Tag: Stats Page

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Stats Page Version 3.4.0: Correcting Some Design Mistakes

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Ever since I started working on version 3.0 of the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, one of the design decisions that I made when it came to the individual host, scorekeeper, panelist and guest pages was to use the specially encoded names in the URL. The encoding process would convert certain characters, such as a space, into their URL-encoded version, or “%20” in the case of a space. Well, looking back, that was not really the smartest way of doing it; and, ever since version 3.0 was published back in 2014, I was afraid of breaking any links that may have been created with that URL format and did not have a lot of spare time to re-design the whole thing. As months and years went by, that problem lingered in the back of my head. Fast forward to this month, where …

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Getting a Shout Out From Paula Poundstone on Late Show with Stephen Colbert

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Paula Poundstone was one of the guests on the Friday night edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert has been on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! as a guest twice and is a very regular listener to the show, he brought up the topic of Wait Wait with Paula. The Wait Wait talk starts at the 3:29 mark in the video below: Paula said that she didn’t know how many times she has been on the show and Colbert said that his research department noted that she has been on 201 times. Paula then mentioned that I keep stats on everything Wait Wait. She also states that she holds the record for losses on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. Looking at the panelist stats, for the show data that I have recorded, Paula does hold the honor of coming in third place the …

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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.