If then else; pas de ribbon clerks; pray for Little Elvis

I have longingly stared at blank Excel sheets for years now, dreaming of the schematic for a round robin that would automatically determine who hits whom when. After Lexington, when O’C and I trudged out a workable plan but only after some trial and error and reliance on an old schematic he pulled off of WTF, followed by his pointing me to the world of horseshoes where round robins are apparently de rigeur (I’m not making this up), I really felt that somewhere, somehow, it could be done. And it had to be done with an absolute. That is, one formula that worked in all the cells regardless of number of teams. Allow me to introduce you to the holy grail:

= IF(D11=0,0,IF(C12=0,0,IF(ISEVEN($B$4),IF(C12+1>$B$4-1,1,C12+1),(IF(C12+1>$B$4,1,C12+1)))))

Tell me you don’t love a formula with five—5!—parentheses. All the zero conditions are to clear the sheet at the point when there’s no more teams. That is, if there’s eight teams, we want it to stop at 8. The test for even numbers is because if there’s an odd number, the number of rounds is the number of teams, but if there’s an even number, the number of rounds is the number of teams minus one; it took me a long time to get this straight in my head. The rest just numbers in sequence starting over again when you get to the end: the $B$4 is a constant because it’s where you entered the number of teams. I will admit that there’s nothing here about aff/neg, but that’s simple enough. The lower numbered team is the aff in all even-numbered rounds. No doubt there’s a more elegant mathematical way of portraying this, and I intend to spend the next few years figuring it out.



I’ve put the template onto my home page and on this page (over on the right with the so-called greatest hits) so it can be accessed readily. I’m very pleased with myself. I’ll never have to consort with the horseshoe crowd again.

In other news, we really cut out the ribbon clerks with this week’s Caveman. A further diminution will have me talking to myself. The fact that we’ve finally gotten to the pomo material might bring back a malingerer or two. Otherwise I’ll just retire it completely.

And at home, I finally sourced the problem with my ripping of cassettes into mp3s. It turns out that one of my USB ports is not the port it used to be. This is the least desirable answer to the question. I simply moved to the other port, no biggie, but this means that Little Elvis is beginning to feel his age. I’m not quite sure what else will be affected by being plugged into this port; obviously we’re at the outset of a barrage of testing, but I have a feeling that most things will work okay. But this is troubling. Everybody always wants a new computer; this particular form of techlust begins roughly a week after you purchase your last computer, but in reality, you expect these things to last forever. Oddly enough (and here I’m knocking wood like you wouldn’t believe) my Dell is maybe 6 or 7 years old and is Peachy City, although I will admit I’m afraid to go online with it for fear of all the murk just waiting to bring it down. But it does everything else just fine. I’m hoping that Little E can last just as long. I’m holding out for whatever comes after Leopard. It’s now a race to extinction; I can feel the meteors about to land. (This is where we break down the fourth wall and turn to the audience and ask them to clap if they believe in Little Elvis. But I’ll spare you that particular indignity. Of course you believe in Little Elvis. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this in the first place.)