There is a point in the running of a tournament when you become a blithering idiot. I reached that point yesterday, exactly a month before Bump, which for me is some kind of (positive) record. Letting tabroom.com do all the work has meant that, instead of daily adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing entries, and going crazy over it starting around August, now all I have to do is occasionally peer bemusedly at the information in the database. Oh joy. Oh rapture. Of course, the first thing I found out when I started paying attention was that there were schools with multiple entries, as I mentioned yesterday. So I got that cleaned up, plus I deleted empty schools, which I don’t understand. Hello, I must be going? It’s not as if an empty entry holds space or anything. Those of us who register online all the time with no idea who we’re registering have created virtual teams of students like Placer Holderooni and Placido Holdem and the like, which in fact do hold real places. A school name without peeps is pointless. Anyhow, while scouring along, I checked the housing, and suddenly panicked over not housing student judges. But, happily, the software does handle this quite nicely, and although I sent out a message warning people to hop to, it wasn’t really necessary. Except there are some people who haven’t put in placeholder judges, so knowing that they will have student judges to be housed turns out to be a good thing, because I can reduce the amount of housing overall by the predicted numbers of Judges T.K., and be able to predictably house the otherwise homeless. (I have no brief against split infinitives, by the way. I am happy to predictably house or to boldly go, even though I am a pain on other maladroit usages, especially the selection of the wrong word or the use of a word incorrectly. The lightning and the lightning bug, as Mark Twain put it…)
In other words, I am getting the knack of the software. I had asked CP to send me the instructions, which he did, as I would like to have at them myself for editing purposes. I’m good at writing instructions. I’ve written Quark and Word and Excel and Lotus Notes (!) manuals for Day Job proprietary purposes, learning over time to exclude any attempts at humor and simply telling people what to do, period. (My recently posted RSS instructions are emblematic of my approach.) After Bump, I’ll dig into it. Meanwhile, I’m learning the ins and outs, the problems that might arise, and what the average user might and ought to do. Since tabroom is becoming fairly standard in the northeast, user support can’t hurt. Not that CP didn’t do it in the first place, but he’s a Harvard guy and what do they know? Honestly, with luck all I’ll have to do is punch up what he’s already done to include the latest enhancements like housing and such. And I’ll be concentrating on the registration aspects, not the tabbing aspects (tabroom can tab speech). The thing is, I enjoy that sort of business. I like to write. (Which, I know, you never would have guessed.) And I admit that I have not succumbed myself to the RTFM approach yet, even though he sent it to me. I like to consult manuals when I get lost, rather than read them in advance. I see them not as maps, telling you where to go step-by-step, but as guidebooks, full of handy suggestions for where to eat lunch if you can’t find a decent restaurant on your own. I like to hit buttons and see what happens, assuming that the worse that can happen is I only that I lose all my data. (See also: backups, importance of.)
Meanwhile, on a more timely note, last night I poked around tabroom.com pulling down data for tomorrow’s enormous first-timers’ MHL. It gives me all the registrations and the receipts and tells me when people need to add judges. It shortens the names of really long schools so they’ll fit on a schematic. What it doesn’t do is detect duplicate names (multiple Regis SLs, for instance). The Goy, as I learned with Monticello last week, does detect such names, and rewrites them as RegisXX. Very clever. The goys probably went somewhere other than Harvard, somewhere without grade inflation. Anyhow, I’m set for the morning, with all the data ported over to TRPC, with printouts for last minute changes, and a MegaPod eager to prove that there is a decent song or two on there somewhere. Tonight I’ll pack everything up in my weekly adventure of seeing what I forget this time.
Let the games begin.
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