Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

After many years, I finally learn what a five-paragraph essay is.

Every now and then I learn something that embarrasses me. It is something that I feel like I should have learned a long time ago. Such is the case with the title of this post. I was stumbling around the Internet and bumped into a post about the good old, standard, five-paragraph essay. I didn’t know what that was.

I did some looking and found examples and tutorials here, here, and here. Wow, this is pretty good stuff. How is it that I never heard of this?

Well, I stopped taking English in High School in 10th grade. At the time, you needed three years of English to graduate. I had English in 9th and 10th grades and in 9th grade I took Journalism, which counted as a year of English. So, no English in 11th and 12th grade. Maybe they covered the 5-paragraph essay in those years. College? I scored high on the ACT test, so I passed over the first semester English class and only took the second semester. That was a writing class, but we never did the 5-paragraph essay.

I’ve written four or five books – back in the day when publishers printed paper books and tried to sell them in the book stores. I’ve written a hundred or so articles for magazines and journals (see the long list here). I’ve even written a few dozen short stories (see and buy them on Smashwords).

And now I have learned how to write a 5-paragraph essay. In retrospect, I could have used those techniques to write this blog post. Let’s see, if you don’t count the summary, this post has five paragraphs. Maybe next time I’ll use those techniques.

by Dwayne Phillips

I have learned that I am not capable of being prepared for everything. Hence, I have learned to be prepared for being unprepared.

I often speak in front of people, lead discussions, teach classes, and generally attend meetings where people ask me questions. I am often unprepared for what people ask. I am, however, prepared to be unprepared.

This preparing to be unprepared may seem odd, but I have met many people who feel the need to be absolutely ready to answer any question and encounter any situation. Perhaps I am not as smart as they or maybe I am just too lazy these days. I prefer to think of it as being more realistic in my estimation of my own abilities.

I am just not smart enough to be prepared for everything.

Hence, I prepare to be unprepared. This isn’t that difficult once I admit my own failings. What I do is have all the needed answers at the ready. Answers such as:

• I don’t know.
• I can’t remember.
• I recall seeing or hearing something about that, but I don’t have the details with me.

I am not refusing to work. The above unprepared prepared responses are followed by:

• If you wish, I will take the time and effort to learn about that.
• If you wish, I will research that and refresh my memory.
• If you wish, I will find my notes and learn the details.

When I talk to some people about my unprepared preparedness, they tell me

You couldn’t get away with that where I work. If you gave such an answer, you would be eaten alive.

Further discussion reveals that the people have actually never seen anyone eaten alive, cut to pieces, killed, or any other such hyperbole that is often tossed about. I suppose that is the foundation of my preparedness of the unprepared. Some wise people helped me to notice that such threats were hyperbole and not reality.

by Dwayne Phillips

It seems that the most difficult thing for a decision maker to say is “no.” Here are a few stories of efforts that were wasted because when given the opportunity, people could not bring themselves to say “no.”

There is something difficult about saying “no.” I don’t quite understand it. Perhaps my mother told me “no” so often when I was a child that I thought the word was a natural response. I guess I have worked with people whose mothers differed from  mine.

Two stories:

First, in the early 1980s the little personal computers were new. For engineers, the computers where bright and shiny. Perhaps they were toys or perhaps they were the mental multipliers we should be using. I was working in a government organization, and everyone wanted to have some of these new devices, but no one wanted to look like they were wasting money on new, bright and shiny toys.

We really could have used a few computers. We had an inventory problem, and while they were not the one-and-only solution, the computers would have helped. I worked for a year on the project to buy a few little computers. Everyone I met had a new set of questions to justify the computers. No one would say, “That is a bad idea. No, you can’t buy computers.”

After a year of work, we sat in a meeting. My boss was as frustrated as I was. The room was filled with people who kept asking questions. Missing from the room was our big boss. When he entered the room an hour into the meeting, my boss looked at him and without explaining the subject  said, “Jim, please just say ‘no.'”

The big boss, stopped, and with a puzzled expression quietly said, “No.”

Everyone closed their notebooks, applauded, and left the big boss standing alone in the room with the same puzzled look.

Second story, in the 2000s I entered a new organization that was still in the government (yes, the government has lots of problems). A few people told me to start a new project to find a second source of parts. We depended on one company for a required part. If that company were to close its doors or go in another direction, we would have no source of parts.

I really didn’t care, but the reasoning seemed sound and I began work on the project. I went before a board of decision makers with the proposal for the project. I told them that I was new and didn’t really understand all the aspects of the situation, but that people who did understand felt we needed a second source of parts. The members of the board all nodded or half-nodded a yes. But, this was too late in the fiscal year to start a new project. We would wait six months.

I really didn’t care, but just to give everyone another chance to say “no,” I went before the same board of decision makers six months later. I told them that I was still new and still didn’t really understand blah blah blah. The members of the board all half-nodded a yes. I could see that they weren’t enthusiastic about this, but they would not nod “no.” They just couldn’t bring themselves to say “no.”

Two years later, we were nearing the end of the project. We had chosen a second source for parts and had awarded them a contract to build some parts. We weren’t going to use the parts for anything, but we wanted to see if they could  deliver the parts. They did deliver the parts and they were good parts.

Members of the decision-making board saw the parts arrive and they all asked why in the world we had bought parts that we weren’t going to use. I reminded them of the meetings at which I explained everything and gave them an opportunity to say “no.” They all had forgotten and denied everything even in the face of minutes from the meetings.

Today: I now work in a different organization – this one is outside the government. Still, I meet people who cannot say “no.” Most decisions are, “Don’t spend too many resources, but keep going in that direction.” I suppose that is the equivalent of a half nod and a request for justification. The world doesn’t seem to change much.

by Dwayne Phillips

I attend a five-day conference with only an iPad and ZaggMate bluetooth keyboard. It worked!

I recently attended a conference at work – eight hours a day for five days. WiFi was to be available. Hmm, eight hours, WiFi, I wasn’t sure about power connections, I decided to try my iPad with the ZaggMate keyboard.

Could I survive with the small iPad screen and the small bluetooth keyboard?

The answer was yes.

It happened that this conference, which shall remain nameless, provided convenient power outlets for laptops. This meant that I could have brought my MacBook Pro for the final four of five days, but I resisted the temptation and completed the five-day experiment.

Some observations:

• I never drained my iPad battery below 40%
• I was able to sit anywhere, not tied to the seats with power outlets
• A dozen people wanted to try my iPad plus ZaggMate
• The screen size and iOS were ample to the task
• Every morning I struggled with the little keyboard for 15 minutes, but after a warm up, I could type fast enough
• I wish I had brought my headphones
• WiFi Internet surfing is great when the speakers are boring

A big note: one day a gentlemen from a well-known government agency, which shall also remain nameless, approached me. He told me that he had been watching me use the iPad plus ZaggMate. He called the CIO office back at his agency. They ordered 50 ZaggMates to go with the iPads they already had. I should get a commission or something from Zagg, don’t you think?

Another note: I found myself touching the screen of my iMac desktop computer in the evening and expecting it to act like the iPad. The touch screen, touch, tap, swipe, etc. became second nature.

by Dwayne Phillips.
I have multiplied my “smartness” in the last couple of decades due to techniques I learned from two peolple.
I always wanted to be smart. Then I wanted to be smarter than that. I guess I am still working at being smarter. I recently switched to paying for Starbucks coffee using an iPhone app instead of a gift card. The reason for the switch was to learn more about iPhone apps, i.e., I wanted to be smarter.
While thinking about being smarter, two names came to mind:
Jerry Weinberg
Tony Buzan
Tony Buzan was introduced to me one Sunday morning while perusing the Washington Post. There was an article about an odd and colorful form of outlines called Mind Mapping. Since I used outlines in my writing and teaching, I was interested. I read Buzan’s book on Mind Maps. I still use Mind Maps today.
Then I found several more books by Buzan. One was about Speed Reading. I read much faster than before. Reading faster, while comprehending more, has speed my learning, i.e., has helped me be faster. Another book by Buzan was on Memory. I use the memory techniques (they are not tricks) Buzan described. I am using them this week to help commit to memory an entire page of text (don’t ask me why as it is a long story).
Jerry Weinberg first came to me while in graduate school. I was studying artificial intelligence, and there was a book sitting on an office desk titled “The Psychology of Computer Programming.” I thumbed through the book and remembered the author’s name. A year or two later I joined a book club because the initial benefit was a series of books by Weinberg on Software Quality Management. I was hooked.
A few years later, I met Jerry Weinberg at a class he was teaching called “Problem Solving Leadership.” I went to a few more classes that Jerry taught. He showed me useful techniques to understand other people by understanding myself. Since then, working with other people is much easier and we are all much more effective. Hence, we all seem to be much smarter.
I guess someone would call this learning to be smarter some sort of multiplier or lever. If you have a lever, you can move far more weight than if you only have your hands. The techniques taught by Tony Buzan and Jerry Weinberg are mental levers. I also consider them to be life levers. They have made me smarter and I know much better how to be smarter every day.

by Dwayne Phillips

One of the more difficult tasks is reviewing something written by someone else and providing feedback that will help both the writer and the reader. Here are some things I learned from Jerry Weinberg.

In 2004, I attended a writing workshop led by author and consultant Jerry Weinberg. A large part of the workshop comprised providing feedback on what other attendees had written. Jerry led us through several exercises in feedback. Here are some of the pointers.

Start with,

I read your writing.

That one may seem too obvious, but it isn’t. When I was in graduate school my major professor often provided me with feedback on my dissertation. Further discussion revealed that he had not read my dissertation. He was merely providing comments because he felt obligated to do so.

Next,

Provide the type and amount of feedback the writer requests.

It is easy to assume what the writer “needs.” You can also waste a lot of time doing that – both yours and theirs.

Next,

Provide your reaction to what you read.

Use statements like, “I laughed when I read this,” or “I’m confused about what the topic was,” or “I struggled when I came to the second page.” Notice, I am providing my reaction to the writing. I am  not saying, “your writing was funny,” or “you’re writing is not understandable,” or “the second page stinks.”

Then there is the “I don’t understand” exercise.

1. Feedback provider: I don’t understand this paragraph. Do you mean X?
2. Writer: answers only YES or NO

If the writer answers NO three times in a row, the feedback provider then asks, “Please explain what you mean.”

Finally (well, this is the final comment for now), explain your expectations and where the writing didn’t take you. For example,

On the first page, I read that there are three steps to a process. I read the first step on the second page and went looking for the other two steps. I couldn’t find them and was disappointed because I really wanted to know what they were.

Finally (see I told you above that maybe that wasn’t the final comment), have a conversation. If the writer tells you something like,

well, the paper says that because of this other reason

ask

where in the paper is this other reason, I didn’t notice it

Perhaps the writer will point you to where it was or perhaps the writer will realize that he neglected to put those words in the paper.

Finally, just kidding, no more points in this post. I do, however reserve the right to provide more points in future posts.

by Dwayne Phillips.
There are a lot of standards today guiding our behavior. There seem to be a lot of people today who ignore the standards and yet they succeed.
It is illegal in many places to talk on a cell phone while driving. It is illegal in many places to send text messages while driving. It is illegal in many places to be using a laptop computer while driving.
For as long as I have been driving, [1] a person could receive a fine for
Failure to Maintain Control of Your Vehicle
It seems that all these new laws for new, sometimes distracting technologies are quite unnecessary. If you cannot text and drive at the same time, you will fail to maintain control of your vehicle and be guilty of [1]. It seems that [1] would be penalty enough for drivers.
I guess we have to add laws, penalties, regulations, and such onto the ones we already have that already cover the same things. Perhaps this is a general human tendency. We want to be sure that we are sure of what requires sure-ness, so we add just a little more oversight, punishment, and whatever.
I work in computers and software. Way back when, you tried to do your best so that you and your organization would succeed. There were tips and techniques for doing a good job, and guys like me studied these things and applied as best we good. The motivation was simple – I wanted to do well.
Now there are lots of standards that require adherence. If you don’t use the standards and swear that you use them, your software won’t be accepted or certified or blessed or approved by the groups of people that write the standards. You may be shunned.
I don’t believe that Google and Yahoo and Apple and well, let’s provide a long list of groups that write software and seem to be succeeding wildly. Still, without adhering to all these standards, the world works just fine using their software.
I guess Google and Yahoo and Apple and their ilk simply maintain control of their vehicle.

by Dwayne Phillips

Some 25 years ago, I learned something that has stayed with me. The reason it has stayed with me is that it still holds true: Don’t depend on live demos.

The title of this post is a statement made often by one of my advisors in graduate school way back at LSU in the mid-1980s. Dr. Charles Harlowe went over this again and again. He was the head of the Remote Sensing and Image Processing (RSIP) laboratory. The RSIP was an inter-disciplinary lab comprising engineers, computer scientists, forestry people, wetlands resources people, and so on.

Way back in the dark ages of 16-bit and 32-bit minicomputers, we took multi-spectral images from the air and tried to have computers make sense of them. We had some advances, and a bunch of us got graduate degrees.

This was one of Dr. Harlowe’s favorite statements. The lab ran on funded research. Everyone few months, a government sponsor visited to learn how we were coming on the research that the sponsor was funding. As graduate students, we wanted to take the sponsor into the computer room and show them our results on the big display. I think the display was a whopping 24-inch monitor connected to a computer that did nothing but drive the display.

Dr. Harlowe wouldn’t allow such. Instead, he made us take photographs of the screen with slide film, create 35mm slides, and prepare presentations for the visitors. We had a special camera and attachment that allowed us to take the photographs. Then we had to take the film to a photo store (they had such in those days). This was all a pain and ate time. So what? Time was the one thing that we didn’t have as grad students.

It turns out that Dr. Harlowe was right. One day a sponsor was to visit at 10 a.m. We had the 35mm slides ready to go. At 7 a.m. the disk drive crashed on the computer and had to be rebuilt – an eight-hour process. While the system administrator, we had those guys back then, rebuilt the disk, we showed our slides to the happy sponsor.

Today? Disk drives don’t crash. Hence, we only have to worry about the 999 other things that could go wrong with a live demonstration. Some of the ones I have seen:

A key person is ill and can’t make it to the demo
Someone deleted a few files the night before just to clean up the disk
The system administer changed a password the night before
A peripheral breaks
Dead batteries

Conclusion? Thirty years later,

Don’t plan on a live demo

Computer hardware is much more reliable today than in the mid-1980s. Things, however, still go wrong. If everything goes right, do a live demo. Nevertheless, have a backup plan – photographs, PowerPoints, videos, etc. Have what will be an appropriate substitute for a live demo.

by Dwayne Phillips

Recent advances in computer networks and facial recognition software bring about some interesting possibilities for knowing that a person was in a place at a time doing an activity. Governments might want to know this information. Private companies, however, would more likely implement this for profit.

This post brings about some interesting possibilities with facial recognition and all the information that is lying about on the Internet.

Here is a scenario or use case:

1. I photograph a group of people standing around in a public place.
2. Photograph gives me date, time, and location.
3. Software separates the individual faces in the photo giving me N photos.
4. Facial recognition software matches these N faces to faces shown on social networking sites, news sites, and all other sites on the Internet.
5. All those other sites on the Internet provide me information on the faces that were recognized.

I can now match N people to places, times, and events given my one little photograph.

Let’s multiply this one little photograph by a few hundred million little photographs taken by every one’s cell phone (connected to the net so the photo can be pulled up into the system without the photographers permission or knowledge) and all those security cameras and web cams and traffic cams connected to the Internet.

I can now match millions of people to places, times, and events. Hmmm. That might be interesting information.

There are some technical challenges:

1. Bandwidth of moving the photographs about the Internet
2. Processing power to constantly scan all faces on the Internet and recognize them

These are tough, but will be surmounted in the next couple of years if they haven’t been already.

Who will do this?

An obvious answer is that a government will do this. Governments, especially those that don’t like a lot of personal freedom, want to know who is where and doing what. Governments have practically unlimited financial resources.

My feeling, however, is that government bureaucracies don’t have the management competence and the individual incentive to make this work. There will be ten years of study before one computer is purchased.

My answer is that a big, international company will do this. Google is an obvious answer. Facebook is another obvious answer. Perhaps someone, with a lot of financial backing, will start a new company and do this.

Why would a company do this?

This information is worth a lot of money. If I know that a person was at a bar in a particular neighborhood on a particular night, I can send them Facebook notes, Tweets, emails, texts, voice messages, etc. advertising all sorts of things for that day of the week in that neighborhood. I can try to sell them all sorts of goods and services specific to that time and place and avocation.

Will this happen?

I think so. It is a natural. It is an extension of what we do with text. After we do it with still photographs of faces, we will do it with audio and video as well.

by Dwayne Phillips

It was the spring of 2006. I had been in California visiting the Contractor for several days. I flew home on Friday, caught the usual cab, and walked into an empty house.

Adam, my youngest son, was playing in the high school jazz band. He was playing bass while his friend Arash was playing guitar. The South Lakes band was playing in a multiple-day band appearance in South Carolina. Karen, my wife, had driven down with Adam and Arash and they had spent several days there. They would return on Saturday evening.

Nathan, my second son, was somewhere. He usually did things with his friends on Friday afternoon. He worked at Champps on Friday evening with his shift beginning around 5 or 6 PM.

As usual for returning from a trip, I had a lot of work to do. Given the weekend schedule, I had decided to work my extra hours on Friday night. I was on the California time zone, so I felt I could work to 9 or 10 PM without becoming too tired to know what I was doing.

I decided to go to Champps for dinner at 5. Nathan would probably show up there while I was there. It would be the first chance of seeing him all week.

I walked into Champps and was escorted to the perfect seat for the evening. It was on the upper level closest to the kitchen. I sat and ordered a hamburger, fries, and soft drink. Not very original, but I wanted some beef and potatoes.

I sat, ate, and looked for my son Nathan. He wasn’t around. I wasn’t sure when he was supposed to arrive for his shift. Maybe he wasn’t to work this Friday evening. I could have been mistaken about his work schedule. I ate and waited.

Nathan walked into the kitchen area from a back or side door. I was happy to see him, but he didn’t notice me yet. I was also happy to see that he was happy to be at work. He greeted his co-workers with a smile and laugh, and they greeted him in a like manner.

As far as I could tell, Nathan didn’t notice me sitting in the area eating dinner. He served himself a bowl of soup – the one thing they could eat without charge – and went somewhere that I could not see him.

I returned to eating my dinner. My gaze went down to my food for a few moments and so did my thoughts. The next thing I knew Nathan was at my table, pulling out a chair, and sitting down with his bowl of soup.

My 19-year-old son, right in front of all his co-workers, had found me in a crowd and sat down to eat dinner with me.

This was the best dinner of my life.

I once wrote to a discussion forum on the Internet that the best thing a child can say to a father was either,

“Dad, watch me do this,” or “Dad, help me do this.”

One person, Weinberg, replied that he felt the best thing a child can say to a parent is, “Dad, –anything–.”

My son walked over and without speaking said, “Dad I want to eat dinner with you.”

Sometimes I read too much into events. I don’t think I am putting too much into this event. I took this is a sign that perhaps I had been a pretty good father all these years. This six-foot two young man, the kid who was born early on a Sunday morning in Warrenton, Virginia, he was okay with sitting with his bald, gray-haired, non-descript man who was his father.

This was perhaps the greatest compliment anyone had ever paid to me.

Maybe there will be a day when I will have such a moment with my other two sons. Maybe they would have done the same. Maybe Nathan would have done this regardless of what he thought of me as a father.

I may never know anything of these “maybes.”

I do know that one this evening Nathan carried his bowl of soup over to my table, sat, and ate dinner with me.

This was the best dinner of my life.