Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Most organizations have “magic words.” Utter these words and things happen. If you don’t know the words, work slows and frustration rises. None of this makes any sense, but nonsense continues to exist and often thrives.

Years ago, a colleague who lived in a nearby rural area wanted to construct a building on his ten-acre lot behind his house. He made several Saturday trips to the county courthouse and ran around in circles with the bureaucracy. It seemed liked it would be months before he would have a permit to build.

Someone at the courthouse noticed the wanderings and pulled my colleague aside. His instructions were simple, “Get a blank form like the ones you have been using. At the top write ‘shed’ instead of ‘workshop.’ You’ll have your permit next week.”

My colleague followed the instructions and had his permit quickly and easily. All he needed was to know the magic word “shed.”

A similar story occurred just a few weeks ago. A colleague wanted to build an isolated network of three computers in a conference room so a small team of people could work on a project. He slowly worked his way through the building, IT, and security bureaucracies, but it seemed like it would be months before anything happened.

A person pulled my colleague aside and said, “Start over with a new form. Instead of ‘computer network’ write ‘proposal center.’ That will pass through the system in a few days.”

My colleague followed the instructions and … you know what happened.

Magic words: shed instead of workshop, proposal center instead of computer network. This doesn’t make any sense, but this is the way many places work. Reason, communicate, work hard, and the earth refuses to turn on its axis. Say the magic words and things happen.

How do reasonable people in an day of science learn the magic words?

First, admit that magic words exist. They don’t make sense; they can be downright silly, but they exist and they do work magic.

Second, ask what they are. In all organizations there are people who know the magic words. These people neither hold high positions nor receive high salaries. They do, however, know the magic words.

Ask, “Is there anything I could call this that would make it all work?”

Another tactic that I have used successfully is to tell the person the outcome I want and ask, “How would you arrange that to happen?” or “What do you want me to do to make that happen?”

It seems that magic words would be printed on big posters and hung from the walls. Everyone would know them, use them, and accomplish much more work. But then, they wouldn’t be magic.

by Dwayne Phillips

In spite of everything I know about technology, I remain confident that our government is not watching us. There is simply too much incompetence built into the bureaucracy to accomplish such a lofty goal.

Consider this blog post a public service announcement:

The American government is not watching you.

The government isn’t tracking what books you buy, what movies you rent, what websites you view, or any of that other stuff. I am confident of these statements.

I have this confidence in spite of my background. I have a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I know computer technology and how little it costs. I know software technology and what it can do. I also worked for the U.S. government for 28 years. I know how big the government’s science and technology budgets are. The budget is big enough to buy the stuff to watch everyone.

Still, I have confidence that “big brother” is not watching us. This confidence comes from my years in government. One example – just a few years ago I worked in a group of five people. The boss wanted us to enter where we were and what we were doing into a calendar program. That would help him do whatever it was he was supposed to be doing as a boss of five people. This flopped. The calendar program didn’t work.

That’s right folks – the government couldn’t keep track of five of its own employees. How in the world is the government going to track the spending habits of 300 million people if it couldn’t keep track of five of its own employees?

Take comfort in the incompetence that is built into a bureaucracy the size of our government.

I still oppose new initiatives to create a smart grid, national electronic voting, national electronic health records, and such. It isn’t so much a privacy issue as a waste of money. The incompetence that prevents the government from spying on citizens also ensures that such large programs will spend large amounts of money and accomplish little.

by Dwayne Phillips

I return to some of my technical roots this week. I am experimenting with the OpenCV image processing and computer vision library. This is fun.

This is a “techie” blog post. Many years ago I worked with image processing. I did this work in graduate school and then wrote a lot of magazine articles on the topic for the old C/C++ Users Journal. I even published a book on the topic. Later, I revised the book and the eBook or PDF of all that is available at this link.

Just in the last couple of weeks, I started looking at the OpenCV library of image processing and computer vision routines (the Wikipedia page on OpenCV is here). There is a good book out now about this topic from O’Reilly.

As the pages on the Internet state, the OS X work on OpenCV is the most immature. MS Windows leads the way with Linux implementations close behind. Well, I work on Apple computers with OS X at home, so…

The OpenCV wiki is quite helpful. I used the loading and installation instructions found at this link. It wasn’t simple and straightforward, but it worked. First, I had subversion loaded on my machine. Subversion is a version control program that was simple to download and install on OS X. Here is the main page for Subversion. Second, I needed the cmake package. It was also simple to download and install on OS X. Here is the main page for cmake. Third, well the good new is there was no third.

The following subversion command downloaded OpenCV:

svn co http://opencvlibrary.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/opencvlibrary/trunk opencv

The following statements “installed” OpenCV. Actually, they built the libraries so that I could link to the routines I called when writing my own programs. Run these from a directory called opencv. You could call the directory anything you want (foo, foobar, whatever).

mkdir opencv/build
cd opencv/build
cmake ..
ccmake .
make -j8
sudo make install

I was finally ready to write a little program and try to link with OpenCV’s libraries. This is where I stumbled around for a few hours. Finally, I “figured it out.” The following uses the gcc compiler family to make a program called foo from a source file foo.c and the OpenCV libraries.

gcc -o foo foo.c -I/usr/local/include/opencv -L/usr/local/lib -lcxcore -lcv -lml -lhighgui -lcvaux

So there you have it. Twenty five years and a few generations of hardware and operating systems later, I am sort of programming with a computer vision library. If I only had tools like this back then…

by Dwayne Phillips

It is easy to draw incorrect conclusions on cause and affect in organizations. One of the major reasons for these bad conclusions is time. Good organizations will succeed and bad ones will fail in time. I have yet to find a way to predict how much time that is.

Google is in cloud computing. Microsoft announced it will be, too. Let’s all jump into cloud computing. After all, these companies are successful and they are doing it. Let’s pause a moment, back up, and look at this.

1. Google and Microsoft are in cloud computing
2. Google and Microsoft are successful

Is 1. the cause for 2.? Maybe, but maybe not.

Is 2. true despite 1.? Maybe, but maybe not.

Okay, I’m not smart  enough to answer these questions, but time will tell. After all, these guys are out there in the marketplace and the marketplace will speak. I believe in that power and wisdom of the marketplace, but when will time tell? A year? A decade?

Well, in the end, time will tell. I agree with that one, but as someone once said, “in the end, we will all be dead.”

Confused by now? I am pretty confused and I am writing this.

Time is a big factor in markets. If you make a bad product and have bad relations with your employees, you will go bankrupt. See, for example, General Motors. But General Motors was doing these “bad” things for decades before they fell (at least they would have fallen had it not been for our generosity).

This is a tale of caution. Just because someone is doing well, doesn’t mean I should copy their practices, products, or any part of their culture. They may be on the road to failure, but time hasn’t worked itself through them yet.

The reverse is also true. Just because someone is doing poorly doesn’t mean I should avoid their practices, products, or any part of their culture. Their time to shine in the market may have not arrived yet.

I think that patience is important. It is unfortunate that many of us don’t have the finances to allow patience and time to take their place. Such is the market.

by Dwayne Phillips

I dislike most meetings as they are not a time to accomplish work but merely a time to socialize. The worst type of meeting is one that is going to be short. Short meetings waste more time and last longer than any other type of meeting.

I dislike the majority of meetings. The meeting I dislike the most is one that promises to be short. That doesn’t sound right, so let me repeat it:

short meetings are the worst type of meetings

Please keep reading.

A meeting I attended last week is a prime example. An email was distributed announcing a twice-a-month meeting. The agenda was sparse, so the meeting “should be” short. I could hear a collective sigh of relief from the disbursed group when I read this promise of a short meeting. Then I groaned. I knew what would happen:

• people would arrive believing the meeting is going to be short
• people – “knowing” that they have extra time in the meeting – start to chit chat
• the chit chat raises new topics
• people decide  “now that we are here, we might as well talk about those new topics”
• people talk about all those new topics brought about by chit chat
• the meeting runs 25% to 50% overtime

I sigh as my forehead thumps flat on the meeting-room table. Last week’s meeting was true to this form.

This is an outgrowth of what I have noticed to be the purpose of 90%+ of all meetings:

a time to socialize

Socializing is good, but if that is what we are to do, let’s leave work and go someplace nice. I have had the mistaken impression for years that meetings at work were a time to accomplish work. Silly me. These social meetings occur in private industry. They occur in government service more than private industry. They occur in volunteer work more than in government service.

There are those delightful exceptions in all endeavors where meetings accomplish something. I have yet to have one of these delightful exceptions start with the phrase, “We don’t have much on the agenda, so this should be a short meeting.”

by Dwayne Phillips

Shortcuts have always led to more work for me, not less. The past two weeks have emphasized that to me. They have also taught my a new definition to “shortcut.” Sorry, there is no magic here.

Wiktionary.org: A path between two points that is faster than the commonly used paths; A method to accomplish something that omits one or more steps

dictionary.com: shorter or quicker way. A method, procedure, policy, etc., that reduces the time or energy needed to accomplish something.

The past couple of weeks I was working on a short project. We took many short cuts on the project. The result was that we had to do that work that we short cut around two and three times to correct all the mistakes we made while short cutting. Our short cuts were not

• paths between two points that were faster
• shorter or quicker
• time and energy reducers

Contrary to these fine definitions, our shortcuts

• were frustrating
• cost us time
• led to screaming, yelling, pained expressions, pulled hair, and red faces

In fact, after almost every short cut, we asked ourselves, “How many times will we fool ourselves into thinking that short cuts save us anything?”

Here is my definition of shortcut:

A newly discovered method of work that produces the same result with the same high quality

When I have less of a product in less time, I haven’t taken a shortcut; I have changed the work. When I have to do the work over again, I haven’t reduced the time or energy required; I have delayed the work. My definition tells me that if I discover a way to do the work with the same quality, I have done just that: discovered a better way to do the work. I will try to use that better way for all cases in the future.

This is all sort of discouraging. There must be some way to skip a few steps and not have any pain. Yes, there is, and that is a new and improved method for working. It is not a shortcut.

This all shouldn’t be surprising. It has always been this way. Cheating on something catches up with me eventually.

But, there are exceptions to everything. There must be an exception to shortcuts that aren’t short cuts. Sorry. I have yet to see that exception. If you see one, please let me know. I am always interested in new methods of accomplishing the same work.

by Dwayne Phillips

Producing a lot of documentation doesn’t ensure project success. Sometimes, when emphasized incorrectly, a lot of documentation can ensure project failure. Keep in mind the purposes of documentation.

This week during one of those little lulls that occur in even the busiest of endeavors, an engineer and I were chatting. For some reason, he told me about a project manager we both know named Mike.

“Mike was telling me,” his story went, “about this project that they just cancelled. They had documented everything on the project, but the project was a failure, wasting lots of money and manpower.”

We both shook our heads and laughed. From somewhere, I said, “Electrons can’t read.”

Mike’s project – the well documented failure – isn’t a surprise. I know Mike’s organization. They are infamous for lack of documentation. Any of their projects that produce anything can be deemed successes because they have no documented requirements. And, as in Alice in Wonderland, if you don’t know where you are going, any destination is fine.

It is unfortunate (Mike works for a government agency, all projects funded by taxpayers) that most of the projects in Mike’s organization are failures. One big explanation for the high failure rate is they don’t document anything; everyone works in the direction they think best, and none of the subsystems integrate into a functioning system.

As a(n over)reaction now and then, Mike’s organization concentrates on documenting everything. The outcome is predictable. They employ people who document well, but who design, build, and test poorly. The result is a large stack of good documents, but…electrons can’t read, so their systems don’t work.

A few notes about documentation:

Documentation serves a purpose – to help people communicate

Documentation doesn’t have to be documents – it can be videos, sketches on walls, photos of white boards

Documentation is not the system – that only works in novels

Don’t measure documentation – we succeed at what we measure, so measure system performance

Other notes you would like to pass along? Please remember, electrons can’t read.

by Dwayne Phillips

The computer has become the learning appliance. Don’t believe me? Just ask my six-year-old niece. So what do schools do now?

“What are you searching?”

That was a simple question. Last weekend I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee visiting with relatives. I was sitting in front of my portable computer studying and modifying a document.

My six-year-old niece walked up to me, perched her chin on the table top next to my computer as only a precocious, six-year-old girl can do, rolled her eyes to me, and asked “what are you searching?”

She didn’t ask, “what are you doing?” or “what game are you playing?” or “can I use your computer to play Webkins” or whatever it is that six year old girls do on the computer. No, it was “what are you searching?”

Computer usage has come to this, searching. There is nothing else that we do on computers any longer. We search.

Maybe that isn’t a bad thing. Why search? Well, for me at least, I search to learn something that I don’t know. The computer has become a learning appliance. There are far worse things to do with a computer or anything else. Learning is pretty good.

What does this say for schools? If the computer has become the learning appliance, what do schools do? Teach kids how to use the learning appliance? That wouldn’t be a bad thing. Perhaps.

by Dwayne Phillips

Location has something to do with a person. It is, however, a small and maybe diminishing factor.

I live in Virginia. Start making assumptions about what that means. But first, ask yourself, “which Virginia?”
There are three Virginia-s:

1. Federal Virginia
2. Navy Virginia
3. Virginia Virginia

I live in Federal Virginia and worked in the Federal government for 28 years before retiring from such last Fall (to go on and get a job with a government contractor). Federal Virginia, a.k.a. Northern Virginia, comprises the ever expanding suburbs of Washington, D.C. The area consumed is proportional to the size of the Federal budget. Bye, bye farmland. Most of the Federal government resides outside the confines of Washington, D.C. Most Federal workers live near their jobs and pray they never have to commute into “the district” to work.

Navy Virginia is in the southeastern corner of the state on the coast. I have visited there a few times in an official capacity.

Virginia Virginia, a.k.a. Real Virginia, is the remainder of the state. I had the pleasure of walking through most of it last year.

I also lived a lot of my live in Louisiana. People in New Orleans used to claim that there were two Louisiana-s: New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana. I never bought that one. I mostly felt that New Orleans wasn’t part of Louisiana, but that is another story.

I once lived in California for four years. How many California-s are there? A dozen?

All this goes towards a thought:

There is a lot of variation in location

Perhaps you have to go down to the zip code to understand something about a person when they tell you where they live. Perhaps you have to go to the ten-digit zip code? Maybe that doesn’t matter either.

Environment, the environment based on geographic location, has much to do with a person. It is, however, only one factor.

So the next time a person tells you they are “from New York,” “from Virginia”, or from anywhere, pause a while before making assumptions.

by Dwayne Phillips

The latest computer, the best desk and chair, even coffee brought to you while working – these are nice, but not the subject of this post. No, the most valuable asset a freelancer has is good health.

No Work No Pay

The reason I picked good health is simple: freelancers don’t have sick leave. If we are sick for a day, we don’t work, we don’t generate content, and we aren’t paid.

One or two days in bed is bad. Worse is a lesser sickness that cuts productivity for several weeks. Those lingering illnesses reduce the quality of our products, and keep us from recognizing this slide. We don’t realize that we are sick.

No One is Immune

I know two best-selling authors and consultants whose health recently cost them six months of work. They have been successful for decades and have more resources than most freelancers, e.g. access to excellent health care. Their six-month illnesses hurt their customers more than their own careers. Nevertheless, they serve as prime examples of freelancers, health, product, and income.

I have two brothers who freelanced for ten years each. Both now suffer from poor health, and neither of them is working at this time.

Things Freelancers Can Do

Buy Health Insurance: Health Insurance is not cheap, but is available for freelancers ($100 per month for an individual). The simplest way to obtain it is to be married to someone who has health insurance from their job. Absent that, buy health insurance for as many family members as possible. At least buy health insurance for the freelancer. This isn’t selfish; it is practical. When the freelancer is sick, there is no health care for anyone in the family.

A danger of no health insurance is that minor illnesses grow into major ones. Visits to the doctor for “little things” seem “too expensive.” One of my brothers allowed little health issues became big health issues which became major health issues. He eventually went to the emergency room and will never fully recover.

Keep regular hours: Many of us become freelancers because we want to set our own hours. Fine, but set the hours and keep them. Go to bed at the same time every day. Wake at the same time every day. Eat at the same time every day.

My second brother suffers from diabetes caused by years of irregular hours. Some days he worked 20 hours; some days he slept 20 hours. Some days he ate five meals; some days he was too busy working to eat anything. This blood sugar roller coaster damaged his health.

Measure your health: I weigh myself and take my blood pressure every day. My weight stays within a five-pound range even during the Christmas-New Year’s season. I regulate my blood pressure with medicine and close attention to diet.

Measure what is appropriate for you (blood pressure, blood sugar, etc.). Weigh yourself regularly – at least once a week. Fluctuating weight is an early indicator of many health problems.

One Tool

I recommend that freelancers keep a work logbook. A text file or spreadsheet will work, but I use a paper notebook (National Computation Notebook # 43-648). Record what you do every day, hour-by-hour. (7AM woke, 7:30 toast and coffee, 8AM blog research, 12:00 nap, 12:30…) Also record your health measurements.

Review the work logbook monthly. How do the health measurements compare to previous months? How regular are your working, eating, and sleeping hours? Surges in work happen and are signs that business is good. A chaotic life, however, is not good.

This probably sounds like your parents talking (it sounds like my parents). Regardless or because of my parent’s advice, I am blessed with good health, able to work, and hoping to continue such for many years to come.