Monday, March 24, 2008

Info underload; chez maintenance; yeasty debaters; mi weekend es su weekend; et cetarooni


Whatever you do, don’t read the invitation to the Northeast Championships at tabroom.com. No one else has. Why should you be any different? All the information everyone needs is in there, which is why people are avoiding it.

Sigh.

We set the closing for 4/2 or thereabouts, to give NFA time to sort out the housing (which is at the moment totally booked). There is an issue with the software in that if you change an entry too dramatically, you lose the housing. There’s a logic to this, but there’s also a logic to it not happening. My guess is that it’s easier to manage offline than within the program, but that hasn’t stopped me from asking CP if he can do anything about it.

I did a lot of chez organizing over the weekend, cleaning up the detritus from Districts and putting the tub back into the basement, sweeping up the blood and bone chips, etc. I was one trophy short of a full set, because I mistakenly repeated last year’s order, but I’m picking that up from the trophy people Saturday, and will pass that along accordingly, and that would be about it on that particular puppy, unless for some reason Rippin’ decides that we did something bass ackwards, but I don’t think they will at this point since, well, we didn’t. Then again, I could have filled out some form wrong, and could be hanged for it in the morning. That is much more likely. I never did hear back from the Goys about my issues with the software. Which leads me to believe that said issues will be there next year. Responsive these guys ain’t.

I have set a deadline for the end of this week for cases for those going to the Dreaded States tournament. If they’re going to go, they should at least be prepared. Meanwhile my yeasty sophomore is going to the Hockarobin this weekend, but that’s Jan-Feb, which after a while becomes etched into the brain. Yeasty people, by the way, are usually referred to as rising sophomores or, I guess, rising juniors, but I’m not quite sure what they’re rising to. (Given the fact that few of them ever go out in the sunlight, the term yeasty seems especially appropriate.) By the time they’re seniors they are presumably risen debaters. I won’t deconstruct the religious overtones of that, which seem rather timely, but will let you draw your own conclusions.

I had a problem with my setup for processing my old cassette tapes into mp3s, and I think I isolated it to the iMic. Everything else seems to work fine. So, I put in for a replacement. If that is the problem, I will have to admit that, yes, it was cheap, but jeesh, it’s a piece of crap considering that it didn’t last very long. I love resuscitating old music, though, and will continue to do so until I’ve captured it all. Occasionally the resulting recording is unlistenable, but mostly they’re quite good. Beats tossing all those tapes out the window.

I did hear from one of your fine Philadelphia universities over the weekend, asking me to tab their tournament for them next year, but as their event coincides with the novice first-timer MHL, so much for that. Of course, I haven’t attended said tournament in about a decade, although I do have a tee shirt from the school somewhere to commemorate the Sailors having won it back in the day. All I really remember was the trucks that sold Chinese food outside the campus. They’ve got this little vending setup, with a hot plate and a steam table, and they have—and I exaggerate only slightly—a fifty page menu. Order whatever you want. None of it tastes like what it says on the menu, but it does all taste vaguely Chinese. Close enough, I guess, given it’s coming from a truck with a hot plate. Anyhow, I’ve discussed the problem of too many tournaments and too few weekends in the past. At least the conflict between this and the MHL is an agreeable one, in that they aren’t fighting one another for the same entrants. But my heart will always be with the novices, especially the first-timers. I like catching them while they’re still raw and untested. Before they turn all yeasty on you.

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