Rob Boudrie

USPSA used a mailing service which printed and mailed the letters. This service states they use multiple mailing centers, but don't say how many. If you have your letter, could you post the zip code or origination (it's on the mailing permit where the stamp would go). No need to post is someone has already posted the zip code on yours. I'm trying to get an idea of the number and location of the mailing points.

By my guess, the letters with PINS should start arriving within the next day or two - could someone please post a confirmation when they start arriving? These will be in a standard business sized window envelope.

The original plan was to pre-squad all Ms and GMs not in super squads, but HQ was unable to do that because of the timeframe.

There are 20 squads of 18 in each match. Chances are that just abot everyone who has a "shooting group" will be able to be together. The larger squad size, and fact that there is only one start time, makes it easier to accomodate groups that a multi-start time Area Championship with squad sizes of 8 or so. We have temporarily closed 3 squads in each match so that we can preserve contiguous blocks of slots in case any large groups squad late. If you have a group and can't fit it into one of the open blocks, contact Kim. (sorry Kim). Complaints about "I did not get what I wanted" are certainly valid, but complaints of the nature "I got exactly what I wanted, but there was a chance under some scenario where that would not have happened, so I am mad!" are less applicable.

The Front Sight PIN will continue to work even if you have set your own password on the member page.

For those of you who aren't geeks: I think I have it fixed For the geeks: No matter how much you try to anticipate every contingency, stuff happens. Although we thought we had this system totally "shaken out", we had not run a major match where competitors would use the Front Sight password, and that was wherein the bug resided. Rob

I am looking at this right now.

Which matches will you be offering to handle registration and squadding assignments for next year? That is not a rhetorical question, but a serious one. Have you contacted your Area Championship match director and offered your services handling competitor correspondence, squadding, and dealing with the people who show up claiming their mailed in request was not honored and must be corrected at the match? -------------------------------- As to the nationals - when I was at Sedro earlier this year and offered the system, I did not have any idea how close to the match the actual deployment would occur. I did not anticipate it being put into action only with only a 16 day window for competitor use, and had hoped for more advance notice. I can assure you that everyone involved will learn from the experience. Feedback should be directed to Dave Thomas at USPSA HQ and Michael Voigt. The USPSA President has full nationals authority and HQ handles registration and squadding. I am certain there will be improvements next year. -------------------------------- The squadding system was not originally created for the nationals, but was done in response to sheer frustration with the process of manually squadding a match. Even if you post "all shooters wishinhg to be squadded together must register together" in the ad, you *STILL* get notes "squad me with Joe who registered last month", or "save a slot in my squad for John who will be sending in his registration. That's not to mention the number of requests from "A" to be squadded with "B" which, in many cases, are not known to "B" and are inconsistent with the people"B" really wants to shoot with. If you want to hear some serious complaining, just start enforcing an "applications must arrive together" procedure. --------------------------------- I realize the Nationals is a special case and will be evaluated differently, however, the feedback I received from the Area 7 squadding procedure was almost universally positive. I say "almost" because there were three people who made it clear they preferred the old way of doing things. --------------------------------- As to "computers screwing up a sport". We will not hit 100.00% on everything we try. Some things will be great right out of the gate; others will need improvements and some may require some rethinking. But, if you think back to the days before computers screwed up the sport: - Major match results would arrive by mail weeks after the event. Now it is not uncommon to have the results make it to the web before you get home. - The only way to find out details of your classification record was to call HQ and get them to look up the data. - Classifeier scores were sent in on paper and manually entered by Sedro. - The only communication from the board and HQ was by telephone or Front Sight magazine.

I ask everyone have some consideration for Kim. Yes, she does have access to all pins from her office. But, there are 660+ entrants between the two matches, and it's not reasonable to: (1) Expect Kim to handle phone calls from everyone who does not have Front Sight handy and does not want to wait for the letter. (2) Expect her to "know who you are." It is not fair to put Kim in the position of having to make the call of "who she knows well enough to give out the info." Good business procedure requires that she treat everyone equally. Yeah, I know everone is "special" and that "everyone knows you", but good process involves treating everyone the same - not running a system where people get treated differently based on "who you know." If you have a problem with your PIN, you must include the PIN you are attempting to use when corresponding with HQ or myself. The super squadding was done a bit late this year, and the Nationals staff will learn from the process. When I offered this system to HQ, I did not anticipate that we would have so little time between "data ready" and the matches. As a result, not all steps were done with the exact timing we would have preferred. It would have been nice to announce the "go live" date a few weeks in advance, and send the letters out a full 5 days before turning the system on. We had the on-line data up within one day of reciept of the final data; used the next day to enable a pre-announcement and review of the Super Squads by the Executive Director; and go live 2 business days after the competitor and supersquad list was delivered. The timing of the super squad selection used this year would have been perfectly fine in previous years when Kim manually squadded both matches on her living room floor a few days before the match. The "lateness" was partially the result of a failure to communicate the changed timing with all involved parties. Any comments Kim makes regarding PIN distribution are official policy.

Correct - I should have said "7".

I was using Midnight as the end of the day, not the beginning, so it is at the end of today.

The letters with the PINS are being mailed tomorrow, 6/22. Domestic competitors will receive a letter from our mailing service, and foreign competitors will receive a letter directly from USPSA HQ. Squadding opens tomorrow (Wed) at Midnight. The 9 digit PIN code from your front sight label will also work in addition to the PIN we are mailing you. Yes, I realize it would have been nice to "pre-announce" this a bit, however, time is of the essence and we simply don't have the time to wait a few days for the letters to arrive, open up squadding, close in on 7/7, and then squad those who have not chosen a squad. Also, the original plan to pre-squad all "M" class competitors together was not possible due to the amount of time left before the match. The final super-squad list was delivered yesterday, and the on-line system was configured and the mailing provided to our distirbution service within one business day of that time. My thanks to Kim at USPSA HQ for all of her work on the nationals - waitlist, squadding, complaints and whatever else comes up.

Members will be able to use the PIN in the letter which is sent or the one from their Front Sight mailing label. Dave Thomas will be advised when the domestic letters are sent, and will have his staff handle the foreign letters from the Sedro office. The exact opening date is a call which will be made by Dave and Kim.

I am helping HQ get the data into the on-line system this year since the software is new, and this is the quickest way to get the system up for our members. Nationals provided the match database a couple of days ago, and sent me the super squad list last evening. I have entered the super squads into the system, and I expect to turn the system on soon (the system now says staudding starts June 28, but that is a "worst case" timeframe - I hope to have it enabled much sooner than that). I am expecting follow up from Sedro on a couple of administrative details today. If all goes well, the letters go out in tomorrow's mail. I will post an update to this forum when the info becomes available. Announcements from HQ will also be available at www.uspsa.org/squadding (select the specific match). Rob

I do not know when this will be released, but the developer is aware of the problem and Roger Maier has a patch version he is testing. The problem occurs when the th ezdb.txt file rowcount exceeds the size of a 16 bit signed integer (32768).

Doing this would be much slower. Based on my experiences at other matches, I very much doubt that the "Palm Crashed", and expect that real issue was user error by the RO. Was this by any chance one of your first stages when the RO's were just getting used to the system? I had suggested RO's get totals before starting to tape until they were sure they had the hang of it.

Matches don't get better by colleting attaboys. They improve by listing to those with constructive feedback, looking for things that can be done better, and trying to see comments from the point of view of the customer, not the match staff. My thanks to Bill Seevers and others for feedback.

Things rarely work out exactly as expected. The original plan was to use the Palms at the GCL Firecracker match near Rochester, however, that event ended up being scheduled after this one. The next plan was to have the RO's learn on the Palms during their shoot time. Some RO's tried; others did not want to distract from their shooting learning a new system - and I could not fault this decision since they were already making a tremendous sacrifice showing up to work 3 days straight (more in some cases) on a weekend which was the hottest and most uncomfortable of the season to date. They were entitled to enjoy shooting the match. We had an ambitious squadding schedule, heat and humidity which made it hard to maintain energy for the entire day, and had to suspend shooting for a while on sunday AM during a downpour. All in all, I am very impressed with the stamina and perseverence of the RO's. I was exhausted at the end of the weekend, and all I did was some computer setup, stats running, training and support. I don't want to even think about what it would have been like entering 2,540 scoresheets in the clubhouse which was hotter than the ranges. I do know that the match director did not have extra staff to spare, and it's unlikley we would have had this done during the match.

This was a learning curve issue. We were running with a group of recently Palm trained RO's, so I decided to "Stick to the basics" in training. Also, all RO's were provided with paper scoresheets (full ones, not just summary slips) which could be used if they had a shooter ready but had a Palm problem. Keep in mind, shooters at all times (except some of the Thurs/Friday RO shooters) were able to see there scores and match standings to date as they left the range. It is possible (given enough staff) to have paper finals *start* to print 5 minutes or so after the last shot. It's not possible to have them *posted* that quickly, or to put up multiple interim postings. As the match wrapped up, we posted new stats each time the "final delivery" was made from a stage... and those shooters willing to put up with 90_heat/100% humidity were there watching. I suspect we would have had more checking results on the spot if the clubhouse were cool and had refreshements available. Rob

Sections and Areas can get a free web site on the USPSA server just by asking. We also can accomodate a few clubs, but won't be able to keep that offer open if all 350 take advantage of it (though I don not anticipate kicking any clubs off once we accept them). You'll still have to pay $7.95 a year or so to Godaddy.com to register a domain. Rob

USPSA HQ will configure the super squads early next week, and PINS will go out shortly thereafter. Rob

RO's call out the time, and it is the responsibility of the shooter to verify that this is correctly recorded. This is equally true of paper or Palm based scoring.

Not moot at all. Proection covers: 1. Loss of data in Palm - for example, dropping one. 2. Typo on the Palm not caught by the shooter. It may be possible to enter "808 seconds" in the Palm, but no RO will accidently enter "808" instead of "8.08" on paper. 3. Consumer confidence. If a shooter wonders if their score is accurate, they can check. 4. Datat not stoered in the Palm. If the RO hits the restart button, instead of done, a score will be lost. That happened to a few (single digit) scores, but they were all recovered from paper without further RO or shooter involvement.

That club should give Ronnie Barrett an honorary membership.

The RO's should be giving each shooter a chance to see thier scores on the Palm as well as the summary sheet. In addition, if any shooter sees a difference between their copy of the hit/time summary sheet and the posted score, they have until midnight tonite to report it to me. I will check the original paper summary sheet and make any necessary correction, as the signed paper copy is the definitive copy in the event of any issue. I can assue you that competitors on Sat and Sun would not have been able to check their scores as they left if we scored manually. In some cases, the scores made it ot the network in the clubhouse before the competitors got there.