Monday, January 13, 2014

In which CP is no doubt made dyspeptic

It was Bobcat weekend.

Everybody in Florida sent me photos of themselves lolling about in short pants sipping drinks with umbrellas and slathering suntan lotion on their pasty white bodies while the rest of us where sliding around on the ice in fear for our lives. Friday night and Saturday morning were at that 33 degree point where the underlying ice is made even more treacherous by a thin layer of melting. I lost six kids, a cup of coffee and, almost, my printer. I really regretted losing the cup of coffee.

I have to admit that the tech situation at Byram Hills is about the worst anywhere. Cell phones simply don’t work, and anyone not in airplane mode will have their battery run down before the cock crows thrice. O’C, while slathering as noted above, sent me a text that one of his judges was running late Saturday morning. It was a miracle that I received it. Which wouldn’t have mattered much if we were on normal network services, but Friday, using a student login, my Mac got bounced every ten minutes and I had to log in over and over again. That’s fun. And then Friday night, the only available printer, attached to the school computer, died. BH has a nice new building and is in a fairly ritzy neighborhood, but they might as well be handing Abe Lincoln a shovel and a piece of chalk as far as technology is concerned. (I wonder if their Intel finalists were presenting their discovery of baking soda volcanoes.) Anyhow, on Saturday, armed with my own printer this time (brought despite the treacherous weather), now I couldn’t log on at all, not even in ten minute bites, which means that the opening of the day was spent with me using my iPhone as a Geiger counter exploring through the building until I finally found service way in the back, where Kaz and I quickly relocated so that we could set up her hot spot. Oy. Needless to say, we did not use electronic balloting.

There were some new and some old anomalies with the software. Once again we saw teams re-paired in a subsequent round. The real problem with this is not that it happens (although obviously that’s a problem) but that it’s only detected after a pairing is released and some rounds have started. Keep in mind that we had 6 divisions this weekend, and there was no way on earth we could have manually checked for this. Another real poser was, for no discernible reason, a breaking student left off the list after the break was made. That is, he byed out of the run-off but disappeared in the pairing of the octos. But the system knew that something was wrong, and his pairing was blank on the schematic. And the 16 break point was leveled at 15. If it was going to dump the poor schmuck, at least it didn’t replace him with, say, the 17th seed, which would have been way worse. I excavated for quite a while to find a solution to that one, and I have no idea why it happened.

With the small divisions we’re getting handier at hand-pairing, which may be better simply done with cards. Hard to say. Kaz and I can do cards in the blink of an eye. If the pairing problem persists, and we’re not getting pairings half the time anyhow, it might make more sense with these kinds of fields.

My other general complaint is that, going by the normal setup, all rooms, despite how well you parse them out, are available for everything. If you select a room for novice LD, in other words, there’s no guarantee that it won’t be used for varsity 47-man Squamish. If one creates separate sites, however, that’s not the case. That’s easy enough to do, but it does mean that the general room default really only works if you don’t care who debates where. That may be true if it’s one division of something all by itself, but we don’t run many of those, and I don’t know who does. Otherwise, putting all this corridor for PF and that corridor for Policy, which makes sense to you, will eventually not make sense to tabroom, and will go by the boards. Also, the fact that you can’t actually delete a room once it’s in also is sort of baffling. Come to think of it, the whole room thing eludes me completely, but as I say, there’s a way around it, and I go that way. I tried to follow the rules according to Hoyle this time out, but a room that we were told was off limits, which I had never put into one of the pools, was, needless to say, the first migrant. How did it know?

Next time, evolving thoughts on Academy.

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