I feel a lull in my life at the moment. The first big tournament of the year is over, the initial hump of new work at the DJ has been put behind me, I just finished an edit and am settling into some serious reading (the two of which are my job in a nutshell, if you throw in other nuts), and we’re probably going to start eating dinner in the dining room rather than on the sun porch. I even have a weekend with no debate coming up (the last until Thanksgiving). Life is quiet. I’ll try to take advantage of it.
I’m figuring on getting the smaller new iPhone. I like the idea of the bigger one, but I think I’d gravitate to it more if it were the only product I used. But since I’ll also have an iPad or a Mac nearby for almost everything I do, and when push comes to shove I just don’t use my phone that much, and I have no intentions of, say, paying attention to Facebook any more than I already do (and if anything, I’m paying less attention to it lately because it seems to, if this is possible, gotten more deathly dull than it was previously), and I know that as much as I like to think I play games, I really don’t (although I’ve been enjoying having the daily Times crossword electronically, but again, I’m more likely to play it on my iPad), my usage doesn’t justify the extra luggage, so to speak. Bigger good, way way bigger so you have to think about its bigness, not so good. I will go for the most memory, of course. I have learned that you can never have too much memory or speed, and that both will seem restrictive way before you upgrade whatever it is you have that requires memory and speed. I’ll wait until the machine is available at the Apple store next door to my office. I noticed that they’re available on Long Island, so they should creep up to Westchester in a week or so.
I’ve been listening to Flash Boys as my commute audiobook. Given our experience with latency issues at the Pups, listening to this book makes me wonder why CP has chosen to dedicate his skills to debate when instead he could be ripping off entire marketplaces and making billions of bucks. An unwise choice on his part. Speaking of which, I am now especially looking forward to working with him at Bronx. I want him to sit next to me with a pencil and write down how I use the system. His use of the system is predicated on his knowledge of the system: he knows where all the bodies are buried. It’s like the only time I ever indexed a book, the original Doubleday Cookbook back in the 70s. I then adopted that book as my go-to for basic recipes, because whenever I wanted to look something up in the index, I always found it right away because the index thought exactly the way I did (or vice versa). That’s why in the early days of tabroom we always liked to have O’C around: we claimed that he thought like CP, or more correctly, he knew what CP was thinking when he programmed a certain feature, so like CP, O’C could immediately put his finger on the right button. (If I’m not mistaken, when CP heard that O’C was able to read his mind, he went on a two-year sabbatical, trekking to various Nepalese monasteries until his mind was completely cleansed, with nothing left behind but “Keep Out! Cruz, This Means You!!!” signs.)
By the way, I went over the fines for the Pups, and saw virtually no real villains in the judges not showing up category. Well, I saw one, who will have a bit to answer for, but that’s it. Nice job on everyone else’s part. This was especially true on Sunday, when you need your top panels. Lose one person, and the 1-1, 1-1, 1-1 becomes a 1-1, 1-1, 3-5 at best, and there is murder in one’s eye. I don’t recall subbing more than one or two judges all day, and those were not because of no-shows but of bad info, and we always had a few 1-ish Pups available to fill in.
I should mention that our Student Advocate was indeed called on directly once, and indirectly more than that. Directly because of some shenanigans in a round that were apparently more bad manners than abuse, but still, that’s what she was there for. Indirectly, because I would solicit her opinion on various things that might come up, because she was closer to the debate experience than I, or at least the LD debate experience. When possible, I will want to continue having such a person around (and I will hope every time it is someone as good as the one we had at Yale).
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