Tag: Data

Blog Posts

Bluff the Listener, Not My Job and Lightning Data Collected and Entered for 2001 onward

 ,

Due to the ongoing pandemic scuppering my plans to visit Chicago and go to a Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! live taping on my 40th birthday, I decided to take some time off of work and do some catch-up work on the Wait Wait Stats Page side of things. So, over the past few days, I have been collecting and entering in the missing data for theBluff the Listener segment data (correct and chosen panelists), Not My Job scores, and some of the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank segment starting score and correct answers. Up until recently, I was missing a varying amount of data for 2001 through 2012. For the most part, I scanned through each of the segment audio or full show audio, that I’ve been able to coax off of NPR’s public servers, and record the data as I went along. Something that I …

Blog Posts

The 1000th* Show Taping and New Wait Wait Stats Reports

 , , , , ,

Back in March 2019, I was working with Colin Miller at Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! on a request to pull data regarding the various Wait Wait shows that have aired; especially, getting data on shows that excluded Best Of or Repeat shows. The purpose of the request would later be revealed to be trying to determine when the 1000th* original show would land on the schedule. In July, the date and the location for the taping of the 1000th* show would start to solidify. The show would be taped in Salt Lake City, Utah and on Thursday, October 24th. Why Salt Lake City? The very first time that Wait Wait was taped in front of a live audience was at Jewett Center at Westminster College in Salt Lake City back in January 2000. So, it would be apropos that Wait Wait would also …

Blog Posts

Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats API is Live

 , ,

For the past few years, people have requested access to the data that I have been collecting for the Wait Wait Stats Page to play around with the data or build a brilliant, interactive infographic. Each of those requests would require that a data export of the requested tables or a MySQL/MariaDB database dump to be created and sent over to the requester. Of course, those exports and database dumps are just snapshots of the data and another request was needed to get update data each time. That got me thinking about what it would take to create an API service that people can use to get data directly from the Stats Page database. At that time, I wasn’t sold on the idea of extending the PHP codebase that is used for the current Stats Page; as, I was looking at doing a completely …