In which we provide more Gem details

For those who are wondering, tabroom has been working well lately, even though CP & Co seem to be one a tinkering rampage. The button that was Nile blue yesterday is Amazon blue today, the list that was arranged one way is now arranged another, that sort of thing. What it doesn’t quite do is know things like how to use judges who haven’t been used yet in PF. It can slice and dice MJP to within an inch of its life, with sliders to adjust it just the way you like it, but if you start out sitting in the judges’ lounge for the first two rounds, you are doomed to stale coffee and bagels until the final trophy is handed out. Go figure. Knowing about this makes it easy enough to solve, but it is sort of curious. When we pair non-MJP rounds nowadays, we always go straight to the unused judges and start flipping ‘em back in. No one sleeps on our watch!

Speaking of flipping, there was this one judge who I regard very highly. His school didn’t need him, so we lost him. But I told the Gem to hire him since he was already preffed, so we got him back. But something came up and he couldn’t come back after Friday, so we lost him. Then whatever came up went down, and we got him back for Sunday. But then whatever went down came up again, so, sadly, we lost him again. But then we lost some other judge, and the Paginator saw that this other guy wasn’t being used, so he put him in Sunday morning, and we theoretically got him back, except we hadn’t, and he texted me that he had been put into a round, so we lost him one last time, and I slapped the Paginator upside the head and told him to mind his own business, which, as we know, is calling up the runners and asking them who he paired where. It was that sort of weekend.

There were happily few issues with the rounds over the weekend. We did have a misreported round that forced us to do a quick re-pairing, but at least it didn’t change who broke, which is always nasty. Although we only had time for 5 prelims, we did manage to squeak out a run-off in PF so that all the 3-2s had a chance to clear. Otherwise that would have been seriously nasty. And once again we saw proof that, even in relatively small events, 6-tier MJP works fine, and mostly everybody got quite decent mutuality throughout. Mostly 1s, some 2s, hardly a 3 or—shudder—a 2-3, much less a 1-2. Of course, the fact that a couple of schools didn’t pref didn’t hurt!

Meanwhile, some more rooms showed up for Penn, and I’ve opened those floodgates a bit more, and I’ve put Catholic Charlie into position to look at the speech entries from the point of view of someone who, unlike me, knows something about speech entries.

Life goes on.

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