October 26, 2011 by phillip.

Ok, so I was dared to do this so I had to stop and do it. Don’t think a challenge to me will go unheeded. Here’s a list of 10 completely random facts about me.

1) I feel an overwhelming urge to take any dare. When I was a kid there was nothing you couldn’t dare me to do. Once you say the word “dare” I’m sucked it. I’ll do it. I’ve jumped off roofs, ate balls of wasabi, all kinds of crazy things that I can’t even mention if the word dare is involved.

2) I used to absolutely LOVE model trains when I was a kid. I wired up this train set when I was a kid that was 4′x8′ and took up a good portion of my den. My parents bought electronic parts because I kept wiring and building till I pretty much had the space shuttle in the den when I was 12.

3) I fear talking to no one. At present I believe this to be true. I’ve talked to many A list celebrities, people passing by, music celebrities, etc. If I am in the place and they are I’ll talk. However, if they seem like they know they’re important I’ve snubbed just as many people because I don’t want to feed anyone’s ego unnecessarily.

4) When I was in elementary school I prided myself on the weird fact that I knew where every country in the world was (152 at the time) and their flag. Weird but true.

5) I ALWAYS stuck up for the underdog. In elementary or high school I’d always try to make that person that nobody liked or cared about feel a little bit better because I felt like I was straddling the fence between all the groups of people.

6) I absolutely HATE coconut. When I was little kid I’d get on my sister’s shoulders so we could sneak some cookies out of a jar on the shelf. One false move and you’d open the jar with coconut. I grabbed and ate one time and was disgusted with it ever since. P.S.: Yes I have been dared and did eat a whole coconut.

7) I have been told by people I’m the most resourceful person they know. I absolutely loved McGyver when I was a kid. I can grab a gang of pieces and make something. When the last big earthquake hit L.A. I asked some relatives in Texas where they afraid of me getting hurt and they said if anyone would survive it would be me on an Island like Gilligan with all the amenities.

I love sports period but contrary to popular beliefs my first love is football. Can tell you why. I just love the sport.

9) I LOVE CHRISTMAS time! I will sing Christmas music out loud in public. In a crowd. Call me crazy but I’ll belt out Chestnuts just to be doing it.

10) I’m not brown because I’m black. I’m brown because I eat so much chocolate. I love the stuff. It’s heaven here on Earth. I’ve been known to do work and get paid in cookies (Family only so don’t ask).

Whew! Ok, that wasn’t too bad. I’m not usually one to talk so much about me. I liked to get people to talk about themselves more than I talk about me.

Posted in Something to know | 3 Comments »

October 6, 2011 by phillip.

I was inspired recently by a picture a friend of my posted on Facebook.

It made me think of a lot of things I’ve said that were similar before about your comfort zone. I’m constantly entering into new stages in life and this is going to be the title of my next one. “A comfort zone is where all the slackers hang out.”

I am all about having fun and doing new and exciting things and it just caused me to think about all the people that you and I know that are living in the same world as you with the same amount of time and have far less commitments or obligations. How is it that these people are not living life to the fullest and don’t have better jobs, careers or business’ than you? It’s the fate of those who linger in the comfort zone.

I’m pretty big on watching football and it makes me think of the football players that hang out in the cool zone. The Cool Zone is a big fan with an icy cold mist coming from it that they pull out on the hot days. Football players are wearing so much armor and a helmet that running around and battling your opponent out there on the field gets you really hot. When they come off the field they head to the Cool Zone. Thing is, what is that guy that really hasn’t played in the game doing in there?

People who usually stay in their comfort zone are that guy. He/she hasn’t put in the time, strength or determination towards the goal but he/she wants to relax and not do anything crazy. You don’t yet deserve the Cool Zone scary player. Get back on the field and scare everyone. Even yourself.

Let’s start today doing things that aren’t what you’d usually do, places you wouldn’t usually go , and ballsy things you wouldn’t say (all within reason of course). Without big risks there are no big rewards. The people taking the risks are not doing it in their comfort zone.

Posted in Life Lessons | 1 Comment »

October 4, 2011 by phillip.

There’s a psychology term known as cognitive dissonance. For some reason people seem to equate where they are and where they think they should be and the further they see themselves from it the the more it starts to effect them. This is common human behaviour. I used to do this a lot until a couple years ago when I read a book that corrected my way of thinking (The Pursuit of Perfect). The problem with me was that I was trying to always be perfect with everything I did. I still believe in trying to be one of the best at whatever I do but to a much lesser extent than before I read this.

This perfection also changed the way I looked at reading. Most of my life I read books to get to the end.  I started a book by looking at the page number of the last page and set myself on a course to reach that page. Many TV shows showed cultures that believed that an assimilation of knowledge taken in a huge gulp made you a new and better being. Think: Borg from Star Trek, linking into the Matrix in the Matrix movies, and chopping off the head of a Highlander and you’ll gain all his knowledge in Highlander. This was my goal. The destination being the last page.

Life isn’t about being at the last page. The last page is the day of your death. Have you given any thought to the path to that day?

I rarely fell asleep during our long car trips when I was a kid. Falling asleep till you got to the destination made you miss the most amazing things along the way. Look at those cows and sheep! We never get to see those. Look at those mountains! Amazing what God has made. Look at the sun set on the ocean or a field of waving wheat. Amazing.

You’ll get to where you want in your career, your life, etc. Just stop and look at what you’re doing right now so when you get there you’ll have many great stories to tell about how fun that trip was.

Posted in Life Lessons | 3 Comments »

September 22, 2011 by phillip.

Often I write a little bit about what’s going on with me or what I’m thinking about but today I’m going to take a little bit of a different slant. I’m going to tell you about me. See, my cousin Christelyn Russell-Karazin runs a great site called www.beyondblackwhite.com and she asked me to write a little something about ME. For some reason I’ll figure out in another post why I always procrastinate posting to my blog and forgot to look at the instructions while I’m away from home right now but here goes a glimpse at what makes me… me.

The computer guy that sits before you is a long story of a whole lot of work. Work on career. Work on marriage. Work on family. Growing up as a black man my father always taught me that if you work hard enough and smart enough it wouldn’t matter if you were blue. Also, that if you do what you love you would never work a day in your life. I am the absolute contridiction because I’ve worked extremely hard but yet have never worked.

As a kid I was really into computers and thus my dad being an electrical engineer helped feed me books. I was the kid that was always reading, talking and playing sports. By the time I finished high school I went to Cal. State L. A. and knew exactly what I was going into. Electrical engineering. Just like my dad. That’s where life got a little shaky. It was in my first month of school that I met my now wife. It was by my third month that she was pregnant and with all my unfocused college behavior that I decided I wasn’t taking all these hard calculus courses. I changed my major to Computer Science but was still just a little too overburdened by the time my first son was born.

I am not typical in anything and definitely didn’t want to be a typical dad. Now in many cultures this may be different but in the black community unwed fathers were unseen fathers. As I worked through college I was the opposite. I kept my son as much as humanly possible and had girls in the dorms watching him while I went to class or when I had to take tests.

School wasn’t the path I’d choose for many reasons. I ended up dropping out of school by my third year but not dropping out of my plan. My plan was to buy a house by 30 and be the Information Technology (IT)  director of a company by 35. I’m pretty open about the fact that I wasn’t feeling too much support in any direction except for my dad with what he could.

I won’t bore you with the Abraham Lincoln stories of reading by candle light but suffice to say there was a lot of it. Fill in the years with 3 more kids (all by my wife), a lot of reading on buses, metrorail trains, in parks, and late at night. Add in a lot of time helping develop my wife and kids into whatever they wanted to be. Sprinkle in a lot of mentoring to kids, family, coworkers and whoever wanted to listen and be the best they could be with me and whole lot of time with my family and you have made yourself the Phillip you see today.

The timeline worked out just right by the way. By 29 years old I was the IT director at then one of the countries biggest Post Production companies and also bought my house.

Easy? Not at all but like good exercise the pain in your muscles you feel is a good feeling because of the results. Mine is a story I tell to all men and boys because I juggle a very social life with all this work and family and it’s never that easy. It’s just what needs to be done the way I see it.

Combine as much as you can where you can. My kids have been regular faces at every place I’ve ever worked so that they’ll raise kids like my dad with me.

Posted in Life Lessons | 1 Comment »

July 2, 2011 by phillip.

I found myself rather unnerved this week which is unusual for me. I had a client that took me to my wit’s end with no reward. I’ll go back and explain my problem.

In the TV show Star Trek in the 1960’s James Doohan played a character lovingly referred to as Scotty.  Scotty was the head engineer on the starship Enterprise that was the biggest baddest ship in the known universe. Seeing as how every week the Enterprise or it’s crew were put into a dangerous situation Scotty’s character was always asked to do something miraculous. If the repairs were assumed to take 5 hours he’d only have 3. If the crew was stuck on a planet in danger Scotty was desperately asked, “Beam me up Scotty” even if all known physics said he shouldn’t be able to. The problem with Scotty is that he made the unthinkable happen so much that he wasn’t a focal point of the crew. His miracles became background noise to the plot of other things going on.

As a computer guy that works in a lot of stuff I am suffering from the Scotty effect.  I’ve done things at companies in the past and present that have made people almost faint with awe. I’m the person that just knows I’ll find a solution. The company in particular that I went to has seen too many miracles happen. Therefore when I pulled off something that I couldn’t even find enough Google results to help me I had to pat myself on the back for once. Went to his office expecting praise only to be met with disappointment at why it took me as long as it did when even his internet provider told him that maybe it was possible but they’d never even been asked for that. To make it even more miraculous, the client of theirs that this was supposed to be for thought it was space age stuff they’d never heard of.

I’m calmer now but I guess it all comes down to real grattitude. It’s the cheapest fuel for the human soul that gets the best results and your local miracle worker is running out of gas. I grew up even hearing the story of Jesus being at a wedding and being asked to turn water into wine. I picture even this person patting him on the back and just walking away while Jesus stood in awe of what his own hands had done.

Posted in Life Lessons | 3 Comments »

May 27, 2011 by phillip.

A long time ago in a neighborhood far far away a computer guy was born… Well, actually it was only 5 minutes from my current house but that’s beside the point. The point is that I’m that guy. A long time ago I was told by my father to do what I love and I’ll never work a day in my life. With that, I learned to find the love in almost everything I’ve had to do (and believe me it was hard sometimes). So I’ve never worked. The second thing was, work at a different company every year till you’re 30 then you’ll have a breadth of knowledge that will serve you forever. I did and it is true.

I got to where I am now because my joy is finding solutions to problems and I use various forms of technology. It’s like having a magic wand in my back pocket. My problem though is centered around not believing anybody needs anything I know. Yes, I know it sounds silly seeing as how I’ve had a couple Google top 10 search results from this blog and emails from around the world but I never believe those results and write articles very rarely. That’s all going to change now because talking to my cousin Shyra today I got a good verbal spanking. It started with, “You have information in that head of yours that a million people would love to have!!!  Get to blogging!!!”

Not to say that I haven’t heard the same things from my wife, clients, and a lot of people on Facebook that find the observant craziness in my writing amusing but it just takes one thing sometimes to get you on the ball. All social media outlets watch out. Here I come! Also, if you know more and want to give me a good verbal spanking to get me on the right course go for it!

Posted in My humble opinion, Something to know | 1 Comment »

January 26, 2011 by phillip.

I have recently come to the realization that what I do I have been undervaluing. Often when I’m asked by my wife and others, “What are you doing right now?” I hesitate for a moment. Pull my hands away from the keyboard, piece of wire I’m holding, or drop my pen and think. This is something that’s causing me time to figure out myself. How am I going to tell this person exactly what I’m doing? I think to myself, “You’re good at explaining things. Go for it.” As this would be true, I’m capable of explaining everything I’m doing to a 6 year old but it might take a minute and I’d paint a picture in the air with flashbacks to previous work that would rival Picasso.

Should I draw it out on a piece of paper? Well, usually I’m on the phone so that would get lost in translation. All kinds of ideas float through my head in what seems like hours that are only milliseconds. It doesn’t matter though, in due time I realize that I will probably bore them or they don’t see the passion that goes into everything I do and get turned off by the enthusiasm I put in it. They may also, find it to be a rhetorical question in the first place so that we can just get back to them and their issues.

So in the end what do I say I’m doing? Nothing.

Posted in Life Lessons | 1 Comment »

November 12, 2009 by phillip.

Recently I got into a debate about interfaces. I know this isn’t the most common conversation. Actually, it was spawned by a conversation about my last blog post on Windows 7. Critiques (even if they are not heavy handed) will usually cause someone from a group that loves the item to lash out at you without fully thinking about the review. Zealotry of anything will cause you to be blind to some extent. The zealotry that is the core of most computer fights isn’t what most people think it is. Most people find themselves in three basic camps: Mac, Windows, or Linux/Unix.

Analyzing the problem further you will find that the real difference between all of these is the interface. The interface is how you interact with the computer. Mac people learned when their computers turned from Motorola processors to Intel that the guts became the same as everybody elses. They learned even earlier when Mac went to OSX that the core became Unix. Briefly returning to the aforementioned debate, the other person disagreed with my assessment of Windows 7 because the interface was easier to use for him. Joe Average User will never flip his lid over the look of Windows 7. Linux users have learned this the hard way. The major Linux interfaces are Gnome and KDE. Both of these have added all kinds of crazy effects, transitions, shading, etc. to better the eye candy in Mac and Windows. In actuality it can look much better than what either of the others can do. At that point they realized, “It’s not how pretty it looks. It’s usability. How easy it is to use.”

Usability is an area that Mac excels at. A Mac is a pretty easy piece of equipment to learn to use for the most part. With that said, it does however have the reputation of not being useful for higher level work or tweakers. Just creative types and people just typing papers and getting on the Internet. These areas seem to be some of the commonly said weaknesses of Linux. My friend’s believe in Windows 7 being easier to use goes even deeper than usability though. It strikes at the heart of my own zealotry. Input devices.

The monitor, mouse and keyboard have changed very little for the last 30+ years. We love these devices. They are near and dear to us. Have we reached the end of the interface road though? If you ever saw the move “Minority Report” you will be aware of Tom Cruise moving items in the air on a two dimensional projection in the sky. Many companies have come out with prototypes of this technology after Microsoft released video of it’s “Microsoft Surface” technology to come out to the public soon. Is this the next step? Even though keyboard changes like the Dvorak (no connection to publication famous John C. Dvorak) style keyboard were introduced in 1936, before the computer even came out, it has not been adopted because we don’t like massive changes in our inputs and interfaces.

So, all that to say the big question: “Have we reached the end of what we can get out of what we are using?” I really can’t picture how much more can be done that will totally blow the mind until virtual reality and 3D projection come but the future always holds some new surprises.

Posted in My humble opinion | 1 Comment »

November 3, 2009 by phillip.

I have received quite a few calls, emails and such lately about Windows 7. “Should I buy it now?” is the common jist of the conversation. Being the kind of person that I am, I never like to make uninformed opinions on things. So, of course I have to be one of the early adopters of most new things related to computers or the Internet because sooner or later someone will ask me about it. First, let me give you a little bit of background so you see where I’m coming from.

Computers are to make your life productive, comfortable and easier. Stick with that in mind whenever you’re making a purchase. My job as the tech guy is to tweak your choices to suit your life better. Now, think back. Microsoft gave you Microsoft Office 2007 and what did you get that you already didn’t have in Office 2003? Very little if anything at all. Apple people just saw this with the new version of Mac OSX Snow Leopard. All the fanfare and when I got it on a laptop it hearkened back to the great old Wendy’s commercial slogan from the 80’s. “Where’s the beef?”

Upgrades for the most part now days are like selling new cars. How much different is this car from the other one? Well… other than the different shell. A turtle with a new shell is still a turtle. He’s just shiny now. Software vendors have learned something from auto companies. Toyota wanted to market to a higher class audience so they made up the company Lexus and use the same engines but put on a nicer shell. Honda, Ford and a few others have done the same. Windows Vista got a well deserved bad wrap from consumers so what do they do? Throw a new shell on it and call it a different name.

With all that said, I am liking Windows 7 for the most part only because it’s an upgrade from Vista. Nothing like standing next to the unattractive person to make yourself look just a little bit better. It boots up a little faster but still slower than Mac and Linux. Gaming isn’t fully working but I am still using the pre-release version. I can’t say that I’ve experienced too many problems with networking either but things working faster than Vista is still a major selling point. Now here’s the clincher and listen to me good. If you have Windows XP running I don’t see any reason to change. Windows 7 will actually take away features in XP like remote desktop so they can sell it to you in the higher end version for $100 more.

This is why I relate this new upgrade to an angry stampede of turtles. Usually a stampede would have the ferocity of wild elephants with dust, vicious tusks and chaos. You see it coming in the distance and it’s unavoidable. In this case, the stampede is coming in the distance. Those new shells are menacing. Those turtles look pretty angry. Let’s keep it real though people. Those are still just dressed up turtles. Stand still and let this upgrade stampede pass you by. You won’t even get dust on your shoes.

P.S.: I get all the features of Windows 7 and more with Linux or free software on XP and Yes, I know that it’s a tortoise with legs and a turtle with fins but turtle sounds so much better.

Posted in Windows | 4 Comments »

October 17, 2009 by phillip.

If you are a user of Vuze (formerly Azureus even though it’s been long enough to stop saying that) then you may be encountering the same problem that I’ve been encountering. Vuze (on all platforms) crashes or freezes when you add a torrent.

The fix is as follows. Go to:  Tools -> Options -> Connection

Under Connection uncheck the box that says “Prompt for selection when a tracker with an anonymous  tracker is added”.

DONE. That was easy. Vuze has already acknowledged this problem and issued a patch but this will work for now.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »