Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips A recent peek into the world of grad students in engineering and related fields reveals a group of people with a strong desire to work for the benefit of others. I have been working with grad students on writing. This took many months to arrange, but for the past couple of weeks […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Old guys should keep learning. I like to write computer programs, so one of the things I am (re)learning is programming in Java. I am spending some time each day studying the Java programming language. Some of my background: I have written thousands of lines of FORTRAN code I have written thousands […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I have always been driven by setting and achieving goals – big goals. Recently, however, I have learned the value of setting a minimum expectation for any endeavor. That minimum removes much of the stress that I have imposed on myself for much of my life. Back in December, we were attempting […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I now have a computer in the kitchen that runs Windows 7 and Fedora. If HP would just update their printer driver… I have finally upgraded my kitchen computer to Windows 7. This machine now is dual boot-able with Windows 7 and Fedora 11 (see this old post for the background). I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Engineers create wonderful things now and then. Oblivious users turn the creations upside down and use them backwards. Such oblivious use teaches great lessons that smart organizations use before going to production. Engineers have their babies. Not the human kind of baby, though some engineers have those, too, but the system-that-they-create kind […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Events in life and work can be separated widely by time and space. They can also be two parts of the same story. Connected separated events grows valuable knowledge as long as we can make the connection. My family and I were caught in a snow storm in December on Interstate 81. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Life is full of bad experiences. There is always something that can be learned in each experience. The bad experience is a form of tuition. The learning is a form of education. Nothing guarantees we get the education with the tuition. The education, however, is there for our choosing. College is pretty […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Most computer programmers and builders of systems see ourselves as being helpful to the people who use the things we build. Beware, as most users of the things we build see us as interfering in their lives. This situation applies to must people in the world who see themselves as helpful (consider, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Difficult experiences can change your perspective on what is difficult and what is easy. I recently went through such a difficult experience. Now, if I could just recreate that in a safe place so that others can grow as well. On Friday afternoon December 18th, my wife, youngest son, and I started […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are words we can say that change situations and sometimes even our lives. “Up until now” are a few words that can erase reputations from our past. I have learned a few magic words through the years. Say these words aloud, and the situation changes. A few magic words are “up […]

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