But the underside of that rock was lovely

So I’ve been on hiatus lately.   I know.   I expect the last post goes a long way towards explaining things, but time and life do pass on.

I just sent out about four dozen emails to various and sundry folks.   It’d look more responsible and on top of things if it weren’t for the fact that most of them had been sitting in the old inbox since June & July.     Eep.

The new look tabroom.com is going all right.   There’s the usual whack-a-mole of error messages and weird corner cases, but the brushfires didn’t burn for too long.   It’s altogether too bad that my largest tournament is also my first and thus gets to be the guinea pig, but that’s the nature of the schedule.   The new interface will take some getting used to, but I think it addresses two pressing realities better.   The first is that schools don’t all live in one league, but register across league borders all the time; it makes that easier.   The second is that the number of leagues using it is going to continue to grow; it’ll scale better on the new layout.

And now, we’re a month away from Yale and a week and a half away from the MHLI.   I suppose I should, you know, plan some cirriculum.   We might have as many as six or seven coaches from the MFL going down to Bronx for the event.

That’s all.   Just wanted to signal to my three readers that I’m actually alive and kicking and will be doing things soon.   But right now it’s midnight and, erh, I should get some dinner.

Comments

Comments are disabled on this site.  I have two reasons:

  1. It’s my site.  Stuff on here is by me, not by you.  There are many ways to create a site that is by you and reply to anything I’ve said there.  If you want to surrender control of your site to complete strangers to post commentary, that’s your choice.  It’s not mine.
  2. Comment threads, due to their anonymity, are either moribund, or full of complete internet morons.  I value neither.

Reason 2, incidentally, is the potential big challenge to the Let’s Talk Coaching ideas.  I think limiting it to coacherly types and banning anonymity should do the trick, but I hope I’m right.  Otherwise, John Gabriel’s Theory  will have proven even stronger than currently stated.

If I owe you an email…

It may be on the way already.   The last two weekends were the capstones of my six-week long sprint of doom, with each tournament being progressively more difficult and taxing on yours truly.   I let a lot of thing fall into the “I’ll deal with it after April 4th category.”   Then JV came up for a fancy dinner & visit Sunday, and that left me tired and nonfunctional on Monday.   So I took an internet break, and a forensics break, for a couple of days.   If you don’t like it, then by all means, dock the pay I get for forensics related activities.

I came back to an inbox full of progressively more panicked emails from folks trying to register for NCFL nationals; it appears that I’d typed a > when I wanted a <, and therefore people with too many judges were being warned, not folks with too few as should have been.   Who brings too many judges to a tournament, anyway?

But at any rate, I had intended to write a recap of the MA State Debate tournament tonight, together with getting around to posting the results of the same, and then MA State Speech tomorrow, and then perhaps after that talk about how Menick is predictably utterly wrong when it comes to computer usage in Extemp, but then my friend Greg from high school texted me and offered me a ticket to the Red Sox game tonight.

So screw you guys, I’m going to Fenway.

Is this all there is?

So yeah, I started a site here. I’m not really intending it to be a blog, because I know I am not reliable enough to post new original things here every day. I’ll forget and be sporadic, or I’ll fall into a pattern where I post unoriginal things here every day. I’m going to aim for the former pattern. In the age of RSS feeds, that’s useful enough.

I’ve managed to dump all the random poetry that I had up on the old drupal powered site. I have to say, I rather like WordPress; hacking it around was pleasantly simple, everything codewise is laid out in a very sensible manner. The best programs and systems don’t need documentation; you simply start using them and find you understand them already. Bad systems rebuff efforts to easily understand them; in good systems you’re encouraged to learn and tinker more.

As for the point of this whole thing, I don’t truly know. I’m going to naturally talk some about forensics, though I cannot hope to take Jim Menick’s august mantle of Dean of the Coach Bloggers. All two of them. Or us, I suppose.

But I also do other things, and need to find time for them more. I will probably talk LOPSA some here and there, the family certain is always worth a trip, and then the wide world of politics never lacks for bloggers, but one more can’t really harm anything?

I suppose one more can, with a loon like me behind it.

But more than anything, I don’t truly believe anything until I write it down. Putting it out here like this, makes it more real for me. It brings clarity, just as debate should. It hopefully will force me to organize the stupid ideas that come to me at odd moments, usually when I’m driving and can’t write anything down. Sometimes you write ideas down and they fall together clear; other times you take a look and say “eeugh. No.”

Expect that last one a lot.