Where did this genius idea come from?

Here's the Tale...

It came to me after watching the movie King Kong, which was 3ish hours long. I was thinking how nice it would be to have a website that listed movie times we could easily miss and run to the bathroom to empty our poor bladders, and not miss any crucial scenes.

I sat on the idea for about 2 years while working at XBox in Seattle. I am a Flash Platform developer and as my skill set grew, I started to learn to make Flash/database-driven websites - Spring '08. The RunPee idea seemed like a good project to practice on, so I started building it. By August of '08 it was up and running. RunPee.com debuted at the 360Flex conference in San Jose to much fanfare.

And then promptly everyone forgot about it. :-(

7:42●●● 95%

RunPee · now 🔔

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GET IT ONGoogle PlayDownload on theApp Store

Then on May 9th @LeoLaporte mentioned RunPee on his weekend show. Before that the traffic to RunPee.com was in the 10-15 visitors/day. After Leo it went to about 350/day. Then Leo and Amber invited me to join them via phone on their net@night show. A few people here and there heard about it. Like Dave Barry. A producer from NPR's All Things Considered found out about RunPee from Dave's mention, and invited me to be on the show. With all that, the site traffic has climbed over 30,000 uniques a day! Thanks everyone.

Lots of other people have also mentioned RunPee - the media attention has been phenomenal. I think this is that viral Internet thing that I've heard of before. ;-) I just never thought it would happen to me. All the traffic crashed the shared server that RunPee was on so it had to be moved to a dedicated server.

Thanks everyone for your compliments about RunPee. Hopefully my next project will be even better.

About the Creator/Developer - polyGeek

I've had many media requests for interviews to talk about myself and RunPee.com. Here are a few details about myself.

Born
1967 in Bisbee, Arizona

Education
Mastered in Philosophy and History at Northern Arizona University (did not graduate. See note below about Swansea, Wales.)

Places I've lived
L'Aquila, Italy; Swansea, Wales; London, England; Seattle, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Crestline, New York, Orlando, Los Angeles and many, many others.

Additional schooling
Massage Therapist with a degree from the Desert Institute for the Healing Arts in Tucson, Arizona.

Studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at the University of Arizona from 1985-1988.

Jobs
Mission Director at the United Space Academy in Huntsville, Alabama: mostly I taught kids how to run mission control during a Space Shuttle launch. Also did lectures on celestial mechanics, astronomy and planetary science.

Research Assistant for Steward Observatory and Kitt Peak at the University of Arizona: did a lot of photocopying and data entry but also got to hang out with some of the best known astronomers in the world.

Flash Prototyper for XBox: built prototypes for the XBox and Zune for user testing. Also developed the media sales app for the Zune which was used to present the device to potential retail outlets and partners. ( I only did the development. Others did the design.) I was told that Bill Gates thought it was outstanding, which coming from him means a lot, since it was all in Flash.

Trivial stuff
I didn't graduate from college because I did my last year abroad in Swansea, Wales. Upon returning to the US I didn't have enough money to return to NAU where I had to present my work from Swansea - as a formality. Instead I got a job doing HTML design/development in Greensboro, North Carolina.

I was in Manhattan, on my way to work, on the Upper East Side on 9/11. I worked at the Hospital for Special Surgery in the IT department doing video and web design/development. Here is a bit that I wrote about my experience shortly afterward.

I have taken first semester calculus three times and made an A+ every time. The first time was in my freshman year of college. Then a year later I took the class again in a different format because a friend was teaching it and wanted to get my feedback on how the different formats compared. I was then out of school for a few years - working at the Space Academy. When I returned to my mathematics studies I started again with calculus because I was rusty.

During my first semester at NAU I lived in a tent near campus. The reason I lived in a tent was because I spent all my extra money on a Dell laptop. That's just how I roll.

I did nude modeling for the art department at NAU.

I lived in the back of my 1995 Nissan Pathfinder for 3 months after I moved to Seattle. During part of that time I was working for Microsoft XBox. I parked the car in the parking lot of the downtown Bellevue library.

I was a professional photographer for a short period.

I created an open source project called videoMaru. It allows people who don't know much about writing Actionscript code to create custom video interfaces without writing any code themselves. videoMaru has received high marks from the community and I am quite proud of this project. It was a nice way to give back to the Actionscript community and devs in general.