Category: Advice

When I worked as an employee at Visible Technologies, I thought to myself that if I ever owned a company that I would like to pay people based on actual work output rather than just for having their butt in a chair.

Now that I do run my own company, I have found this to be nearly impossible to do.… read more “Cost Per Unit of Productivity”

Exercising every day is a big challenge for most people. What I have done to motivate myself to exercise every day is to track it in my personal goals spreadsheet that I update each day.  You can see the types of exercise I have done each day below for the last two weeks:

Only 2 days off!… read more “Every Day Exercise”

Google’s new open source language parser, SyntaxNet, seems to be nearing human levels of sentence parsing.  Trained human linguists can parse sentences with 97% accuracy, SyntaxNet can parse them with 94% accuracy… basically SyntaxNet is halfway there. If it doubles in efficiency twice, it will surpass humans.

When it surpasses humans, how far will we be from general strong artificial intelligence?… read more “SyntaxNet is Approaching Human Levels”

I think there are 4 levels of productivity an employee can have:

1. Doing work
2. Doing work + reporting on the work
3. Doing work + reporting on the work + providing insights on the work
4. Doing work + reporting on the work + providing insights on the work + taking action to improve the work based on insights.

I just finished reading the “illustrated man” by Ray Bradbury. A fascinating tale about a tattooed man whose tattoos tell stories from the future, it is a bit macabre. Entertaining though and good literature.

Managing complexity is one of the greatest challenges developers and managers face. Developers face complexity in the form of having code that can grow difficult to understand, and managers face it in businesses that become hard to comprehend. The human mind is finite and can only hold so much in it at a given time.

Developers have a number of tools and best practices to try to help make code more understandable.… read more “Complexity”

Does anyone have any suggestions for how I can improve the homepage of Coalition Technologies or our SEO services page?

I haven’t updated these in a while but am thinking about making some changes. I feel like we need to update the content to more accurately reflect how the business works now.

Robert Cortines, the superintendent of the LAUSD schools received a bomb threat and then closed all schools today. 640,000 kids were sent home along with approximately 100,000 teachers and administrators. The threat was “electronic”.. I am guessing emailed from the Tor network or something like that.

Was Robert Cortines decision the correct one?

Let’s look at the facts:

1. Of the 1,055 actual school bombings in the history of the world only 14 were preceded by a warning.

Interesting information I came across today. For a 170 pound athlete, a fat gain of 2% (or 3.4 lbs) results in a vertical jump height loss of 2″ and a 40 yard dash time increase of .26 seconds.

That is pretty crazy to me. Currently I weigh about 198 pounds and am 6’6”.  I am not fat but definitely not skinny either.… read more “Body Weight vs Speed”