It all started as a joke. A bunch of bored graduate students started throwing a foam dart at a whiteboard. This morphed into software that combined an interactive touch display with Nerf guns. More and more students started playing. Anything to keep us from working on our dissertations. This distraction turned into an even larger one when we somehow convinced our supervisor to get involved. This...
Deshawn from Survivor 41, the first player (hopefully the last) to ever participate in the “Do or Die” twist In season 41 of Survivor, there were a lot (and I mean A LOT) of new twists introduced into the game. One twist that sparked a lot of conversation, analysis, and mathematical breakdown was something called the “Do or Die” twist. The twist worked as follows. At the...
I recently participated in a white elephant party for work. This type of holiday event is also known as a Yankee Swap or Bad Santa gift exchange. As I was participating in this event, I started thinking about what’s the optimal strategy? Should I steal or open something new? How much does my position in the gift selection order impact my chances of getting a good gift? To answer these deep...
I’ve told parts of this story in presentations in the past, but this is the detailed version of the key moments throughout my education and career that have led to where I am today. So, how exactly did a kid growing up in small town rural Canada find himself at one of the most influential technology companies in the world? Growing up in Canada’s Chocolate Town I grew up in a small town in Canada...
Recently Will Lanier from the Out Foundation contacted me because he had found an old blog post about my Crossfit Alerts project and was trying to do something similar for the upcoming 2018 Crossfit Open but for the LGBT+ community. He explained that he is involved in a project called OutWod to help bring together LGBT+ Crossfit athletes. They were going to have participants from this community...
If you are unfamiliar with The Genius, then you can read my summary and pitch below. If you are already well-versed, then you can skip ahead to my discussion of the game Monorail. Even without ever watching the show if you enjoy strategy games, you will likely love Monorail. Just want to play the game and don’t care about what I have to say? Go to www.MonorailTheGame.com. Check out the code...
I recently started watching History channel’s show Smartest Guy in the Room. The basic premise of the show is there’s three kind of regular guys with regular jobs, but each of them have high IQs. Each episode one of the three designs two challenges in an attempt to stump the other two. If the challenge designer stumps them, he gets the title of “Smartest Guy in the Room”...
It has seriously been a long time since I’ve blogged. Ever since leaving academics to start a company (Proven.com) with my business partner Pablo Fuentes, I’ve either not had time to dedicate to my blog or not had topics that I could really share in a public domain. Luckily, I had a nice side project idea recently mashing together two of my loves, CrossFit and programming. For those...
Recently a project I am involved in at Stanford participated and won the Semantic Web Challenge at the International Semantic Web Conference. The Semantic Web Challenge is a competition for Semantic Web applications. For the uninformed, the Semantic Web “is a group of methods and technologies to allow machines to understand the meaning – or ‘semantics’ – of...
What’s this? Another post? Yes indeed, two within a week of each other. My blog tends to work this way, my writing comes in waves. This post relates to data mining, visualization, and mashing up GMail with Facebook. I attended a talk last week at the CS department at Stanford and the speaker mentioned that they were using the “TO” field in e-mails to perform hierarchical...
