E6500 portable computer (2 years old). Wow. This was really easy. Aside from the half hour download of the Linux distribution, the process required ten minutes. And I am not a system administrator for either Windows or Linux.

Bonus points – the distribution and installation can use my 750GigaByte external hard drive (Seagate FreeAgent Go).

And, by the way, I wrote this blog post while in Linux Mint.

Screen shot of the Linux Mint screen

by Dwayne Phillips

How to cross the barrier of the blank sheet of paper.

I love a blank sheet of paper. I know a lot of people who don’t. I was in a meeting once where people were given blank sheets of paper and literally revolted. They wanted some type of template to focus their thoughts. True story.

I recall hearing predictions of such when I took a great facilitation class with Gary Rush (I cannot recommend his work too highly). He told of a situation just like mine. His solution was to create a template. He had a blank piece of paper. The footer of the paper read:

Free-Form Data Entry Template

No joke folks. That one little line on the bottom of the page breaks the mental block that some people have with a blank sheet of paper.

by Dwayne Phillips

I learned a problem-solving method when I was a sophomore in college (in the previous millenium). It still works.

I have a problem today at work. I have no idea what to do.

Let’s fall back in time to my second year of calculus in college. The professor told us something like:

1. Take a problem you don’t know how to solve.
2. Break it up into smaller problems (that you don’t know how to solve)
3. Repeat step 2. until you have a large set of small problems that you do know how to solve.
4. Solve all the problems found in step 3.
5. Sum the solutions from step 4. until you have the solution to step 1.

Guess what, that method this works. The trick for me these days is to understand any current situation in light of this procedure. Most of the time, step 2. means understanding the situation and me in a way that I can ask questions. My current problems are not calculus or physics or even electrical engineering. My current problems are about understanding some fuzzy task that someone thinks they have in their head.

Understanding the problem (steps 1., 2., and 3. above) requires patience with people.

by Dwayne Phillips

Sloppy handwriting costs MONEY!

I was happy when I moved from 6th grade to 7th grade. The reason was simple – there would be no more penmanship classes. I would get all A s in school and no more C s. Penmanship was, anyways, a made up subject so that girls could get a good grade (excuse my bad attitude, but I was after all just a little boy).

I always hated penmanship. I knew what I meant. So what if someone else had trouble reading what I wrote with a pencil? That was their problem.

Fast forward a few decades. I would sit in meetings with other engineers and someone would be at the white board. They would mumble something towards the board, write a few things, and turn around. “See?”, they would ask.

Yes, I could see that they had put ink on the white board, but I had no idea what it was.

Time wasted. Money wasted.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. We were writing some documents as a group at work. People would write their comments on their printed copies. I had to type the comments into a master copy on the computer.

I could see their ink on paper, but I had no idea what it was.

Time wasted. Money wasted.

When I was 45, I bought a book on penmanship. It had the good old pages of how to make letters. It had the dashed-line letters where I would slowly and carefully trace how to make the letters. It had the blank lines requiring me to write each letter dozens of times. I worked through the entire book.

Note: this book, like many “modern” books, taught only blocked printing. It did not teach the looped cursive style.

I write in a journal. I practice writing by hand every day. I write by hand more than most people. My penmanship is better now than at any time in my life.

What is my secret to writing in a way that is legible?

I try hard.

I hate to write this blog post. I sound like Miss Campbell (that is Miss Campbell, not Ms or Mrs Campbell), my teacher from the first grade. This, however, is not griping for the sake of making a six-year-old boy do boring work over and over.

This is about wasting time and money.

In case I am not clear on this, let me repeat:

Bad penmanship is about wasting time and money.

So every engineer out there – let’s get over our disdain for what happened to us when we were six years old.

Try harder. Write legibly.

by Dwayne Phillips

People off tip off what they are about to do (pick up the remote control and you are about to watch television). There are other tip offs or indicators that are not so obvious.

I was sitting in a meeting a few weeks back. I put on my $1 reading glasses and shuffled through some papers. The gentleman at the end of the table announced, “Dwayne has put on his glasses, so he is about to say something.”

He was right. I did put on my glasses to find something in my notes that didn’t agree with what had just been stated. I wanted to be sure of what I had before I said so.

This brought to mind a number of actions that indicate unrelated coming actions:

1. Putting on your glasses indicates you are about to speak
2. Picking up a red pen indicates you are about to read
3. Picking up a ruler indicates you are about to write

Number 1 is about me.

Number 2 – I knew someone who could not read anything at work without marking it as she read. She always marked with a red pen. Hence, when she picked up her red pen, she was about to read.

Number 3 – when in high school, I knew a guy who always wanted to write in a straight line. He did so by holding a ruler to his paper and writing along the top edge of the ruler. Hence, when he picked up a ruler, he was about to write.