Wednesday, October 05, 2016

In which we mostly ponder benefits and bugs

I spent all of yesterday in a DJ meeting going over a new replacement for an old system. It is a classic conundrum in that it while it offers benefits to the company, it doesn’t offer any benefits to the users. Everyone will have to learn something new to do exactly what they’re already doing. There are no work or time savings, no great new ease of use, nothing. Those benefits to the company, on the other hand, are major in terms of asset management. I kind of dread rolling it out, because I can’t promise anyone any particular personal benefits. Asking everyone to be an altruist is not necessarily an easy business. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, as Spock would say, but in the business world, most people tend to favor the individual (themselves) over the group. There are no utilitarians in the subjective reality of the office cubicle.

While I was going through all of this, I occasionally popped off to watch the tournament world. Monticello closed, and we have three runnable divisions, mostly. PF will be a little dicey, with too many of one school, but the rest are quite workable, mainly because there’s a nice fluid pool of judges I can move from event to event to keep everyone on their toes. I’m waiting to hear about e-ballots. With a small tournament like this it’s not terribly onerous to do paper, but why would you if you don’t have to? If nothing else, I wouldn’t have to lug my printer up the stairs. I can live with that.

Rather Large Bronx is going through its late conniptions. Tabroom isn’t tallying partial judging correctly, which is giving them a headache. I passed it along to the King of All Prime Numbers, but I’m already guessing that he’ll tell us that we’re thinking incorrectly and that we need to debug our brains and not the program. I’ve got to get a message out, meanwhile, to a handful of very promising first-year-outs who will be judging 0-5 rounds if they don’t post a paradigm immediately. Overall, though, the judging numbers look good, with lots of leeway for the late outrounds, which I always really worry about.

Onward.

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