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Living Dangerously in Peru
The three most dangerous things that I do in Peru.
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Lima’s World Class Bad Traffic
Lima has world class bad traffic. Why?
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Being a Tourist in Peru
I spend some of my time in Peru just being a tourist. Here are some trips we took in 2025.
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Shopping in Lima
Lima provides all kinds of shopping experiences: everything from street vendors to high end department stores in elegant shopping malls.
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Crime in Lima
Crime – and the fear of crime – has shaped the urban landscape of Lima in many ways.
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SE for Medical Devices
This post discusses four aspects of systems engineering in the medical device field that may not be covered by academic coursework. It is based on a talk that I gave to system engineering students at the University of Utah on December 2, 2024. Topic 1: Regulation Medical devices are heavily regulated by government agencies. In…
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Lessons Learned from Mentoring Modeling
The Wasatch chapter of INCOSE met with systems engineering students at the University of Utah on September 8, 2022. It was a pleasure to share some our knowledge with the students. Judging by the quality and quantity of their questions, the students also got a lot out of the event. Four of us gave presentations.…
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Working with the Worlds of the Workplace
Systems engineers encounter many different worlds within the workplace: product design, management, sales, testing, manufacturing, service and human resources. If we understand the structure and values of each of these worlds, we can work more effectively with the people that inhabit them. This post was inspired by ideas presented in the book The Dawn of…
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Schedules are Models
Schedules are models. We can use them to model various ways we might organize a project. We can then make a schedule that best meets our needs BEFORE we start executing the project. Two categories of models In this post I find it useful to make a distinction between two categories of models: scientific models…
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Parkinson’s Law for Schedules
Parkinson’s Law states that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” To plan the development of a product, we create a schedule. This schedule is a model of how we hope to proceed with the project. We use it to determine what we need to do, the best order in…