We thought we were prepared. We were mistaken.
On Thursday, November 26th, the 40th annual Holiday Basketball Tournament began. As in the past, SysOps were tasked with the enviable (as if) job of broadcasting the games live on the internet for the families, friends, and fans of eight teams from schools around Asia. It seemed as though everything would be fine: we had a great new website, a Mac Pro to help us show the games on said website, and enough people registered to help that there was no way we would be understaffed.
Before we get to the details of how much bupkes this event gave us, why don’t spend a few sentences analyzing the technology behind our operations. Starting last year, Keiran had been spearheading the redesign of the (honestly pretty bad) tournament website. Working from well over ten design concepts, the present website was created, every div tag painstakingly configured and every image carefully designed to project an image of smooth, high-quality 21st-century sports coverage. Once the website was finally complete, it took another several weeks to acquire the logos of each participating school (save for HKIS, for obvious reasons) and set up the databases to handle the game schedule and team rosters. Despite all those chores being completed well before the deadline, the website was not without problems as it went live. Our main concern as we placed the site files in the high school Dragonnet’s main database was the implimentation of the live feeds, and rightly so. We had not received any information about hooking up the live feeds to the website, nor had we any idea what system we would use to display the videos on the internet (we eventually decided on using Boinx TV on a new Mac Pro designated to arrive the first day of the tournament for the high school feed, and Windows Media Encoder for the middle school).
With enough of the kinks worked out that we believed we could safely go live, SysOps sat back and relaxed, waiting for Thanksgiving day to come, and bring with it the opportunity to show off our beautiful site to teh wurld.
Then, on the day of the tournament, we encountered total, utter disaster. The live feed didn’t work. Spectators from as far as Vancouver left comments complaining about the broken video system as we scrambled to get everything functioning properly.People didn’t show up. Access to the crucial media server was denied us by ETS. The Mac Pro didn’t get to the gym on time. Life sucked.
Fortunately, after a few manic hours of shouting, pressing buttons, and plugging things in and out, everything was (somewhat) under control, and stayed that way for the rest of the night. Despite operating on a skeleton crew, the comment boards were filled with praise for our obvious skill and technological prowess. It seemed we had won…
…until the next morning. We arrived to discover that somehow our broadcasting system had been disconnected from the publishing server and nobody outside the school’s network could see the feed. More scrambling. More shouting, pressing buttons, and plugging things in and out. We frantically called Mr. Hardman, our de facto god and the official school technology coordinator, beseeching him descend from whatever binary-powered heaven he was residing in and save us from our miserable situation. Much to our dismay, he told us he was busy.
We waited for half the day, playing flash games (with the notable exception of AJ, who insisted on playing RuneScape) and eating junk food, wondering desperately when the venerable Hardman would arrive to save us from our pain and hateful spectator comments on the website. 11 AM, and he was still absent. Noon came, and was Mr. Hardman there? No. 1:00? No. Finally, at 2:00, just as we were beginning to believe our glorious deity had abandoned us, he finally deigned to appear in the high school gym and set up our Mac Pro Boinx broadcast, as well as fix the middle school feed. Things were once again under control, and this time they remained that way.
Saturday morning, we got to school and immediately got to work bringing the feeds online. No problems. Comments filled the boards thanking us for our efforts and cheering on whatever teams were playing at the time. Staffed adequately and working at full capacity, it seemed we were in the perfect position to allocate certain members of the team as commentators to aid the beleaguered Mr. Ewing and Steven Keithley.
If only that had been a good idea. Aside from a visiting sports reporter from Stars and Stripes (the US Military’s newspaper) who provided skillful and accurate commentary, the idea backfired completely. One Allen Zhang, a less involved member of SysOps, tried to do the job, but after tripping over his words and describing a momentary clusterflop of female players struggling for the ball as “some intense girl on girl action”, realised that perhaps sports commentary was far from his strongpoint.
In the words of the Gradual Report: Final Summation, the tournament was not a failure, but not a complete success either, there were many problems but many solutions as well, and there was every manner of action ranging from pleas to divinity to intense girl on girl action. Not a terrible way to waste three days.
