SCT

AHHHHHHHHH!!! Relaxed state.

If it's possible to make a tournament easy, it was pulled off this weekend. Big thanks to the CWRU crew for pulling it off, and all those who came in to help out. I like tournaments that run efficiently and ahead of schedule, and we got both. In fact, the only thing that was really bad about it was that we had room and staff for additional teams, but we(NAQT) couldn't pull that.

The especially good sign was that NAQT pulled in something like 18 new schools (Not counting the CC's which I have to check last year's list to this year's.) Now the battle is to get them to stay in touch with the circuit. And for the circuit to stay in touch with them.

I won't say that they were the best questions NAQT has ever done (I reserve that for some of the old '97-'98 era IMs, which still blow my mind) but it was in that range. Avoiding needless obscurity, remaining squarely among approachable answers, while still providing enough challenge to teams to differentiate all along the line from top to bottom. While that isn't exactly what everyone wants out of quiz bowl, when you get down to it, it's what 95% want (or 95% of what people want), and the remaining 5% wouldn't be happy unless what you did was what more than 5% of the remainder didn't want, and well, you gotta choose somewhere. And the side of the angels isn't a bad choice.

Two odd bits from the job:
1. I spent the better part of the afternoon in a meeting where the next three years of strategy were laid out. Assuming I stay in the job that long it will be interesting. I found it difficult to follow the lecture, given the fact that the guy giving the briefing was wearing a button with our new marketing slogan. So help me if I ever get marked down in my job for not wearing sufficient 'flair', I am taking a flamethrower to Fort Multi.

2. Following the meeting my boss's boss brought me in for a pre-job-performance-review review, whereupon it was insinuated that I'd be the perfect guy in testing for a task. That task being monitoring all bugs as they come in and making sure none of them get lost in the shuffle of development. My immediate thought was something that would only cost about $35 to implement. Assuming they give me the task, I'm going to implement the whiteboard from Homicide: Life on the Street.