In the past week I came to reason that I'm going to have to start splitting my tasks off, at least for this one weekend of the year. A Saturday tour of duty at the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament revealed this to me, as I ran a sixteen-hour day between two tournaments, and then instead of doing what I should do in that situation and sleep, I kept typing up press releases for another hour. In retrospect, what I should have done was just crash as soon as I entered the hotel room. I badly misplayed my energy management going into Sunday, and it's that sort of thing that made it hard for me to function. And because I’ve become accustomed to running on a certain level of muscle memory to get through the these tournaments, I stumble and tire out the process the more the routine is changed.
Bad Muscle Memory
Sunday was the IPNCT, and it was my bad muscle memory day. There are things in these tournaments that I knock out and function by having a rhythm and a series of patter bits that I've incorporated into reading to keep things going while I move things around.
As I'm moving from bonus back to tossup: "First and last for 20. Tossup Next."
As I'm moving from tossup to bonus: That if 15 and here is your bonus."
When the question is below the last line of the screen "Next page"
Even if it's nothing recording it, I don't want long pauses or dead air. I don't want the game to grind to a halt, and I don't want the teams to lose focus while I sort out the ordinary problems of the game. I use that patter to keep the game moving, and I've practiced those little bits of patter to give the rest of my body the time to move the computer into position for the next question or scorekeep.
I do the same thing with folders; "Are you familiar with the card system?" both gives me a chance to gauge their reaction, and for me to move their folder into their view. I go through the pages in the folder, each with its couple of words to let them see it, and to give the next station time to complete their roster checks, so people don't go straight past that.
Well Sunday is the IPNCT and Friday night was the ICT, and both break the patter and screw up my well established muscle memory. There's no card system to explain on Friday night, and now there's just two documents in the folder, placards and a schedule, neither of which need any explanation. Sunday is the IPNCT, and all of my handy patter which I've cultivated over time between tossup and bonus, announcing when score checks occur, scripted responses after a team takes a time out, alll of those are gone from the set of appropriate actions. And Lord do I know it.
I did better than I usually do on Friday night. I think this was the first time I've gotten through ICT folder handout without asking someone if they were familiar with the card system. But my three rounds of reading for the IPNCT were stacked with me trying to run a tossup only format like it was tossup-bonus cycles. I flailed excessively at this. From trying to scroll the online reader to the bonus, to "correct for 15 and your bonus," I was completely off my game. All the muscle memory I use to work efficiently and reliably was out of sorts.
I uncovered a couple of new wrinkles to my muscle memory during the IPNCT. When I clear after a neg in normal quizbowl, I typically lean forward, hit the button to clear, and lean back into a reading position for the rest of the question, putting the reset slightly out of reach. This doesn't typically burn me because in championship level quiz bowl, nobody's going to immediately buzz in there, they'll wait until the question ends, and I lean forward for that. Well guess what isn't true when you have 10 players each acting in their own separate interests. You get me bobbing forward and back until I learn to just stay leaned in for the rest of the question.
Further exacerbating my bad muscle memory was using OQS (online question system) with complex answer lines. OQS is how we run readers for the championships now, but it's still got a few kinks that trip me up because I'm very used to PDFs at this point.
The typeface is still a little wonky to identify rn vs m, a couple of liguatures are ambiguous, and I'm not entirely happy with how it tends to place pronunciation guides after a line break. But the big problem that other people have as well is the complex answer line problem. This is the biggest problem to moderator muscle memory currently out there.
A short history of making caution signs
One of the longtime problems in quiz bowl is how to make readers aware of upcoming questions that require careful parsing. This could be a pronunciation guide or answer guidance. Answer guidance has gotten exponentially more complex over the last few years, as writers want to be creative with their answer lines. Do not accepts become tricky when combined with alternate answers, because they get positioned far from the correct answer. Steps like "accept X before Y is mentioned [in the question]" introduce a non-linear method of reading the question to check your position. The problem with these method is they slow the question down, and introduce the possibility of errors of interpretation in the very attempt to prevent it.
As this situation has developed there were improvements to the directives for readers. Some tournaments put notes before the question to caution the moderator, and NAQT, when working with paper at championships, included a sheet with questions to note had complex answer lines. While these helped a little, they often slowed down the reading of the question, or got lost if they were on another page, or distracted the reader from the reading. As a feature these are currently lost in the OQS, and we probably should develop some way to flag these. Thinking about it as I type this, yellow background text in the answer line indicating all the things to consider might be a way to caution the reader without making them read it before reading the question.
After the tournament, I ended up having my muscle memory fail me again. Most times I fly out to a championship, I schedule the last flight out Sunday night or the earliest Monday flight. In Chicago that's at Midway, so I spend 90 minutes on the train figuring out what I'm going to do with the post-tournament press releases, and then over a sandwich in the food court, I try to push as much of the press releases out. The reason this runs counter to muscle memory for this weekend, is that I don't have an autogenerated template.
The script we use for the other NCT's expects some things when it scrapes the tournament results: If you're in playoffs, you have a round you were eliminated; Matches consist of two teams from a school made up of individuals, not individuals from a school; Teams from the same school are in the same division. Those little differences are enough to cause any attempt to pull press releases automatically from the data to fail, and crash the script. So for this evening, I had to write the story for each team's ascent through the ICT from their stats page, and each player in the IPNCT from their stat line, and an account of the finals from the control room. This is widely seen as a bad idea, but I don't have a better plan in place. I managed to publish the most important press releases before my plane boarded at 10:00, eight stories of the top 4 in Division I and II, nine stories of the nine finalists of the IPNCT.
One of the tasks that popped up in tournament conversation was an effort to update the NAQT Nationals app. For reasons to be explained later on, I was hesitant to do it. Despite being a software tester in my day job, I was not really looking to add to tasks this weekend. But was convinced by others to do it. After I had installed the latest TestFlight for iOS, I did what I always do in the first match of the day. I cautioned the teams to put their phone on airplane mode for the match, and then I did the same.
You know what doesn't work when you put a phone in airplane mode: TestFlight and an app that needs to connect to the internet. Muscle memory yet again!
Everything needs replaced
The primary reason I hesitated on doing the app testing was that I was convinced whatever testing I would do would be for nought. I'm running out of time on the lifecycle of most of my technology, and this summer will probably require me to upgrade a few things. My phone's no longer able to upgrade iOS, and some apps (like my banking app) are starting to fail. If I have trouble with the app, it's always possible it's because the OS is too old to handle the new feature.
This is kind of across the board, I've spent so much time doing the book and the day job and the night job, I've neglected the maintenance, until it all needs done at once. The laptop I travel with normally is a Chromebook, that I got when I was recovering in 2019, and it's well past its automatic Chrome updates. I don't want to do it, but I have to because Slack doesn't work right on such an old browser version, and you can't really run OQS without some degree of Slack integration for protests and checking in on people. And while slack works on the phone, my office runs on teams and actually frowns on having both on your phone during work.
I've been borrowing a Windows laptop my father bought in 2020 for my days when my day job is my home job, since my previous day job Windows machine is so old it can't be upgraded to Win11. I can still use it as the base for Remote Desktop with Citrix, but it's both slow, and lacking support.
Everything has that feeling like it's about to break if you don't find time to maintain it. My glasses even need replaced, as they last got updated while I was off as well. But probably the weirdest thing that needs updated is the garden soil.
The annual gardening update
I'm trying to get the garden started for this year. I have been thwarted in my March efforts by a mix of cold and rain, preventing a good tilling of the raised beds, and thwarted by too many weekends with my schedule tied up for the dry and bright hours. After last year's poor production and deer incursion, I resolved to put my composter to work early and till last year's compost into the beds, but the one perfect day to do it was in the middle of hospital visiting hours. The only thing I've gotten planted this year, aside from a wintered over potato bed, has been a pot of snow peas under a tripod, and covered in flowcloth. I finally got a chance to check it today, and we've got 30 or so shoots aiming for the poles. It's a start.