Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips I receive about one phone call a week from an actual person. What happened? I have a cell phone. I still have a landline phone. Several times a day, the landline rings and a nice computer voice tells me about home improvement. These computer voices are becoming nicer. I guess that is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I find an old method of editing that I was using without knowing it. I recently discovered the paramedic method of editing from UCLA professor Richard Lanham. I think I have been using this method for years without knowing it had a formal beginning and technique. I referred to what I was […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes, some things are important to me. It is usually a mistake to extend that importance to another person. The idea hit me. This is IMPORTANT! I will dig into this topic. I will expand it in many ways. Me: Hey, look at the results of my analysis. I have looked at […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is interesting to me. Is it interesting to you? interesting, adjective, something that attracts your attention, arouses your curiosity, or holds your interest because it is unusual, exciting, or engaging. It is highly subjective, meaning what is fascinating to one person may be dull to another.—Google search The answer to my […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems we haven’t learned much as we still read stuff that makes no sense. A long time ago, I heard a political commentator read part of a political party’s platform. Parties used to do these platforms to inform everyone of what they were saying. The commentator would read a sentence and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Let’s turn these nouns into verbs. Let’s not. We are going to modernize the application to optimize it and maximize our efforts. — Wrote someone who shouldn’t have been writing In other words, we want maximum free time. Let’s make the application modern and optimal. Turning a noun into a verb (I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips As much as we “have a better idea” and want to revise, sometimes the first version is the best. The first draft. The bane of writers of fiction and non-fiction. Let’s fix it. Okay. That’s the first version. Let’s revise as we become “smarter.” Are we always becoming smarter? Sometimes not. The […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Another rant about writing that makes no sense (to me). This system uses three times less (memory, weight, time, space, effort, and whatever) than that system. I understand what it means to use three times more weight (15 pounds instead of 5 pounds), but what does it mean to use three times […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Please tell me what we are doing. Please don’t read from a catalog. Person beaming with confidence: Look. Here is a block diagram of our system. You see we are using Snowflake, Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and toss in a little Excel for good measure. Person baffled but interested: Interesting. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Let’s revise that one more time. Okay, but will it be better or just different? Revisions. Edits. That is what writers do. Many prescribe to the notion that the first draft is practically nothing. The real work of the writer begins when the revising and editing begin. And how many revisions finish […]

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