September steals into the world with a lovely crisp week of New England fall weather, cool and perfect, but with that bright bright sun that we see all summer and miss all winter. I went up to York, ME for Labor Day, giving me a chance to walk in the cooling breeze during sunset and wave goodbye to summer, a stolen tradition but one I quite like.
And now we have the reality of the approaching school year. Boo, hiss.
Tabroom
I am crawling to the bitter end of the list of things I have to do with Tabroom before I can feature freeze it. I had hoped to finish that before leaving for a sojourn with Mock Trial folks last month but it was fantasy, as ever. My last challenge is to build a front end that can take advantage of Tabroom living in the cloud now, which will let people other than me autoscale the power of our installation upwards if the service is lagging. Right now we can scale it up, but the process is picky and technical which means only Hardy and I can do it, and as anyone in front line support will tell you, you need at least 3 people for 24/7 coverage.
So once this is done, I can permit others in the NSDA hit the “More power!!!” button when there is a slowdown. The process of programming it is quite tedious, however. One major requirement is making sure that folks without a programming background can understand the nature of the problem before hitting buttons that will cost us a lot of money. There are times when there are Tabroom slowdowns for individuals that aren’t actually server overloads — their local internet is having trouble, or the provider’s is. A system can report load metrics to tell you if they’re struggling and why — but these are a little arcane and hard to read, and stored in multiple locations. So part of this task is me having to read badly formatted data from six different sources and present it to a colleague in my department such a that an intelligent non programmer can understand and act on it.
That job is nitpicky and tedious, and prone to look right when in fact it is wrong. When you’re trying to sift through a dozen bits of data that are all decimal numbers between 0 and 1, and you pick the wrong column, it still appears okay unless you check it very carefully. It’d be easier if the wrong answers were all 439,981 when the right answers were 0.31.
But the nice news is I’ve been able to write more of this backend in NodeJS and not increase my rewrite woes yet further on the cusp of being able to focus on it exclusively.
I’m also working on a pretty comprehensive set of documents for Tabroom aimed at Mock Trial usage. It’s coming along well, though it is reminding me that we really do need to show some love to the docs for Speech & Debate usage as well. I’m hoping I can actually use some of this MT stuff to help out S&D. Two public speaking activities, helping each other.
Tournaments & Travels
My slimmed down schedule includes two this month: the Kentucky Season Opener on 9/7 weekend, and the Jack Howe Memorial at CSU Long Beach on 9/28 weekend. And then, in more distant and exotic news, I depart for Taiwan, partly for the Taiwan Speech & Debate Invitational on 10/12 weekend, but also for a week of seeing what the island has to offer first hand. I admit Taiwan has never been high on my travel radar before, because I didn’t know much about it. I sat down on a long flight last week to do some reading, and it took me exactly one blog post to go from “How should I fill my time there?” to “How on earth can I narrow this list down so it’s manageable?
Otherwise this is also the stunning time of year when New England gets to lord our superior weather over the rest of the world. It doesn’t happen often, so we tend to grab it with both hands when it does. The humidity blows out into the ocean, taking the bugs with it, and then the leaves turn bright, and I start moseying northwards to the forests more often.
Writing
I haven’t done squat with the eight or so ideas I have for a travel blog that people keep pestering me about. But I’ve written three full chapters of this book I’ve been toying with. I’ll likely never have the gumption to share it with anyone else, but it’s been edifying practice to write it out, and it gives me an excuse to put the coding linter down sometimes.
I made a clipboard to write with out of purple heartwood that came out decent. No photos yet, and I suspect I made it a touch too thin and it’ll warp, but as a first shot working with a new hardwood, I’m decently pleased. If it does warp, I’ll try a layered version next and see.