Mar 3 2012

Random Thoughts From JOs

I always have mixed feeling about the Junior Olympics. Neither daughter ever particularly enjoyed fencing at JOs when they were competing—somehow JOs was always more stressful and less fun than any other national tournament.

On the other hand, it’s an easy tournament to work—the events are large, but there aren’t that many each day. On the other other hand, there’s always the board meeting at JOs, which this year met both Saturday and Sunday evenings. By the time the board finished its last agenda item at 11:35 Sunday night, I was the only spectator left. (I’m told that the executive session that followed lasted another hour or so after that.)

• Fencing Time is coming along, and we’re getting used to it. I’ve become accustomed enough to using the Bout ID to find bouts in the tables now that I don’t need the bracket/bout number combination I used to rely on in XSeed. (But it’s still nice having lots of options for finding things.

• We discovered that the framing of the ad section on the fencing results website took over the entire screen on iOS and some other mobile devices when zoomed. (That’s now been fixed.)

• I was disappointed I wasn’t able to get to Squatters or one of the other brewpubs in Salt Lake. In the pre-Winter Olympics days decades ago when I lived in Utah, one could not buy alcohol easily in restaurants and I was looking forward to seeing more cosmopolitan dining. But between attending the board meeting sessions and working my events, I wasn’t able to get out much for evening meals. Oh, well–maybe next time.

• The Salt Palace turned out to be a smaller variation on the Georgia World Congress Center–a short walk from the hotel, followed by a long, long walk inside to get to the farthest possible hall at the other end of the building. But the walk back and forth inspired me to begin a collection I’ve considered starting for years—Convention Center Carpet Patterns:

                    

             

For years I’ve marveled at the complicated multicolored carpet patterns to be found in public spaces. I assume the garish mix of colors and abstract designs are meant to minimize the visibility of debris and deterioration, and I’m always curious how such patterns would look in smaller spaces. None are anything I’d like to see in a residential eating space, that’s for sure.

Can’t wait to see what new visions in carpet await in Cincinnati.

Jan 21 2012

May You LIve in Interesting Times, Part 4

Sunday and Monday both ran fairly smoothly.

Much as I hate to see anyone need to take a medical withdrawal, it was nice that one happened on Sunday—it allowed us to verify that Dan’s overnight fix had corrected the bug from Saturday.

Sunday also gave us another example of the advantages of separately posting pool results and tableau. Someone in the Division I Women’s Saber event (why, I wonder, were most of the problems in Portland in saber?) came to us, wondering why it appeared that 83 fencers were promoted to DEs when the format sheet said that only 77 would be promoted. That’s how we caught that operator error, where the DE round was set to the default 80% promotion rate instead of the 75% it should have been. A quick and easy fix, but one we don’t want to have to do at SN.

The most remarkable part of Monday was that I was able to start releasing strips to the armorers for teardown by about 1:30 pm. It used to be routine for teardown to begin (or for the fencing to end) that early, but it’s been years since that was possible. Our strip layout was odd and awkward for a number of reasons (the armorers even stashed some replacement equipment under the BC stage so that it would be more accessible than it was from their armory in the far corner), but it was a great layout for teardown. The first section released (pods A–E) was far enough from where the fencing continued that the teardown process was barely noticeable, and by the time I released the back section (pods H–K), fencing was down to only the replay pod (G) and the finals strip.

Our 3D Tetris is easier than it was when this photo was taken in March 2011.

We’re getting better at packing up the BC crate, too. We paged some armorers to help get the server case into the crate—it’s astonishing how much easier it is for six people than just three to lift that sucker over the side of the crate. And once we got the server into the crate, the 3-dimensional game of Tetris that is making all our bins and boxes fit went much more quickly and easily than in the past. After congratulating ourselves on our cleverness, we realized that the improvement was mostly due to the reduction in the number of boxes from registration that we had to include—apparently, J.R. and Joe [Sibley—known familiarly among BC types as "Office Joe" to distinguish him from our Joe Salisbury, aka Coffee-Joe] had pared what they ship from one event to the next.

Joe sent me the stats for the live results over the weekend. We had a bit under 7,000 unique visitors, who each averaged 2.46 visits. Joe had set the server bandwidth to his normal default, and both he and Dan and a couple of other tech geeks reacted to the “bandwidth exceeded” message that popped up on Saturday with “Cool!” Joe says we used in a day and a half what is usually a full month’s usage for most of his clients. He bumped up the capacity an order of magnitude or so, so there were no further bandwidth issues.

But we’ve definitely got a hit with the live results.

Update [1/21/12, 10:43 pm]: Joe (that would be Salisbury) suggests I should have mentioned—because it was such a nice big number—that the total  page views on the results site as of the morning of January 18 was 105,794, and that there were visitors from more than 60 countries. He’s right—I should have.

Jan 21 2012

May You Live in Interesting Times, Part 3

The Foucault pendulum in the lobby of the Oregon Convention Center.

The Foucault pendulum in the lobby of the Oregon Convention Center is one of the prettiest I've ever seen, but I never did figure out how the disks reset through the day.

Saturday turned out to be just as interesting as Friday was.

We began to be more comfortable with the new look of all the paper we were working with. FT is flexible about how you can print everything—we can have pods and/or quadrants and/or page numbers and/or table brackets and/or a unique bout ID number with or without an accompanying barcode on the DE bout slips. We experimented a bit with the placement of all these items to get the most helpful combination, so that everyone could use whichever bit worked best for them.

XSeed’s unique identifier is the fencer number, derived from the alphabetical list of everyone entered in the entire tournament. It took most of a day for those of us working the table side to quit having to slap our hands to stop our automatic search back up the tableau to find that fencer number we no longer needed to worry about, and a bit longer not to feel like we were forgetting something by writing only the fencer’s name on the slip.

We discovered one advantage to FT’s use of the unique bout ID when someone inadvertently handed a stack of bout slips to the wrong computer operator, who didn’t notice that they weren’t for her event before she entered them. She scanned the barcodes, which pulled up the proper bouts in the proper event, and they were all entered properly into the correct event without her having to switch from the event she’d been working in. We just have to be careful that the bout slips all end up in the correct physical folders.

Another cool thing is that FT lets you print whatever range of the tableau you want. So if we’re stopping at the 16 to move to the replay pod, we can print the tableau only up to that point, and then print out a new one from the 16. This will be handy for SN—when BC table space is at a premium, we can switch to smaller tableaux as events fence down from their original four or eight pages.

During the turn of the Division I Men’s Saber, we discovered a fairly serious bug in FencingTime (which was also a perfect illustration of why we prefer to post the pool results and the DE tableau separately). James Williams came to the BC table to complain that even though he’d won all his pool bouts, his win percentage showed on the round results as .83. It turned out that there had been a medical withdrawal from the pool before it was completed, which means that all of that fencer’s bouts are thrown out. FT did that, but when it calculated the pool results, it still figured it was a pool of 7 instead of 6. Not only was James’s win percentage wrong, but so was that of everyone in the pool except the poor guy with no wins. Dan and Joe figured out a workaround for the problem, so we could continue the event—there was only about half an hour’s delay dealing with it—and Dan added it to the ever-lengthening to-do list in his FT notebook.

The bug didn’t seem to do James any damage, though—he went on to take the gold medal. (We BC folk aren’t supposed to play favorites, but since James started fencing at the same club my daughters did, I can’t help but be pleased when he does so well.)

Late night, unfortunately. As is usually the case, the concession food we could get with our vouchers wasn’t nearly as good as what we’d had for lunch.