I’m Mario. I’m an engineer from Argentina who somehow ended up in Wichita, Kansas. The name of this site comes from feeling kind of lost at some point along the way, which seemed funny enough to keep.
My day job is analytics. Before that I spent years doing operations research in aerospace and meat packing — scheduling, routing, blending, the math that decides who works Tuesday night and which truck goes where. Cargill, Cessna, Textron, and before all of it, scheduling aircraft maintenance in Buenos Aires straight out of university.
Free optimization tools
Over the years I built a pile of optimization models in Excel — real ones that ran actual operations — and they all lived in spreadsheets nobody but me could open. So I’ve been turning them into web apps anyone can use. Free, no signup:
- Vehicle routing optimizer
- Staff scheduler
- Roth conversion calculator
- MLB lineup optimizer (daily fantasy is a knapsack problem in a costume)
These solve real mixed-integer programs, not simplified approximations. Each one started as something I needed and couldn’t find. I write up the conversions here as I go.
The tradelines thing
A big chunk of this site was/is about selling authorized user tradelines, which is what happens when someone with good credit and an operations-research brain reads a forum thread and thinks “wait, that’s a supply and demand problem that can be optimized.”
For a few years I added buyers as authorized users to my seasoned cards so they’d inherit the account’s age and payment history. I sold through brokers, and for a while directly from this site. It worked. It also taught me some expensive lessons — eBay banned my seller account, and Bank of America closed a $40,000 card over it. (In increasing order of pain.)
I’ve since shut down the direct store and gone back to brokers only. The posts stay up because the mechanics haven’t changed. If you’re trying to figure out how any of it works, start with the tradelines FAQ, or the five-year numbers post if you want to see what it actually earned.
One thing I won’t budge on: I don’t recommend CPNs and never will. They’re synthetic identity fraud and a federal crime, however they’re marketed.
Everything else
The rest is what a personal blog usually is. Analytics is working notes from the optimization projects. Money is credit cards, points, and things I got wrong about investing. There’s some travel, mostly Argentina and back, and a WordPress category that’s really just me documenting how this site is held together so I can find it again later. Then whatever, which is exactly what it sounds like — including a college football ranking model I ran up until last year and might dust off again this season.
Some of the older posts are in Spanish. Those stay in Spanish.
Questions, corrections, or a complaint that my routing solver gave you a worse answer than you expected (genuinely useful, please send it) — the contact page is the fastest way to reach me. I’m on LinkedIn too if it’s a work thing.