Watching the ebb and flow of a tournament in tabroom.com is rather engaging. In a way, it’s a little like playing a video game. People move around, and resource requirements keep changing, and you keep track of it all from your godlike position at the keyboard. When people drop, slots open, and you have to reassign them. When housing opens up, you have to reassign those slots. People send you requests for this and that, more often than not asking to correct their errors because they changed an entry and lost the housing, but if you’re a good game player you’re ahead of them on that and you take care of it before they ask because you know it’s going to happen. Moves in the game happen at random, although if you send out an email blast, that usually generates a few changes. With Bump closing Friday night, you might think that things are heating up, but since we went waitlist right at the beginning, at this point it’s mostly just polishing the entries. We’re down to a manageable number of waitlist slots that I’m pretty sure will sort themselves out to everyone’s satisfaction. The real magic moment will be Monday, when fees are set. There will be some heavy business over the weekend, and then, well, we hold the tournament and the game is over. I can easily think back to the Bad Old Days when I did this all by hand, and drove myself crazy. Now all I have to do is log in and occasionally find a bug in the system (those things CP calls “features”) that I can pass along to his royal computership. Life is so easy nowadays… You kids don’t know what we had to go through, and while you’re at it, get off my lawn!
Speaking of his royal computership, I do wish he allowed comments on his blog, but when I asked him about this once he claimed that it was his blog and he wanted full control over it and he didn’t want clowns like us mucking it up. Which means I always have to respond here instead of there. Jeesh! That is so Web Point One of him. Anyhow, if you don’t follow him, you should, at azuen.net. His latest posts have been on tabula rasa judging and Nov-Dec. Why wouldn’t you want to read that?
Anyhow, he was rather complimentary about our TVFT podcast, congratulating us effusely for not talking about our hardware/software. Rather big of him, I thought, but no one’s ever accused him of being short. To fill this much needed information gap, I provide the following.
We all have the same microphones and we use GarageBand, except for O’C, whose GarageBand is somehow on the fritz, which I find suspect to say the least, so he uses Audacity, which is a nice little free program that I used to use on Nostrum because the old version of GarageBand on Little Elvis didn’t support podcasts. We set up a conference call in Skype but do not record from Skype directly. We each record our individual tracks, keying up at the start with a countdown. This is the hardest thing for us to do, to tell you the truth. Get three grown men to count down together from 10 to 1? Sounds simple? You don’t know these particular three grown men. Anyhow, I mix the whole thing in Audacity because, to be honest, I can’t figure out how to mix in GB. For some reason I also haven’t figured out, the podcast ends up in some sort of random stereo, with some things in one channel and some in the other—w/e. In any case, the sound quality, since it’s from direct microphones to computers without the corruption that ensues over Skype, is pretty decent, I think. Of course, I never listen to it, aside from the beginning, to synchronize the tracks and add the intro music, and now the end, to add the Hendrick Hudson Debate Team Marching Band outro music. Come to think of it, I now have some Tech Time music as well, so I guess I’ll have to start listening to the middle…
There. I’ve got all the tech stuff out of the way. That wasn’t so bad now, was it?
No comments:
Post a Comment