Almost two years ago, I decided I was going to sit down and make some changes to my life. I had just finished a four year stint at microsoft, felt burnt out on tech, gotten out of shape due to working regular sixty hour weeks in front of a computer and smoking like a chimney. I sat down and thought about what it was that I wanted to achieve and came up with a list of stuff that I wanted to do. I decided to focus on accomplishing three -smoking, weight loss, and starting a company. I did several things to accomplish these goals, but one of the best, and easiest, was just changing my home page.
Nowadays, when I open up my browser in the morning, I’m greated with three pages. They are as follows: (my company) entrenza.com’s beta page, gmail, and foremost – a google docs spreadsheet entitled yyyy-mm goals and actions. The beta page is related to one of these goals, but lets talk about the spreadsheet. It’s really simple and looks something like this:

It’s been a pretty successful system. I don’t worry about huge strides, I just worry about accomplishing, one thing towards each goal each day. So far, ‘ve registered a LLC and and have regularly worked part time on a startup for over a year. We’re right about to go into beta. As for getting in shape, when I left seattle two years ago and got my California license, it listed my weight at 205lbs. I renewed last week and had 185lbs on it. Prior to leaving Seattle, you could add another 20 lbs to that. I no longer smoke.

I don’t know if this will be useful to anyone else, but I’ve had some success with it, and who knows, maybe it will work for you. If you try it out, I’d love to hear from you and see how it goes.

I’ve been working on a startup project on the side for almost a year now – focusing on pattern recognition, natural language processing stuff, and predictive statistical modeling… it’s been fun. At the core, we’ve put together a language analysis engine which looks at a chunk of text and figures out if it’s positive or negative. In researching this as a problem, we’ve determined that if you take three individuals, and then have them categorize the same random text (blog, article, website, tweet, etc) they will agree 63% of the time. There’s a little bit of variance depending on what’s shown, but plus or minus a couple percentage points, is about how accurate a human is. We’ve gone through several different models in doing the predictions, and tweaked the algorithm quite a bit over multiple different versions, but we recently hit a pretty major milestone – we’re now rating articles, or our engine is, with a 70+% accuracy rate. In other words, if we rate something as positive (meaning the author felt positive about whatever they were writing) 70% of the time, the human will agree with how we rated it. ^_^

We’re better at determining human opinion than the average human is.

We’re going to be going into beta soon, on a service that will allow you to track how positive or negative your brand is, by tracking the mentions on the internet – effectively doing sentiment analysis and tracking; if you’re interested, you can sign up here. You can read more about the project in general at www.entrenza.com.

Thanks to Steve & Jesse & Ben, my co-collaborators on the project for making this happen!

I’m thinking, along w/ some people I’m working on a start-up with, of running a contest to help up “train” the back end “artificial intelligence engine” which is used in our software.

Here’s the gist: you would log-in to a website, and be presented w/ an “article” – this would be a blog, website, etc. you would then rate it as positive, negative, & so forth. Anyone who rated 1000 articles in a month (each takes about 1-2 seconds) would be eligible to win a prize, which would either be an xbox 360, or a playstation 3.

So: Three questions: