I have finished entering in show descriptions for all Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! shows from the very beginning up to the latest show; as well as, going back and cleaning up the description for the earliest shows.
The next set of statistics that I will start collecting and entering are the Not My Job and panelist scores for the shows that I have audio for. I will work on collecting Bluff the Listener information as well. The latter will be displayed in the next version of the Stats Page.
A few months ago, I decided that I wanted to go to a live taping of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! in Chicago on the week leading up the fifth birthday of the Stats Page going live to the public. So, I made plans with the staff of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! and booked my flight and hotel rooms for most of that week.
Thursday night, I walked over to Chase Tower (I had booked the hotel that was on the next block over) and went down to the lobby of the Auditorium in which the show is normally taped at. There were already a lot of fans queued up to get their tickets; so I joined the queue. When I got up to the table, I was marked down as a VIP and waited in the VIP area. Before the show, I got a chance to meet Peter, Carl, Kyrie, Mo, Simon (which made his first appearance as a panelist that night) and the rest of the crew backstage for a quick meet and greet.
Backstage with Kyrie O’Connor, Peter Sagal, Mo Rocca and Robert Neuhaus
Backstage with Mo Rocca, Robert Neuhaus and the crew
After that, I went to my seat in the front row, right in front of Carl Kasell’s podium and was seated next to his wife. Within a few moments, the panelists came out on stage, along with Peter and Carl.
Peter Sagal, Mo Rocca, Kyrie O’Connor and Simon Amstell on stage
Carl Kasell, Peter Sagal and Mo Rocca on stage
At that point, the show started and so did the fun… big time! Simon Amstell stole the night with his style of wit and humour. Simon seemed to have taken up a child-like curiosity about everything American, had a pretty blasé attitude about the whole Royal Wedding, got into things that are definitely not G-rated (mentioning things like “vagina” and “pornography”), went well past any politically correct lines with his Panelist Prediction, and had a “potty emergency” in the middle of taping. There were many moments in which Simon’s behavior caused Peter to crack up completely. During the Panelist and Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank rounds, Simon officially took the crown of taking excruciating amounts of time to answer questions away from Mo (who was also on the panel). All of this lead to a long taping session, a longer than normal re-tape of several sections, and a lot of material cut out from the radio and podcast version.
Once all of the taping was completed, Peter transitioned over to an audience Q&A session and mentioned two special guests in the audience (Carl’s wife and myself). After that, Peter, Carl and the panelists were available for photos and autographs.
Post show meet and greet
Post show meet and greet
Carl Kasell signing autographs at the post show meet and greet
I was able to snag the autographs of the panelists on the back of the pad that I used to jot down notes during the live taping:
Later, I went across the street for a brief after-show get-together with Kyrie, Mo, Carl and his wife. There, I was able to answer some of Mo and Kyrie’s questions about their own appearances, etc.
All in all, it was an awesome night and I would love to be able to do it again soon. Huge thanks to Peter, Carl, Kyrie, Mo, Simon and the whole Wait Wait gang for the great show and allowing me to get a peek behind the scenes!
This weekend marks five years since I have made the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!: Show Details and Statistics Page (also known as the “Stats Page”) available to the general public. Although the original site was coded and the underlying database had been around for about a month, it was not ready for general public consumption. The announcement of the site was made on my personal blog on 29 July 2012 and the site had been hosted on a server at home.
Over the past five years, there have been a lot of data collected and entered into the data, new features have been added (including links back to each show’s page on NPR.org and panelist first and most recent appearances) and the site was mentioned on Peter Sagal’s blog and on his Twitter stream. The site has since been moved to the cloud and has a much easier to remember URL: wwdt.me/stats
Also, during that time, I have also personally been mentioned on the show several times, including: being the listener contestant the Not My Job segment on 2009-04-25 in which Monica Seles answered zero questions correctly, being a listener contestant on the Who’s Carl This Time? round on the 2011-04-23 show, and who can forget the whole “Mo Rocca, the World’s Worst Obstetrician Dot Net” bit?
As mentioned in other posts on this blog, I am currently working on a complete code re-work for the Stats Page to bring any of the feature requests that fans have submitted over the past five years. The new site will include panelist point breakdowns, which bluff was chosen and which bluff was correct, and where each show is recorded. Granted, a lot of that data has yet to be collected and I don’t have access to some of the oldest shows to be able to collect all of that data. Some of that will take time and others will be lost in the Ether.
Thank you everyone for their comments and suggestions for the Stats Page and for checking it out!
Over the past week, I have been working on the last remaining pieces of the new Stats Page and its underlying database structure. Well, I have finally finished writing up the code to grab and display the location in which shows are recorded at. I still have not entered any real data for it yet; but, it is ready for when I am able to get that data in.
To verify that I have the code working, I wired it up to the test script that I have been using. The following is a snippet from that script’s output. Note the field called “Show Location”.
I still haven’t had a chance to work on the web presentation layer yet.
In efforts to make linking to specific Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! shows on NPR’s website easier, I have created a simple URL shortening system that anyone can use. In fact, I have already updated the current Stats Page to use the new URLs to reduce the overall page size.
There are two formats for the new shortened URLs:
To use either, just replace “YYYY” with the four-digit year, “MM” with the two digit month and “DD” with the two digit day. For example, to link to this past week’s page on NPR.org, the shortened URLs are: http://wwdt.me/s/20120721 and http://wwdt.me/s/2012-07-21.
There are some sanity checks to verify that there is a show corresponding to the date in the URL. If there isn’t, it will redirect you to the Stats Page.
Although Paula mistakenly noted right before her turn in this week’s Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round that she had won the last three times that she has been on. In fact, Paula had won the last four games that she was on:
Right before she took her turn, she was attempting to do some humble-bragging. After answering five questions correct, Paula had won that round; thus, extending her winning streak to five games.
Now, for a little bit of additional trivia about Paula’s five game winning streak:
I anxiously wait to see what happens the next time Paula is on the show!
I just found out about a lovely issue with the WordPress Jetpack Comments plugin in which any comments submitted to the site go into the Ether. Unfortunately, I didn’t find out about it until this evening when testing something else. For those that have tried to post comments to blog posts, I apologize for the problem and frustration.
The issue was due to a conflict between the Jetpack plugin and the CAPTCHA plugin that I use to reduce spam. I have fixed the issue and submitting comments now work.
Sigh…
During the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank (LFinB) round for the 16 June 2012 show, Maz Jobrani had answered six questions correctly (as confirmed by Peter saying yes, correct or right six times and by the six dings). Unfortunately, Carl only noted that Maz Jobrani had five correct answers for 10 more points for a total of 13 points.
If you check out the show’s transcript for the LFitB round, you will notice that there are six “(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)” listed for Maz’s portion of the round.
Due to the miscount of correct answers, Maz Jobrani ended up being second rather than tying with Amy Dickinson, who also had and was credited for 6 correct answers, for first place.
Until Peter and/or Carl officially correct the record, the stats page will show the current official scores and rankings. Once the record has been corrected, I will update the stats page to reflect that. My guess is that Maz will be afforded the same “win” pass the next time he is on the show, just like when the same thing happened to Paula Poundstone (gypped two points on the 2007-09-01 show and got a “win” pass on the 2007-09-22 show).
Over the past couple of days, I have been working on completing all of the PHP code required to query the WWDTM Stats Page database. Tonight, at the end of my two week sprint, I have reached that all important milestone and have successfully written a test to make sure it works.
Warning: this following contains a fair amount of programming talk. If you are not a programmer, please ignore the rest of this post ;)
The current version of the WWDTM Stats Page code has grown into a real mess and has become more and more difficult to add new features. The primary goal with version 2.0 is to write almost everything from scratch using proper class objects and breaking up code into manageable modules.
First, I also decided to move to the newer PEAR::MDB2 database access API from the older PEAR::DB package. Next, I wanted to build a new class that uses a Singleton code pattern to eliminate the need to create new database connections for each query and to reduce the amount of redundant code.
I have also decided to not depend on stored procedures as that would allow for easier database query optimization and allows me to possibly change out the underlying database with something different that may not support stored procedures.
While writing out the new data access code, I simultaneously wrote out various unit tests and testing scripts. The latest test script returns show information for a specific year. This test script will be the basis for building out the presentation layer, as the new site will only show the information for the requested year by default. Why? Showing information for every single show that I have in the database has caused the current page to be exceeding long and large to download. On the new site, the option to view all years’s information will be available, but it won’t be the default.
Below is a snippet of the test script’s output. Please note that there is very little formatting and no attempt to make it easy to read. The point to make sure all of the requested data is there and no errors are generated.
For my next sprints, I will be focusing on the first stab at the presentation layer. My hope is to have something presentable as an early preview by the night that I’m in Chicago for a WWDTM taping in late July.
For all of the Wait Wait fans out there that also are into database designs, you are in for a small treat. Below is an EER diagram of the recently updated database used to house the statistics and other information for the Stats Page. You can view the diagram in its full-sized glory by clicking on this link.
My goal is to get the database data and tables as normalized as possible by way of mapping tables. As you can see from the “ww_showpnlmap” table that I have fields for recording: how many points each panelist had, how many points each panelist had before and how many questions the panelists answered correctly during the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round. I don’t have data for every single show or panelist at this point.
Right now, there is one additional mapping table that I will need to create before I can start entering data about where each show was recorded.
That’s all that of a sneak peek I have for you today. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them as comments.