Pups 2009, in which certain people feel really sorry for themselves, poor baby

The Pups? Well, we got through it. Although for some reason I just sort of felt out of it all weekend. Maybe lack of sleep, maybe the flu shot. I don’t know. It was as if my head were packed in cement or something; it was very hard for stuff to get in or out of it.

I arrived early enough to solve (sort of) the first problem, which was that the data was not coming in correctly from tabroom. The thing is, nothing had changed from the last time we’d done this, not in tabroom, not in TRPC, but the process of transmitting the data was interpolating a number into the second team member field, then concatenating a # with the last name of the first team member, but # is invisible, so everywhere it mattered you’d get Hen Hud G or Regis S rather than both initials. Hardly enough information… We never did figure it out; I reverted back to using separate team, school and judge files, which worked fine, with the down side that one needs to comb through them for duplicates that will otherwise wreak havoc. Caught all but one, which isn’t terrible. Also entered in all the strikes and rankings at this point. Nothing automated here, but tabroom does keep a record of the strikes, so when someone comes in wondering why such-and-such is judging because they struck s-a-s, we can quickly check and (happily) report that, actually, no you didn’t. Two schools with similar names provided one minor issue here, ending up that both schools got to strike one person deliberately and the other school by ill-gotten strike gain, but those things are hardly a problem in a big tournament.

The rounds went off hitchless on Friday. There’s two of them, with plenty of extra judges. And speaking of the judges, the pool was outrageously solid. Going by the community rankings, as explained in the invitation, we were able to provide As in every potentially game-breaking situation, and most others as well. In aid of transparency, I report that we start at the top of every list (random) and never vary in the assignment of judges: we do not inject our own opinions of who should judge whom. Mostly TRPC does the assignments for us, but if the program puts in less that an A judge on a bubble, we always take from the top. Thank God it’s not alphabetical, or Bietz would judge every round…

On Friday we heard that there might be some problems getting all our Saturday rooms, so we rejiggered the schedule in case we had to stagger V and JV rounds. This would, unfortunately, have also staggered us into Sunday morning doubles, so we were hoping to be able to crawl out of this hole if the worst didn’t occur. And, fortunately, said worst didn’t occur. But there was some scrambling. I’ve never seen a schedule readjust so often, but always moving quicker and not slower. We just told everybody to pay attention, and most of them did. One person missed a round, but given that we were twittering, posting on the schematics and announcing in the meetings, and the other 400 people did get the message, I’ve got a feeling that it really wasn’t us. Anyhow, we got everybody out of there at around 8:00 on Saturday, with doubles under their little LD belts. I miss the old days at Yale, where ballots went out Saturday at about midnight, and coaches carrying torches and pitchforks stormed the battlements. Then again, I don’t think I could have handled too much storming, the way I was feeling. It took me forever to do the Friday crossword, if you want to know how bad I was. Friday? Forever? Moi? No way, Hose A.

One of my favorite moments was when some poor schlub read the schematic and saw a room on the college campus as the location for the round. We were at a high school about fifty parsecs from said campus; this was an oversight on our side, the inadvertent clicking of a little box somewhere in the deep dark past, and a miss of the problem when we eyeballed the skem. The other people in the round came by and said that we had to be kidding, while that one poor schlub hightailed it all the way down to Pup Land. Poor thing. There are very few ways to get the sympathy of the tab room, and a bye. This is one of them. I mean, we did say that was where the round is, so technically it was our fault. Rule number one in life: when it looks too dumb to be true, it’s either not true or else it’s in Sarah Palin’s autobiography. Ask somebody if you’re not clear on things, in other words.

Breaks went fine on Sunday, after I managed to let loose the ballots that we had been planning to distribute by hand. Ah, the wrath of Vaughan! This was my lowest point of the weekend. Fortunately the judges were at hand to keep things moving, but nothing is worse than letting the farflung folks think that they can go wandering off, which is what I did. There’s a lesson in this: everybody screws up. The takeaway from the lesson: screw up some other way next time. Making mistakes is okay, just don’t keep making the same mistakes. Dedicate yourself to making new mistakes. That’ll keep things fresh. That’s what Menick would do!

(Jeesh: I’m referring to myself in the third person. What next? Thanking God for letting me record a rap song?)

There were all sorts of interesting things going on, transparency-wise. We published all the results after the rounds, starting Saturday morning. We published the brackets when we announced the breaks. The ballots went online during the tournament, for coaches to check. I don’t recall any tabbing errors (but then again, I don’t recall anything about 13 hours in the middle there). I tweeted regularly, so anyone who bothered to subscribe to @debatetab, as they were asked to repeatedly, got the important updates, although I slowed down a bit Saturday since, after all, we were all in one place, and JV could make announcements directly. To be honest, I have a feeling that the Twittering of a tournament won’t ripen until Princeton, where everyone is farflung at all times. We’ll see.

There’s probably more to report, but as you can see, mostly things went fine, at least from the perspective of the attendees. Meanwhile, I’m assuming that I’ll get some sleep between now and the Kaiser Roll, and be back to my former sterling self.