I was off my feed yesterday, thanks apparently to a minor bout with a virus which did not agree with my opinion of the best way to handle the digestive processes. Thankfully, like all such viruses, this one quickly lost the war after some initial success in some minor skirmishes, and I am back in business. Meanwhile, the world has completely gone to hell in a handbasket. You know what I’m talking about. But I will reserve judgment on WTF for the time being, aside from reminding the VCA of the axiom, idle hands are the devil’s workshop. The thing is clearly claiming to be under construction, and it is bad form to think that work in progress equals the final product. My main complaint with them in their previous reconstructions was the moving of the organization’s blog material to less and less prominence. I’m hoping that this is not repeated in the future. My WTF correspondent, Herman Melville, has emailed me to say that I have nothing to worry about except worry itself, and that he will be providing me with a complete guided tour of the site as soon as he recovers from his work as a runner at the WTF tournament. “It’s not easy being in charge of everything,” was how he put it. Ah, the runner’s lament…
One benefit—nay, the only benefit—of not working yesterday was the opportunity to prep the upcoming Regis tournament that’s taking place tomorrow. I’m very pleased with the way the data pulls out of tabroom.com and into Evil TRPC. There are some quirks, though. All judges are listed for 9 rounds, so if you manually add further judges, they need to go in for 9 rounds as well, which really makes people freak when they show up at the registration table and see what their judging requirement looks like. For that alone, to tell you the truth, I enjoy the process: I love the smell of freaked-out judges in the morning. Then there’s the LDers, who appear as part of a three-person team with the second person missing. That is, there’s spaces in each team entry for three names; for no known reason, tabroom gets each LDer’s name into Evil in the first slot and in the third slot. Same name, no effect on tabulation. That is, no debaters are harmed in this process, but it is curious. For all practical purposes it doubles the number of LDers and then makes half of the new number mere simulacra. This is also what happens when they tab tournaments in France, with or without TRPC.
I’ve also begun to take stock of Bigle X. CP gave me access to the data just to poke around for my own selfish purposes (I wanted a looksee at how housing is handled by the application, since I intend to use it for Bump next year), and not to put too fine a point on it, but this tournament has more schools entered than most tournaments have teams. LD and Pfffft start Friday, then Policy starts Saturday after the other two spin down into elimination rounds, thus freeing up classrooms. Policy ends Monday, while LD simply goes off on Sunday starting the RR, and the whole thing is reminiscent of one of those computer railroad simulations where the whole point is to make sure that Topeka gets its wheat on time and the sidings are clear on the Reading. Jeesh. One big issue is four single-flighted rounds on Friday for Varsity LD. One needs to import judges with a Topekan wheat-market mentality. I’ve usually been off on the Novice side of things, which was meaningful when we had separate buildings, but now that we’re all together, and it’s me and JV and Kaz (and maybe The Enforcer), we’re all just one happy family, and I’ll get a nice close-up view. And CP will be in there too, running Pfffft. (Ah, the Scrabble games I see in my future!) My other issue is remembering how to screw up a Round Robin, since I’ll tab that too. It wasn’t too hard last year, and actually I didn’t screw anything up, but it was time-consuming. If it weren’t for side and judge constraints, it would tab itself. Oh, well…
And I finally heard from the Goys about the District tabbing software. I didn’t read the message too closely, but I gather I now have what I need. I intend to inspect the vehicle and kick a few tires on Sunday. I’ll keep you posted.
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