[At 10pm tonight, I scrapped everything I had written and just decided to punt a discussion of AI hallucination and quiz bowl writing models to next week. It was inflating beyond my ability to trim it in time, so I’m going to give myself more time with it. And as I’ll explain, I’m already on tilt tonight.]
HSNCT prep
This past week I did the major pre-event press releases for the HSNCT. Joyce has been doing work in the run up to this making sure that if the team didn’t give us a connection with their local media, we had someone in place to hear their story. Usually, entering the tournament, we have 10-15% of the field who we aren’t sure who to email if they finished in the top ten. Well, this year, we’re down to 3 teams, and even with them we know who we’re telling about their tournament, because their press is coming with them. That’s a major accomplishment for us.
But with that, I’ve had to worry about how we’re going to process 320 press releases between the end of the tournament, and when the local papers go to bed. Just to give you an idea, it took 6 hours to do the pre-event PR for the HSNCT, from text creation to shipping. The later Sunday finals presses the amount of time we have to do everything, and I still have to make a Monday morning flight. So with each tournament we’ve done this year, we’ve tweaked our methods, and prepped for the possibilities.
Prior to any NCT this year, I started compiling the local TV markets’ media emails for the 40 or so cities where we have the most teams coming from. I’ve compiled that before on Sunday night after the tournament, but having the data onhand and current is a speedup.
For all the attendees of the IPNCT who were coming to another *NCT, we used the press release system to validate your school’s connections, and if they were old, we started looking for your local education reporter. This is one of the big problems we have: team media contact data gets stale much faster these days.
Joyce took the extraordinary step of pushing teams to double check their contacts, and made a public appeal through social media.
Before the SSNCT final, I hit upon an accidental realization of our software’s capabilities. Our press releases after the tournament collect all the information of each team and their results, both individual and team. If we had to write them from scratch we’d never get them out before the next championship, much less the night of the final. Before the SSNCT final, I put the webform up that generates the press releases, and found I could do the after event document for all but the two remaining active teams. And it worked, needing only a find/replace on the sentence of who won the tournament. Suddenly I realized I could load everything in stages. Teams that didn’t make playoffs could have their press releases written immediately after playoff rankings were compiled. Playoff teams that weren’t the Super Seven could be queued up during the Sunday meal break. And with that, I could maybe ship every press release, just after the tournament ends. Meaning I could get a good night’s sleep.
The final tweak I put into the process was something I did for the pre-event filters. Having seen the ability to sort teams on the generator form by who was done with the tournament, I started trying other fields. Doing that I hit upon sorting the field by the media contact. This I realized could be a valuable way to organize the prelaunch. For years I tried to put all of the pre-event releases out as quickly as possible. I wanted any writer who was tasked with two or more schools to get them in a blast, so they would profile all the teams in one article. But if I sorted by media contact, I could just group the common contact together, and send it on the way, making my task less of a waterfall process.
Unfortunately, this improvement raised the ire of one of the reporters, who let me have it in email, calling it worthless spam. This got me out of sorts because at least some of the schools had given the reporter’s name as who they wanted to contact. It also irritated me because the paper had done an excellent article on a prior year’s top ten finisher. So I’ve been out of sorts since that email.
And then today got shuffled.
The Power Outage
I’ve had power outages at work, and at home when I’m trying to work, but today was probably the most irritating day of waiting for the power to come back on. I had gone to the office at 7am after dropping Catie off, and immediately noticed the sound of the generator by the back door. I could reach my office, the locks and passkey functioned with emergency power, but nothing in the office but a couple of emergency lights were on. I could take a meeting on my phone, but that’s it. And today, I had planned to run a major overnight regression set to open the new software release. But to do that I needed a terminal here, to contact the test machines in another building. Oh, and if you’re thinking about remote logins from home, a standard since COVID, no dice, all my connections go through my desktop and then off around the world. No desktop, no nothing.
It is at this point in our story when we introduce the insidious, incomplete knowledge which screws with your emotions. Power companies introduced their outage maps online, and they fill you with such hope that you’ll be able to proceed. And so when the map showed two overlapping outage areas that should be completed by 10:30, you feel good. When one slips to 11:00, you still feel good. Then when 10:30 and 11 roll past and the map magically updates to 1:00, you still feel hopeful enough to eat your lunch, and take phone calls from your boss, planning the afternoon. We can still run this process if the machines are up by 3, and they’ll still complete in time tomorrow morning. The little map, it mocks, you as your phone drains out.
I had to retreat home at noon, otherwise I’d have no information, and the task was important enough that I might need to get working late to prime it. So I went back home, put the dog out, and did the tasks I would have done tonight. And then the map updated to 3, and then to 5. At four I drove back, and then got caught in traffic, due to the power outage spreading to the next town, hidden by the map until I was in it, taking out the traffic lights, and closing offices. Was it a brownout from heat, or a cascading failure? Don’t know, just tried to get to the office. At 4:50, I pulled into the lot, heard nothing of the generator, and saw lights in the lobby. Three hours later, I had completed what was supposed to be my morning’s work and I was thoroughly rattled and annoyed. The little map had won.
I’m at my best at work when I’ve got at least a plan for the morning, something I can punch out to start and set up the next two or three things in line. I’m at my worst when I am sitting still, unable to move forward, and unable to plan what it coming next. Today started with me at my best, and immediately dropped me to the bottom.
Tomorrow better start with a win, and if not, it better be a complete loss. I don’t think I can take another holding pattern in the dark.