Time to start Christmas shopping yet?

I have now done a couple of things that put me semi-squarely back into the debate world.

First of all, I’ve been working on the MHL. I sent out an update to the members discussing this and that, reminding them of the schedule and the first event, which is the free workshop, same as last year. And more importantly, I either reminded them or advised them (I don’t recall having mentioned it before, but maybe I did) that we would be starting a novice division of PF at the MHL events. This strikes me as rather seismic in our thinking of PF around here, which seems to sadly lag behind the thinking everywhere else in the forensics universe. But if you can have novice policy and novice LD, I’m hard-pressed to know why you can’t have novice PF. We’ll even be introducing it at invitationals, including Bump. As always, a novice has to be a—duh—novice, and not some ringer who’s annually done every debate event under the sun other than the one in question, but that’s a given, right? Anyhow, the season seems closer and closer. Must be all the heat.

Secondly, I’ve begun been playing with some of my web pages, which is something I do every summer. Not the designs, which are Model T caliber in their complexity and will remain that way, but the content. I’m beginning to sharpen up a few pages O’C and I have been talking about, thinking about the NYSDCA, and punching up my own pages with this and that (things do change from year to year). Very soon I’ll also have to address this year’s Bump invite. O’C’s already been working on Big Jake, with among other things a new sked he’s run by me and Kaz, but then again, he begins working on the next year sometime during the third or fourth award ceremony of the current year. I tend to be less tinkery, since I don’t have that much to hone. But working in the novice PF division will require a bit of juggling on my part, no question.

CP has asked me and Catholic Charlie to do a little support work on tabroom.com, which I’ve just begun. Helping other people set up tournaments, essentially. He’s got this whole back end that is really either tech-ishly elegant or gruellingly overkilling, I’m not quite sure which. But as the system gets more use, no question that he really can’t support it all himself. Given that the last time he took a vacation, Jimmy Carter was in the White House, he does need to back off a little bit. So I’m learning the ins and outs of that, for what it’s worth. At some point I’ll want to take a peek at Yale, while I’m about it, to see that LD is set up the way we’ve talked about it, with MJP and death-to-shenanigan types and totally separate JV and V judge pools and so forth. Meanwhile I’ve got Sailors signed up hither and yon, ready to head up to the Pup in pretty decent numbers, so I’ve got to sort out rooms and transportation and so forth on the local level.

And yes, the Touch now works. With a total system reinstall, the extra software patch, dislocating unnecessary location services and running in the airplane mode, the battery is now back to its old reliable self. Whew. What a pain.