Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Why aren’t people taking me seriously? Why aren’t people paying attention to me? If I want people to take and my group seriously, I should: do CMMI do PMP do ITIL sit at the keyboard and write everyday sit at the table and draw everyday take photos everyday play my instrument everyday […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We tend to love to live with our own problems. I read recently of a great innovation in fonts for programmers. Someone has just invented a new font that makes it easy to tell the difference between the number one and the lowercase letter L. Wow! 2015 and we’ve finally solved the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A curious cousin to Garbage In, Garbage Out is the database curse of Nothing In, Nothing Out. If you are old enough, you have heard of Garbage In, Garbage Out. When we put bad data into a computer, the computer crunches the numbers a produces more bad data. In recent years, I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some of today’s more efficient technologies are efficient because we are lazy. FORTRAN is an efficient programming language. The executable files are small. The programs execute quickly. There is a simple reasons why FORTRAN is an efficient programming language: the compilers were created at a time when computing resources were much less […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are practices that time has proven to be worthwhile. Someone in school drilled them into us. We vowed to avoid them as soon as school was out, but life eventually catches us. I have lost track of the number of times I have seen this on the job. We have a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips More often I find myself needing help from a person who is good at figuring out stuff. A PeGAFOS. I have simple needs at work. I need a person good at figuring out stuff. Someone who can consider a puzzling situation and figure out how to work our way out of the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We tend to treasure failed tools. It is as if the tool becomes part of me. One remedy is to realize that a tool I use is just that, a tool I use. It is not me. I don’t know how many times I have seen it. A person is standing at […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are times when I ask if my situation was caused by one of two shortcomings. Neither answer is pleasing. Then I move on to ask why I am in such an unsatisfactory situation. A couple decades ago, I heard a statement about explaining a bad situation. One paraphrase of the statement […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Do you want to reduce the anger that people feel coming from you. Don’t stop shaking your fist; stop pointing your finger. Each culture seems to have its own form of an angry gesture. The one that comes to mind in my own culture is the fist. Shake a fist at someone […]

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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 […]

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