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Interview with David Steinberg (aka ZZYZX)
Q: Where did you get the name?
A: In 1986 I was on a Teen Tour traveling
around the country. We took I-15 from LA to Vegas and I saw
the road. The name stuck with me. I first took it on as a
mock nickname but over the years ended up using it more and
more and more.
Q: Whats up with ZZYZX rd. on the way from
La to Vegas?
A: In 1944 Curtis Howe Springer decided
to just claim some land in the desert to create a health spa.
He called it Zzyzx so he could be have the last word in the
English language. The guy was a kook but a well-meaning one.
He would feed anyone who stopped by his resort, even if they
couldn't pay. Alas the feds had issues with some of
his more, ah, interesting health ideas and the whole issue
of him just taking the land in the first place. It's a desert
research center now.
Q: What made you want to create the Phish
stats?
A: It just came out of curiosity. The first
version of Phish Stats was a text file. I did my best to remember
all of my old set lists and counted how many times I saw each
song. After each show, I'd update the file by hand. It kind
of worked, but it wasn't very accurate. Later I wrote an application
in Visual Basic that would create the every time played and
yearly stats information. I would then upload the files to
my web site. It wasn't exactly the fastest thing ever; the
every time played file took about 20 minutes to create and
was a 1.2 megabyte file. If you wanted to know the history
of Tela, you had to download the whole thing. At the time
I was working on this, I was doing tech support and not really
liking it. I was trying to find a way into a programming career.
I decided to use the Phish Stats program as a way of teaching
myself Perl. I figured that if I was curious as to how
many times I had seen Fluffhead, other people would be too.
So the rationale was a mixture of assuming that other people
would share my obsessiveness and trying to get out of a dead
end job. Both ends worked; I got a job at Microsoft a few
months later.
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