In which we ponder the Newark MHL

We only got 3 rounds out at the First-Timers’ MHL. Why I continue to think every year that we’ll be able to get 4 out is the proverbial triumph of hope over experience. Oh, well. It’s always worth a try.

First of all, there was the team that ate the tournament for breakfast. We shall never see them or their director again. I got to enjoy watching O’C ream out said director. In the past we have ranked me as passive-aggressive, Kaz as educational-aggressive, and JV as aggressive-aggressive. We’ve never ranked O’C on this scale, because he is slow to explode. But when he does? Nuclear aggressive! No living thing could possibly survive it.

Kaboom…

Then there were all the usual problems with a borrowed building, like locked rooms. That can eat up half an hour without batting an eye.

And finally there were computer problems. First of all, we couldn’t log in, and worse, I didn’t get decent reception on my mifi. So there was that to contend with. And then we had what I can only refer to as latency problems. Some school networks simply don’t have the ability to manage what we do on tabroom. I talked to CP about this, and he claims it’s either latency and proxies or we’re doing something wrong and hitting a wrong button. But I don’t know what button to press that gives different results of the same data on different devices. That’s a server issue, somehow. And when I think about it, we hardly ever run on high school servers, and the two biggest meltdowns this year, at Yale and Newark, were on high school servers, and they both failed because of latency issues.

This problem can be solved. Don’t use unreliable servers. How do you know if a server is unreliable? For me, if it’s in a high school, which all sorts of controls of what can and can’t be accessed, it can’t be trusted. I have a mifi, and I’ve ordered a better one to come later in the fall. I’ll use that, or I’ll use Kaz’s phone if she’s around. If we’re on a college network, we’re pretty safe, I think. We had no problems at Princeton, Columbia or Penn. And if you must use an unreliable server, just have one station pairing rounds and printing/pushing. At least that way, what you get is what you get, as compared to what you get is one thing and what Joe gets is another thing and what Jon gets is another thing and when you send it to CP, he gets yet another thing.

The bind moggles.