Aside from our one hoo-ha, tabroom mostly worked fine. One
thing that didn’t work was isolating roles. It’s set up to allow ownership,
administration, tabbing, and various entries-only. The only ones that seem to
get you in are ownership and admin. I gave MP tabbing-only originally, not
because I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, but just to test it
out. Nada. (Got a similar nada with Biggish Bronx.) Theoretically no big deal,
but I can envision situations where I seriously want to limit access, maybe
when I have high school kids entering data, for instance. We filed a good
old-fashioned bug report on that one. Another bug was the setup for blocking
judges in elims who had dropped a student in a previous elim. It just didn’t
work. Bug reported. Oh, yeah. It still wasn’t doing byes correctly. We just did
them by hand. Given that debaters were dropping like flies, a bye in one round
didn’t mean there would be a bye in the next. Whatever. The problem with
entering a help ticket on this is that no one wants to sit around waiting for a
programming fix for a problem you can solve by simply doing a click-and-replace. Maybe this will be the bug that never goes away, since I distinctly
remember CP fixing it last year at the State tournament. Then again, I also
remember the sinking of the Lusitania. I’ve led a long and busy life.
We borrowed from the Tiggers for the pushing of ballots on
Sunday. This is a process that needs the odd bit of refinement. When we next do
it, in fact at the Tigs, I think I’ll try it this way:
1. Post the time for the judge assembly
2. Release the pairings when I’m actually standing in the JA
room. This way people won’t say “I didn’t get a text” and not show up. The
whole point of JA is to replace assigned judges with alternates. If all the
alternates stay away, which they would do if they didn’t get a text, well,
there you are.
3. Keep a better running list of no-shows while trying to sub for the posted
judge. They're all obligated. And that way, I can fine every single one of the tattie howkers. Bingo!
Fun stuff: When you’re handing out ballots by calling the
names alphabetically, someone comes up to you and asks for a ballot you haven’t
called yet. More fun: When you’re handing out ballots by calling the names
alphabetically, someone comes up to you and blocks traffic and roundly rails at
you with a question about a rules infraction that might or might not occur 25
minutes from now. And five minutes later does it again, for a potential infraction 20 minutes from now. I mean, first of all, I
couldn’t answer the question anyhow, since there was no rule about it, and
second, I couldn’t answer it because even if there were a rule about it it
hadn’t happened, and third, have you noticed I’m busy here doing something
else? Even more fun: When the judges bring their ballots onto the shuttle bus with
them after the last round and you’re spending half an hour tracking them down. Even more more fun:
When the same judges bring their ballots onto the shuttle bus with them after the last rounds TWO NIGHTS
IN A ROW and you’re spending half an hour tracking them down.
Our room at the high school had a new wrinkle this year:
lights activated by a motion sensor. Or more to the point, lights deactivated
by a motion sensor. Every fifteen minutes or so the lights went out, not
because we were sitting there in an immobile stupor, which has been known to
happen, but because the sensor was over in the corner behind the dishwasher.
Perhaps if we had been washing more dishes that day, it might not have mattered
so much.
There were the usual issue situations. Annie handled a
couple of them, which is the whole point of Annie (or, I guess it’s better to say,
the whole point of Annie at Pups LD). One complaint went to the management, complaining
that their judge had never been used. The reason for this was that their judge,
an unknown, had not published a paradigm, not that we were sitting there in the dark in our
immobile stupor preventing that particular judge from getting any rounds. Come
in and watch us some day. Rule number 1: the computer does the assignments.
Rule number 2: we only replace assignments if we can improve the mutuality
issue. Rule number 3: we always pull the judges from the top of the proffered
list. Always. In other words, we really don’t give the proverbial hoot about
who’s judging whom (2 out of 3 of us in the room had no horses in the race). We
only care about the arithmetic beauty of the thing, as much as we can achieve
it. Keep in mind that Catholic Charlie is a math teacher and yours truly, while
relatively verbal, did get near-perfect math SAT scores back in the day. The
math means something to us in a platonic ideal sense.
I’m sure there will be more stuff to report, but that will
do for now.
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