In which tabroom is put to bed, and I am not far behind it

For the first time since August, I don’t have any reason to look at tabroom.com. I have exactly zero tournaments to manage.

Overall, this has been an interesting year. We tossed TRPC early on and dove headfirst into tabroom, with generally good results. Like TRPC, the program works best when you have one nice big field to work with and a nice big pool of judges to go with it. Actually, it works better, because there’s the whole collaborative thing where a team can attack different pieces of the process, plus the management of MJP is far superior to TRPC’s. First of all, it provides better matches, and second, fine tuning is a comparative breeze. For smaller fields and problematic events, it has some quirks that have had to be sorted out. The inability to print room lists is a serious flaw: there’s no one way to see what’s happening at a given time, and if there’s a problem, you find out about it because multiple rounds are scheduled in the same place, or no place. It has hard-to-track flaws with calculating speaker points if there’s been a bye. As a matter of fact, it has a hard time with byes, period. Putting a bye team into a round can be as complicated as the Normandy invasion. And sometimes it doesn’t advance all the advancing teams. The thing is, we knew going into it that there would be a period of beating it up, and since I’ve beat up a lot of systems over the years at the DJ, I know what that’s like. You get the benefits of an improved system, but also the inadequacies of a new system. No programmer can foresee every quirk. Or actually more to the point, users can find quirks better than programmers once you reach the last 5% of the programming process. Go live, beta, and let the chips fall where they may, and if you’re a beta tester, you know what you’re getting into.

At least I’ve managed to leave a trail of crumbs for other users. Let’s face it, there aren’t many people who tab as much as our little traveling tab room does. Anyone using this system a couple of times a year, or a tournament director setting it up once a year, is going to be daunted. I wrote the manual to help those folks, and while the manual can be as daunting as the program, if you just start at the beginning it will walk you through anything that might be unclear.

Anyhow, it’s behind me now, for the time being. Tonight is Bean Trivia, the semi-official end of the Sailor season. There are a couple of Speecho-Americans with some more rounds on their plates, but debate is over. I will be going to Utah for NDCA next weekend, but I’m not tabbing there because board members are generally barred from doing so, presumably because of the endless disputes. (Endless disputes? Not in my tab room. You come in and start a dispute and we’ll end it right then and there. Get off my lawn!) I’ll be judging PF, which I like to do. A good weekend in the back of the room will get me up to speed to see what’s new that’s been going on lately, if anything. I wish the topic weren’t so deadly, though. I’d much rather listen to gender equality than extracting ink from India or whatever they’re arguing. For once I might be wishing that people don’t stick to the resolution.