Blog Posts

Fact Check: The Number of Times Amy Dickinson Has Beaten Luke Burbank

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At the Live Wire! Radio taping this past Saturday, Amy Dickinson was one of a number of guests on the show. When Luke Burbank, the host of Live Wire!, introduced Amy on to the stage, he stated that Amy had beaten Luke 14 times on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!. While I understand that the quip was done in jest and in a self-deprecating manner, my Wait Wait Stats portion of my brain went into overdrive and I started to wonder how many times Amy actually beat Luke. Before I go into the actual numbers, as taping of the second show started, I tweeted out a screenshot of both Luke’s and Amy’s current stats on the show: In case you were curious on how @AskingAmy fares against @lukeburbank on @waitwait. Both on @LiveWireRadio tonight. pic.twitter.com/tHbq5vMT1P — Linh Pham (@questionlp) May 31, 2015 In case …

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My Interview on “Little Red Bandwagon” with Some Wait Wait Talk

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In addition to running the Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, I also run and manage an archive of sorts for (Wait Wait panelist) Luke Burbank’s podcast, Too Beautiful To Live, called the “Marsupial Gurgle” (it’s a TBTL in-joke). With the recent re-launch of the Marsupial Gurgle archive, I was invited to be on a guest on a podcast about TBTL called, Little Red Bandwagon. As part of being a guest on the podcast, the topic of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! came up and I discussed some of the behind the scenes bits regarding scoring and what-not. My segment on the show starts at around the 1:16:15 mark.

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Interactive Wait Wait Stats Infographic

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A couple of months ago, Erin Flachsbart sent me a message asking if I would be interested in helping out a project that she would like to start up. The project was to create an interactive infographic that was based on the Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! panelist and show stats that I have been collecting (and continuing to collect) over the years. Over the course of the project, I provided Erin with database schema and database backups that she can go through and play with the data. I also provided some insights, and apologies for not having a lot of back data on panelist bluffs and show location information. With the project completed, Erin posted the awesome interactive infographic on her site at: mataglap.com/waitwait. I’m humbled to be able to assist in providing data and insights for the project. Thanks Erin!

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Year in Review: Wait Wait Stats Page and Other Happenings

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The past year has been a fairly busy year for me in the world of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! in terms of the Stats Page and attending live tapings of the show. At the beginning of the year, I posted a preview of version 3.0 of the Stats Page, something that had been in development starting in the latter half of 2013. Version 3.0 brought a set of huge changes to the site, including a completely rework of the site’s code and a full redesign of the actual site itself. Prior to version 3.0, the site had been rendered as one monolithic page containing one large table for each year of show data. The site’s code, which had been and continues to be written in PHP, was also an unwieldy monster and made it difficult to update and maintain. Version 3.0 allowed for a …

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Slight Change of Plans: Wait Wait Stats Page Version 3.3.5

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As mentioned in the last blog post about upcoming developments for the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, version 3.4.0 would be introducing both a new set of stats and graphs. In addition, version 3.4.0 would also include the descriptions that judge and scorekeeper Bill Kurtis uses to introduce himself at the beginning of each show. Due to unforeseen complexities of feeding the queried data into the appropriate graphing functions, I will be releasing version 3.3.5 this weekend that will include Bill Kurtis’s descriptions in each of the show’s infobox.

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Working on Wait Wait Stats Page Versions 3.3.0 and 3.4.0

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For the past month, I have been working on making a number of changes and updates to the Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page to make working on the site’s code a bit easier to manage. The changes won’t change the user experience of the Stats Page in any meaningful way; though, it does optimize how the panelist charts pull the required data and when it is rendered. Although the update will not include any new features (more on that in a bit), the version bump a few, significant behind-the-scenes updates. The biggest updates come from updating the code framework, Silex, to the latest and greatest version, optimizing the code that generates the HTML code, and finally, breaking some of the larger code blocks into separate modules for more efficient code review and fixes. Version 3.3.0 of the Stats Page should go live sometime during …