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Sean and his dog

Come for the jokes, stay for the nonsense. This site contains my ramblings about programming, developer relations, stuff I’m working on, and the occasional machine learning/data mining pop culture mashup.

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Latest stories

Crowdsourcing a Behavioral Model for Survivor

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A little over a year ago, I was contacted by Angie Caunce about participating in a data project related to Survivor. If you are a fan of RHAP, you’ll likely know who Angie is. She is the creator of The System, or the Angie Caunce Character Types, which I have written about before. I also built a website for this system CaunceTypes where you can explore every player of Survivor based on her...

Start the Insanity: Analyzing Seinfeld Based on Story Line Grades

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For the past three and a half years, each week, I’ve been listening to the Seinfeld Recap Podcast. If you are unfamiliar with the podcast, each week, the hosts, Rob Cesternino and Akiva Wienerkur, recap one episode of Seinfeld. Our Seinfeld Recap heroes, Rob and Akiva, are closing in on the series finale and I wanted to do something special to commemorate the occasion. Starting in episode...

How Difficult Is It To Play Quidditch Professionally?

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I am a huge Harry Potter fan. In fact, I’m having a Harry Potter-themed wedding in just a few weeks. Like many things I love, I like to completely overthink and overanalyze every detail. In the spirit of this, I took a deep dive into analyzing how hard would it be to make it in the wizard sport of Quidditch? Quidditch as a Professional Sport Quidditch is the most popular sport in the...

The World’s Greatest Collection of Ideas Brought to You by NewsAF

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News AF is a weekly podcast discussing the Internet’s best actual factual news stories hosted by Rob Cesternino, Tyson Apostol, and Danny Bryson. The best way to sum up the show is with this review from iTunes by Rogonalog: If you need news, look no further! News expert Danny Bryson and his two sidekicks, Survivor contestants “Boston Rob” Cesternino and Andrea Boehlke, break...

A Brief History of Hot Takes from The Seinfeld Recap Podcast

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The Seinfeld Recap Podcast, hosted by Rob Cesternino and Akiva Wienerkur, is closing in on episode 150 of Seinfeld. At the time of this writing, they have released 147 episodes. With less than 40 episodes to go, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at some of the great “hot takes” that have come out of discussing Seinfeld for nearly 240 hours. These hot takes come from both...

Analyzing 2-Tuple Phrases from the Seinfeld Recap Podcast

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It’s been a little while since I’ve written up any of my projects on the blog and after listening to the Seinfeld Recap Podcast this week, I thought I was overdue for a write up. If you are unfamiliar with the podcast (then honestly, I don’t know what you are doing here), each week, the hosts, Rob Cesternino and Akiva Wienerkur, recap one episode of Seinfeld. A listener recently...

Predicting the “Dateability” of Survivor Players

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With all the great pre-season Survivor coverage happening on RHAP, I was inspired to do my own pre-season project. We have all witnessed the awesome power of “Nicoletradamus” when it comes to winner picks, but what about predicting the “dateability” (i.e. whether a contestant makes the merge) of Survivor contestants? To address this age old question, I went back through...

Akiva’s Lost Pop Culture References

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If you have read my blog in the past, you likely know that I am a big fan of The Seinfeld Recap Podcast. Each week, the hosts, Rob Cesternino and Akiva Wienerkur, recap one episode of Seinfeld. If you ever listen to this podcast, you will start to realize the Akiva has a ton of knowledge about certain pop culture topics but there are also many things that basically every human on the planet knows...

What Television Shows Have the Most Podcasts?

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I listen to a lot of podcasts. In a given week, I spend more hours listening to podcasts than watching television, movies or listening to music. Most of the podcasts I listen to are TV-related. In fact, almost every TV show I do watch, I listen to at least one and sometimes more podcasts related to that show. It’s a little crazy. There’s tons of podcasts out there. It’s hard to...

Who is the richest Survivor player to ever win?

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During the last two voicemail shows on Rob Has A Podcast, Rob Cesternino and his co-host have discussed the question, “What winner of Survivor had the largest net worth prior to their win?“ In this blog post, I explain how I came up with the answer of Yul Kwon, winner of Survivor Cook Islands. Before I dive too deeply into my research, I want to setup why this question is interesting...

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I write about programming, developer relations, technology, startup life, occasionally Survivor, and really anything that interests me.