Basically the next Ken Jennings
For the last 8 or so weeks during the stay-at-home orders, KCRW hosted a live, online trivia game every afternoon at 4pm. The questions were often related to news bits that had been on the show in the previous several days, or just random facts sometimes related to the station. The bit was, if you won one of those days you were invited back to a championship showdown. Long story short, I was in a zoom conference call with my engineering team at work and am SUCH A BOSS I simultaneously logged into the championship round and won!
I received this sweet certificate
With which I sent them a selfie for this sweet shoutout on twitter and in their newsletters.
I’ve become drunk on my fame and need LA to understand that this is now my town.
But actually,
The most important part about this (well, bragging is super important but the next most important) is that when I was asked for a short bio by the nice young lady handling their events email - call her V.B., I finally spilled to KCRW the existence of http://www.eightyninenine.com. I’ve been pretty reluctant to ever share it publically just because of 1) worrying i’m somehow violating some kind of policy and would be asked to shut it down or B) it isn’t in a perfect state and if many people visited at once it would most definitely crash. However, in a great stroke of serendipity, Damien and I had actually spent several hours recently revamping the look and optimizing the database retrievals. So as of a few weeks ago it has been running faster and looking sexier than ever.
V.B. emailed back minutes later with a way more positive response than I was worrying over and she said she was going to pass it along to the other staff at KCRW. I don’t know who has seen it but the cat’s finally out of the bag. Looking at the Analytics of traffic to the page, my usual < 10 visits a day skyrocketed up to ~ 30 for 2 days in a row!! My server can hardly handle this incapacitating level of interest!