Wanted: Recordings for Two Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Shows

Over the past two months, I have received the recordings for the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! shows aired in 1998 and 1999 from the Special Collections at the University of Maryland. There was one recording they had listed for Wait Wait for May 23, 1998, but the program had been preempted by an airing of "Rock & Roll America."

(Read more...)

Wait Wait Stats Update: Decimal Scores Part Two

While I continue to listen to the Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! shows that aired in 1998, I ran across an episode where panelists would start the, then relatively now, Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank segment with half-points. Since I didn't account for that when I went through updating the wwdtm library and all of the Wait Wait Stats-related sites, I had to go back and make additional changes.

(Read more...)

Wait Wait Stats: New Versions Published

As a follow-up to my last blog post, I have published the latest versions of the Wait Wait Stats applications and API to production. The wwdtm package has also been published to PyPI, and docs.wwdt.me has been updated with docs for the new version.

(Read more...)

Wait Wait Stats Update: Decimal Scores

Since publishing the "Wait Wait Shows From 1998 to 1999" blog post, I have listened to the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! shows that aired from January 1998 through April 1998. While listening to those shows, I was surprised that panelists could receive half points during various segments. This forced me to think of what changes I would need to create in the various Wait Wait Stats applications and the Stats database.

(Read more...)

Wait Wait Shows From 1998 to 1999

A while back, after being able to download Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! shows that aired back to 2000, I worked with the folks at Wait Wait and NPR to request access to the shows that aired in 1998 and 1999. At that time, the NPR Rights and Permissions group would need some time to see if and how they could provide me access to those shows. After a few months, I did not hear back from them and moved on with other things.

(Read more...)

Homelab Upgrade: TrueNAS Mini X+

In my "Homelab Setup: Storage" blog post, I mentioned that I have a Synology DS918+ NAS (network-attached storage) server that houses my music, video, photos, and game collection. Also, I stated that I might be looking at either replacing it or augmenting my network storage with a second NAS.

(Read more...)

Wait Wait Comes Back to Portland!

It has been six years since Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! has taped a show at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon, and it has been almost four years since I have been to a taping (the 1000th show taping in Salt Lake City, Utah). I had planned a visit to Chicago for my 40th birthday celebration in 2020, but something happened globally months before that scuppered the plan.

To say that I was excited when I heard that Wait Wait was coming back to Portland would be an understatement.

(Read more...)

Homelab Setup: July 2023 Update

Since publishing the "Homelab Setup: Servers" post back in February, I have made several changes and updates to my homelab; including, some consolidation of workloads and an update on the storage side of things.

Update: There has been a little shuffling around with the Raspberry Pi 4 boards that are currently in use since this post was written. The "Raspberry Pi Updates" section has been updated to reflect the latest changes.

(Read more...)

Wait Wait Stats Updates: June 2023

June has, so far, been a pretty quiet month for any development work for the suite of Wait Wait Stats-related sites. Work and other projects have kept me a lot busier than I would have liked; and, I don't see that changing too much in the coming months.

I was able to sneak out an update for the Wait Wait Stats API to update a few dependencies which had some important updates and fixes, including security vulnerabilities.

More information is available in the project's CHANGELOG.md.

I am excited to be going to the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! taping here in Portland, Oregon on Thursday, July 20th.

Wait Wait Stats Updates: May 2023 Part Two

In the past couple of weeks, I have been working on a few updates to the Wait Wait Stats Page, Wait Wait Reports Site, and the Wait Wait Graphs Site.

Below is a breakdown of the updates to each of the sites.

(Read more...)

Wait Wait Stats Updates: May 2023

In the past couple of weeks, I published updates to the wwdtm library, and the Wait Wait Stats Page, Wait Wait Reports and Wait Wait Graphs web applications.

For version 2.1.0 of the wwdtm library, I have consolidated the pytest configuration into the project's pyproject.toml file and migrated away from using setup.cfg and setup.py for package building.

(Read more...)

wwdtm Version 2.0.9 Released

I have updated the wwdtm library to version 2.0.9, which includes bumping the version of MySQL Connector/Python to 8.0.33 and NumPy to 1.24.2. The former is done as a very initial step towards support for the upcoming Python 3.12 release later in the year.

(Read more...)

Handheld Consoles Part 1: Game Boy

Over the last couple of years, I've been on a quest of rounding out the collection of video game handheld consoles with original hardware or ones that have been modified to some modern creature comforts. In this series of posts, I want to go over the handhelds that I now have in my collection and give my take on them.

For the first post, I'll start where I all began for me, the Nintendo Game Boy.

(Read more...)

Wait Wait Stats Updates: March 2023

With the release of Materialize version 1.2.2, I have updated both the Wait Wait Stats Page and Wait Wait Graphs Site to use the new version of the CSS framework.

In addition to updating the version of Materialize for the Graphs Site, the Plotly.js graphing library was also updated to 1.20.0.

Lastly, the version of Pure CSS used by the Wait Wait Reports Site was also updated to 2.2.0.

(Read more...)

Homelab Setup: Storage

In the last two posts in the series about my homelab, I covered the server and network portion of the homelab. This post will cover the storage side of things.

(Read more...)

Homelab Setup: Networking

This is the second series of posts where I provide a view into my homelab. In the first post covered the servers that I have and what I have running on them.

In this post, I'll cover the networking side of the homelab.

(Read more...)

Homelab Setup: Servers

As I mentioned in my last post, "nutters: Flask UPS Monitoring Web Application," I have a small homelab set up at home that includes a few systems that act as servers, storage, and networking devices.

I am starting a series of posts that will provide a bit of a view into my homelab and explain why I opted to go down a certain route. In this post, I'll cover the computers that I have that act as my servers.

(Read more...)

nutters: Flask UPS Monitoring Web Application

After picking up a second UPS battery backup unit to provide backup power for my cable modem and a few items in my A/V stack that is located too far away from the primary UPS for my server and networking stack. I wanted to create something really simple and lightweight that can display information such as UPS load, battery charge level, and estimated battery run time.

(Read more...)

Wait Wait Stats Apps Updated

One of the dependencies for the Flask framework, Werkzeug, was updated to fix a security vulnerability that can be exploited in a DoS attack. Since the Wait Wait Stats Page, Wait Wait Stats Graphs site, and the Wait Wait Reports site all depend on Flask, I have updated the required version of Flask and Werkzeug to 2.2.3 for both.

The changes have been published to their respective GitHub-hosted repositories and the instances of applications running on the production server have been updated.

Wait Wait Graphs Updated to Version 2.2.2

Version 2.2.2 of Wait Wait Graphs has been published; which, updates the version of the Plotly.js library from 2.17.0 to 2.18.1. The new version has also been deployed to the Wait Wait Graphs Site.

For information on the changes to the Plotly.js library, check out their Releases page on GitHub.

Wait Wait Stats Infrastructure Updates

Up through today, the infrastructure that hosts the Wait Wait Stats Page and its related sites is made up of 6 servers running on DigitalOcean (referral link):

(Read more...)

Announcing minima-plex Theme for Jekyll

As part of setting up a personal blog, I spent a fair amount of time trying out applications (including WriteFreely) and several static-site generators (including Jekyll and Hugo).

I settled on using Jekyll as I didn't want to use yet-another-application on one of my servers, I liked the idea of simply writing posts in Markdown, using Git for versioning, and it can be hosted through GitHub Pages or other similar services.

(Read more...)

Wait Wait Stats Project Updates

New versions of the Wait Wait Stats Page and the Wait Wait Graphs site have been published, mostly to update the version of the Materialize used by the sites (from 1.1.0 to 1.2.1) and to update the copyright year and blocks in each of the code files.

(Read more...)

Hello World!

Hello everyone! 👋🏼

It has been many years since I have maintained a personal blog and I have decided to start one back up.

You can find out more about me on the About page.

(Read more...)