Daniel Singer is the 14-year-old creator of Backchat, an anonymous messaging application. He runs a grown-up business that’s received hundreds of thousands in funding, but he solved one recent problem by throwing rocks in the backyard.

Singer and his team were up at 2 a.m. trying to solve a problem that involved processing multiple threads in the same conversation.

“It looked like it was impenetrable,” said Singer, who lives with his parents in Encino. “We were spitting out gibberish, trying to figure out the answer.”

Singer decided to step outside and not return until he figured it out. He picked up a stone that looked like one you might skip across a pond and started playing with it. Then it struck him: thinking of each thread like its own stone would vastly simplify the process. Singer went back in to tell the team that after all their hours of brainstorming, he had just solved the problem by tossing a rock in the air.

“We just sat there in the dead of night,” he said. “All that work we did was for naught.”

Acting Up

Talent agent Sid Levin makes his living booking acting jobs for clients. Many are minorities, veterans or people who are otherwise “underdogs” in showbiz.

But Levin, 56, co-founder of Levin Agency of Beverly Hills, also managed to book himself an acting job after he was approached by producers of the show “Pit Boss,” an Animal Planet reality show about Shorty Rossi, head of an L.A. talent agency for little people as well as a rescue clinic for pit bulls.

(Yes, reality shows do hire actors.)

Levin thought he would be cast as a good guy. But it turns out he was portrayed as the villain – a rival talent agent who poached Shorty’s clients, leading to the demise of the agency, dog rescue clinic and even TV show. The six-season series ended after the incident.

Of course, the ending was just for show. But Levin said he has since fielded innumerable, expletive-laden calls from fans who think it was all real. He’s still getting calls to this day, but said he doesn’t regret the experience.

“It was all for ratings,” he said. “I never knew they were going to portray me that way. But I still had the time of my life.”

Staff reporters Matt Pressberg and Jonathan Polakoff contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].