In which we wrap up the Brotherly Lovers with a bow and send them off

The question you’re probably asking about the brotherly lovers is, did SpeechWire and tabroom.com play nicely with each other? In a word, they were ecstatic partners for the entire weekend. It worked out fine. In a way, it reminded me of the good old days of porting data out of tabroom and into TRPC, grabbing csv files and sending them over to the SW contingent. This requires a little extra alertness on their part regarding late changes, but that’s not a terribly big deal. Once they had the data, they ran well, and when all was said and done, posted complete results files back on tabroom. Again, shades of the old days, but let’s face it. If a system works, and the people using the system want to use it, what’s the real objection? It’s not as if I’m being paid by the NSDA to push tabroom. Everything I do with that system is totally my own idiocy. I was the one who dove in that fateful November without looking back, although it was Kaz who eventually came up with the comment that “it’s in beta” whenever we needed to explain a glitsch. And I’ve never tabbed speech in my life, on top of that, so what do I know? Dr. Alex and company, from our perspective down at the other end of the table, were doing a fine job from start to finish, and I hope they all come back next year and do it again. ‘Nuff said.

Tabroom behaved quite well, aside from its usual inability to place byes correctly. For the little events we paired by hand, and for PF we just plugged in the right bye to replace the wrong bye, tossing the wrong bye back to the wolves. The best solution to this problem by far is to have an even number of teams in the field, and I recommend that strongly, but these other solutions aren’t terribly burdensome. One thing different this year from last year was that we did not see the continuous outages caused by Penn and Harvard and Berkeley simultaneously overloading the system with users (even on Saturday, when Harvard was still in full swing). That was a real step forward, as last year, whenever we wanted to do literally anything we had no choice but to wait impatiently and curse the interwebs until we were able to get back in. The loss of 2 minutes on every key click adds up pretty fast, so not having that problem is a load off the old mind, definitely.

Of course, we did have the issue of one school lighting out because of a blizzard to the south. The south? Unusual weather we’ve been having lately, to quote the Cowardly Lion. This meant that we had to rebuild a double-flighted break round that was actually in progress, and that we had to manually pair the breaks after that. (Which, if you follow my tabroom blog, is why I recommend you print out a bracket at the first opportunity. One never knows, do one?) That school that pulled out did the right thing, by the way. When your principal calls you home, you go home. No arguments. No demurrals. No nothing. The idea of travel in a blizzard, or any sort of travel in dangerous situations, is simply not what we’re here for. We want to bring home everyone safely, and that’s the end of the story. I have to admit that I really didn’t follow what was happening in Boston, aside from a few bulletins from people there. I don’t know how the Brotherly Lovers would have handled things if the situation were reversed, and while I have no love lost for the Harvard tournament for a variety of reasons, I’m certainly not wishing that the gods of winter gobble them up in one bite. We’ve all been hit too many times by storms that have crippled or even cancelled our events. The pain and frustration of that is enormous. It’s no fun staying home watching the world end when you should be at your tournament biting your nails and yelling at the runners. Been there, done that. Don’t want to be there again.

Anyhow, at some point Kaz and I managed to acquire cheesesteaks, or at least I did, she not being of the PCS persuasion, apparently, which is a true personality failing on her part, and we also got our famous crepes, and I got home at a reasonable hour and so did she, in her case making it the next day to London and Paris as she had planned, so all in all, it was a good weekend. I’ll miss Change of Address, though. He’s graduating this year. The thing is, he spent time as an event planner at the White House last year. Yeah. Event planner. At that White House. Wouldst that every Tournament Director had that sort of background.