Monday, December 21, 2015

In which it's beginning to look a lot like a chlassich Christmas

Somebody has to be the person to crawl into the crooks and nannies and find where the light doesn’t shine. At the Christmas Chlassich I decided to take the train in, since I was going out for dinner afterwards. Since I’d be lugging whatever I brought on my back, I decided to bring my iPad rather than my computer. Certainly I’ve done all sorts of things on my iPad in the past tabroom-wise, so I didn’t give it a thought. Until it came time to enter results. Regis, having been built by the original Irish monk settlers in the New World, doesn’t have useful wireless. If the poor box had a nickel for every person who asked about it, the box wouldn’t be poor anymore. Hence, paper ballots. No surprise there, although I was surprised to see that our tab room was reorganized, with no more networked printers. Oh, well. Catholic Charlie had his printer, so were were okay. So we paired everything and printed it, but as I said, when it came time to enter results, the numbers simply wouldn’t take on the iPad. I could force results, but that’s a time-consuming business at best. I think the problem is somehow IOS-related: there’s something in the coding that you can do on a computer but not on an iPad. That doesn’t strike me as strange, but it does strike me as odd that I’m the first person to notice it. I can’t be the only iPad user in the tabbing community. I know, for instance, the Bro John has used an iPad. But that was at Bigle X, where the wifi is cheap and easy. I guess the Bro has never tried tabbing in a Catholic school. (Maybe he hates Catholic schools and refuses to have anything to do with them, but honestly, that’s pretty unlikely, given the Bro-hood and everything.) Anyhow, I dutifully reported the problem via a help ticket. I said in the subject line that I couldn’t enter results on my iPad, with a message that said that the subject line said it all. The response was that it didn’t say it all and they needed more details. So, I said it again, with more words. It doesn’t matter terribly if it gets fixed, but a system nowadays sort of needs to run on any device, and God knows we’ve used mobile devices to fix problems when we’ve been out of the room, usually carousing at a local gin mill. In any case, Catholic Charlie had the perfect solution: “Bring your computer next time.” Brilliant thinking on his part. No doubt the boys in the tabroom boiler room will ultimately provide similar advice. I’m pretty sure it will work.

The Regis KK AKA CC was bigger than usual. As often as not, it falls on a weekend when school has already let out for the holidays, meaning half the potential attendees are on their way to Bermuda, Bahamas (come on pretty mama), etc., but that was untrue for most folks this time out. And with college kids home, having gotten out of their prisons, we had a lot of good judging. Occasionally one Regi picked up another Regi’s ballot, under EdM’s guidance, but that’s fine, because they are an endless line of storm troopers perfectly capable of getting the job done with no fuss. We had policians up the wazoo as well, very nice to see, very efficiently run by the UDL leadership. In fact, they were done before we were, which was entirely due to sun spots. Still, we were done by about 5 and giving out medals like there was no tomorrow. Catholic C had told me we had virtually unlimited medals, which means I didn’t run out until near the end, at which point he and I had a discussion of the inherent meaning of the word virtually in the common usage.

When all was packed up, I strolled down Madison and enjoyed the nice brisk Manhattan evening on my way to dinner with HoraceMann, the Superhero Without Any Superpowers. Then, in order to soak up some holiday sauce, I switched over to Fifth at around 60th street, and soon managed to get caught in the crush of people watching the Saks light show. There were times when I practically couldn’t move. More than once people using strollers as battering rams managed to cut a thin swath through the assembled multitudes, and I managed to follow in their wake once or twice when I wasn’t in fact one of their victims. I breathed a sigh of relief when the EMTs picked up my bruised and battered body and tossed me onto a stretcher the rest of the way to 46th Street to the Brazilian restaurant.


All in all, it was a good tournament. And the last one of the year. Meanwhile I got a couple of buzzes from Blake, where apparently all was so swell that JV was settling in for a nice big sushi dinner, just before his trip to the emergency room to treat his anaphylactic shock. Blake, of course, is the last $ircuit tournament of the calendar year, although it jumps the gun and does the Jan-Feb topic, to add yet another event using what is really the Jan-April topic. Whatever. I’m not in the game, so what’s it to me? Then again, if I see something, I say something. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

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