trendpreneur

I often get asked about my dreadlocks and since today’s been the semi-regular Dreadlock Aftercare Day, here’s a post devoted to them.

People who aren’t that familiar with dreads often get quite curious about various aspects of the hairstyle, and of course the personal reasons behind choosing and maintaining it. First off is age, of course — I’ve had mine for what’s approaching three years now, and although dreads in their early months are easy to spot, mine haven’t drastically changed much beyond the first year (other than length and losing fluffiness).
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It’s an unfortunate working habit of mine that when I get deeply involved in one project, things which edge towards ‘vanity’ rather than ‘work’ tend to get left by the wayside for a bit. Even when totally stuck on something, rather than spend time away from the problem on another project, I tend to get furiously depressed and do something entirely different, like play videogames (which I need to stop pretending are real work) or comfort shop.

Apologies over and duly marked for a post about productivity, here’s what kickstarted me back into the real world a little – Paris! Thanks to TechCrunch UK, I’m off to LeWeb this year, something I had already ruled out as being “omgwtfhowmuch?” i.e. well out of my budget. I’m really excited now, the conference seems to combine a lot of really interesting themes, with a heavy emphasis on startups. It’s going to be fun.

Given the timing of LeWeb, I might spend a few days in London beforehand, due to a couple of events on around that time. Somewhat frightening that I can’t remember the last time I was down there, rather than just travelling through. I do, however, have very distinct recollections of Oxford Street Christmas shopping around this time of year. No thanks…

In between spending time playing the latest World of Warcraft expansion (ah, the joys of a sideline job in gaming) I’ve been working on a demo app, codenamed “hot or not”. Not a great codename, mind, since that’s exactly what it is…

However, it’s kind of interesting to see how many design challenges even something this simple throws up: assuming we have an algorithm that can take something and return a number representing popularity, how do we build an app around that? If our algorithm depends on input but we want to find an overall ‘top n’ list, do we need to resolve named entities or can we cheat a little with term frequency? What data sources do we use? Do others publish data we can use to bootstrap or otherwise kickstart the system? Should we restrict by topic (and thus invoke clustering) or use overall statistics? What about different terms that refer to the same thing (lexicon resolution)? The list goes on.

I’m certainly beginning to see why natural language projects rarely make it out into the wild, though that’s hardly going to get in my way. It’s fascinating what you can do when you have a core algorithm primed and a language toolbox at the ready, in terms of different toys and products you can build — the trouble is pinning everything down!

I’ve been wrestling with Python all day, so what better excuse than a digression into gaming (again). World of Warcraft’s second expansion is out tonight, so I suppose I’m just putting my WoW Insider hat on a bit early…

Speaking to someone recently about MMOs, he admitted that the fantasy and sci-fi theming of most popular games put him off. “If only it were a bit more realistic…”

My instant counter was that, despite the fantasy setting, a game like WoW is realistic in many ways. At a very basic level, once you’re immersed in the game and playing with a lot of other people, the elves/dwarves/orcs/dragons setting becomes mostly inconsequential. Conversation in-game is mostly about the real world, there are countless nods to popular culture in the game itself, and skills such as guild management, auctioneering and finances are remarkably applicable outside of Azeroth.
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We had a really informative talk today about the investment process from a lawyer’s point of view, a subject which often seems to be covered via word-of-mouth and coaching from those who’ve been there, rather than laid out in a simple and clear fashion as it was today.

I’ve got plans for the notes that go beyond a blog post, so while the world stays in suspense, I thought I’d share a tip from a more experienced entrepreneur – let’s call him Kevin, as that’s his name – about due diligence and document organisation.

What Kevin does is to scan every important document his company deals with and back them all up to the company’s servers online. Whether it’s incorporation paperwork or grants, loan agreements, supplier and customer letters, etc; everything gets a virtual home. When it comes to due diligence, all he has to do is give them access to this repository of documents, and that’s it. Paperwork made easy.

What sort of stuff should you make copies of, and how should it be organised? A due diligence checklist like this one can help to give some idea of the headings documents can come under. Personally, I’m thinking maybe even a wiki format might work for general information organisation, where important hardcopy PDFs can be attached ready for future due diligence, but more volatile information can simply be edited with an audit trail. Of course, security is really important if you’re storing this stuff online, but that’s another story.