If You Want To Become A Better Writer, First Become A Better Listener
Six years ago, when I started Opinionbypen, I had a goal to become a better writer. Somehow I assumed that the constant practice provided by weekly posts would miraculously improve my writing. That’s certainly not the first thing I’ve ever been wrong about. Think...
Dessert Selection, A Description of One Engineer’s Decision Process
My wife constantly tells me that nobody but an engineer thinks the way I do. I say she’s exaggerating but in an attempt to keep peace in the family I’ve agreed to a test. I’ll write about an ordinary decision process and leave it up to my readers. The Decision...
An AI Assistant Comparison, Alexa, Google and Folgers?
Once they hit the market, it was a given that sooner or later I would acquire one of the AI assistants on the market. The only thing holding me back was bandwidth and cost. When Google dropped the price on their mini and Amazon dropped the price on their Dot. I was...
A Very Personal Look At The Engineering Decision Making Process
I’ve written a number of posts about how engineers think and make decisions, so I was stunned when my Wife questioned my decision making process and demanded details. My first response was to deny any malfeasance on my part but when I recovered my composure I...
A Plea For An End To Tiny Instruction Manuals
One of the movies being released this Christmas is Downsizing, a tale of people being shrunk to reduce their cost of living by reducing the resources needed to support them. It’s a sad commentary on our current state of affairs that my first thought was they would be...From the Doghouse -It’s all about them
A look at dogs having fun!
Short Stories
With posts like these, ever wonder what kind of fiction I would write?
Random Posts
Amazon’s Secret Weapon, No Will Call LinesWhen I needed 200 aluminum fence stays, I found them for $19 at Amazon and $11 at Lowe’s but I still bought them from Amazon. The decision wasn’t made because I’m a loyal dedicated Amazon shopper. It was a simple matter of economics. When I calculated all the costs, Amazon …
Musings on Parallel UniversesAll my life I’ve been fascinated by the concept of parallel universes. You know what I mean, universes that coexist with ours, having only minor differences. Then again, maybe you don’t know what I mean. The idea goes something like this. Every time you make a decision, a universe exists …
Why Do I Need To Change My Passwords So Frequently?I was in a discussion about passwords a few days ago when somebody mentioned that it was a good idea to change your passwords frequently. That sounds good on the face of it but if you have a strong password should you change it frequently? It’s that frequent changing that …
FocusIn gaming, you get to pick specific attributes that contribute to your characters success. Real life is similar, but we don’t get to choose our attributes. In a way I was lucky, one of my strongest attributes is focus. For an engineer, the ability to focus on a problem is …
Outsourcing Our Mind To Gadgets, The Sad Case For HumanityWhen my wife was complaining that she no longer remembered any phone numbers, her phone took care of that, I remembered something Kurzweil said in his book, we were outsourcing our mind to our machines. Remembering phone numbers is certainly not the only function we’ve outsourced to our gadgets. I …