The run-up to Sorta Stretched Bronx is now in full swing. I
think slash hope we’ve added our last judges in debate. People are dropping,
but not many. The thing seems to be, for the most part, bigger than ever. This
morning I sent out a message to people to recheck their prefs, but overall I think people have learned not to do them until the last minute so as to account
for any changes. I don’t want more changes, but if some really good judge comes
along I won’t say no. The better the judging, the better the tournament. My bet
is that this is going to be one of the most scrutinized events of the season,
so we need to pull off a good one. At the moment, I think we’re poised to do
it.
The Paginator sent me a message this morning that I had set
the PF strikes wrong, by school rather than by team. I guess this was how it
was done last time, and I just blindly copied it over, but it really doesn’t make sense, given how easy strikes
are in tabroom. Back in the TRPC days, you would always prefer school strikes,
to save tab time. Now, there’s no tab time involved at all. It’s like prepping
during registration. In the TRPC days, there was all sorts of hoo-ha to attend
to. Now you just sit there smoking your cigar and looking sage and occasionally
pretending to be busy. I can do that.
The tabroom Morlocks seem to have fixed the bug in the
access, where you can set people up to only enter ballots (or whatever limit
you chose). This didn’t work at Yale, and I can see why it’s a good thing.
Admin rights are for people actually administering. If you’re going to use
myrmidons to enter ballots, you want them limited to entering ballots. This, of
course, presumes a world where ballots are not electronic, which, sadly, is a
world we still live in occasionally. Monticello, for instance, had no wireless at
all last weekend, but RJT swears that a new system is going in this coming
weekend, which means that next year we can try e-ballots. Certainly we’re all e
this weekend in the Bronx, as we were last year. In LD we only had one soul who
would come by to pick up his paper ballot and, while he was there, explain to
us how we were doing everything wrong. CP was in the room with me then, and
showed remarkable restraint while hearing how bad the whole tabroom software
was, and how it really didn’t do things the way they were supposed to be done.
Our critic knew whereof he spoke: he was a regular local judge (albeit in a
region with no tournaments) and was quite handy with his Commodore 64.
Speaking of Monticello, last weekend went swimmingly, except
for the time I pressed a wrong button and had to spend ten minutes repairing
the damage. Note to self: Policy <> PF. RJT had plenty of alums for us to
abuse, so the judging went better than one might have expected. I was using my
Karma wifi for the first time, and it was peachy and fast. Plus people kept
logging on to it for free wifi, which meant that I kept getting more free data
for future use. This thing worked much better than anything else I’ve ever
used, although it does take a minute to launch in the morning. No big deal,
though. So in that universe where wifi isn’t universal, this is a nice little
toy to bring along to ameliorate the situation. The only down side is that my
email account, seeing mail from Karma, thinks I need to by a Karma, so all the
ads I see these days are to buy this device that I already own. That, of
course, is the way of internet marketing. As soon as you buy something,
marketers try to sell it to you. Oh, yeah, I’m also getting lots of ads trying
to get me to rent a room in Monticello. You’d think that marketers would know
that no one ever rents a room twice on the Little Mountain. Mostly people are
upset hearing all the gunfire in the night, and resolve that there must be
better places to park the carcass. (But I exaggerate. The night was calm and
peaceful, and there were hardly even any fistfights. I should be careful. I don’t
want to give the Montwegians a bad name.)
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