2013 Bridge: Webmaster for District 25

Posted on June 17, 2023 by Mike

Webmaster, database, email, comm comm, bulletin. Continue reading →

2012 was long before “ACBL Live Results”¹ made it easy for bridge players to find out within an hour or so the results of tournaments.Late in that year I saw a notice on the NEBridge.org² home page that District 25 (i.e., New England) was seeking someone to post on the website the results from its tournaments as the tournaments were running. It asked interested players to contact the president of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC), Ausra Geaski. I did, and after a short training session from Bob Bertoni, who owned and operated Megaherz Computer, the company that designed and implemented the website, I took over the responsibility.

On the evening of each day of the 2013 Knockout Regional in Cromwell I posted the results. The tournament director sent me a text file for each event. I amalgamated them into one large file text file using a program that had been provided to me. I made an HTML file that had an index at the top with one line linked to the anchor for each event that I had inserted at the top of the appropriate text. It was more basic HTML than rocket science.

Bob thought that I had done a good job in getting the results posted promptly. He told me that someone who was webmaster at one of the other units had tried to do it at a previous tournament and had made a big mess.

I subsequently told Ausra, whom I occasionally saw at the Hartford Bridge Club³ (HBC). that I was willing and able to do more. Shortly thereafter another notice was posted on NEBridge.org. This one said that the district needed a webmaster. Bill Braucher was resigning from the post that he had held for seven years. I let Ausra know that I thought that I could do it. I also told her about my own website, Wavada.org (which was introduced here), but I don’t think that anyone ever checked it out.

One evening at a tournament Bob spent about an hour with me explaining how the district’s website was structured and how the built-in page editor worked. During this session he discovered that I already knew HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.⁴ He exclaimed, “Oh, you can code! You won’t have any trouble with this.”

A little later we realized that we had something else in common. Bob had attended Boston College on a debate scholarship.⁵ His coach was Tuna Snider, whom I knew fairly well. In the end Bob offered me the webmaster job at the same salary that Bill had earned.⁶ I countered with a demand for a 75% raise, and we settled on 50%.

The bridge world was very different then. The district’s website was its primary method of communicating with its members. It did not publish a newsletter, and it had no program for using email. For the most part postcards and flyers were snail-mailed to the clubs. The district relied on their owner/managers to pass the information on to the players. This method was somewhat costly and totally unreliable.

Furthermore, the webmaster was not allowed to post any material unless the website editor, Allan Clamage⁷, had checked it for style and errors. Allan also taught me about standards that the district had established to govern the decisions. For example, the website never published an obituary or promoted any unit’s tournaments or other events.

The Website Committee (Allan, Bob, District Director and NEBC Treasureer Rich DeMartino, and myself) had a strategy meeting during one of the lunch breaks at every tournament. I don’t remember much that transpired at these meeting, but the other members mostly endorsed my ideas for improving the website. After three or four meetings Rich declared that we seemed to know what we were doing and disbanded the committee. At about the same time Allan began to review what I posted only after the fact. I considered that show of trust as a great compliment. I only embarrassed him a few times, and he never got angry at me.

My primary goal was to attract more eyeballs to the site. Expert players Harold Feldheim and Jay Stiefel allowed me to post articles that they had written for The Kibitzer, the newsletter of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA). I also received material from Frank Hacker, Steve Rzewski, Bill Braucher, and a few others.

I began writing The View from B-Low under my nom de plume, Single Session Swiss⁸. After each tournament the webpage for The View whimsically recounted my own completely inexpert experiences. Most were true; a few were fish stories. Most of those articles still exist.⁹ The index to them is available here.

Database Manager: I remember that during one of my conversations with Allan, I exclaimed, “We don’t know who our players are!” He disagreed. He then showed me how he downloaded csv¹⁰ files of the entire ACBL roster every month. He then arranged for the ACBL to allow me to do the same. Allan used spreadsheets, but I undertook the major task of designing a MySQL database for use by the district and myself. At the time I wasn’t quite sure what I would do with the information, but I knew that we needed it.

I maintained two copies of the database, one on my local hard drive and one on the Wavada.org website that I had purchased from iPower so that I could share my travel journals with friends, family, and fellow travelers.

The database’s primary table had one record per player. Every table in any database should have a “key”—a field that uniquely identifies the record and cannot be changed. On the player table the key was the seven-digit ACBL number. Using it as the key would be a small problem if I wished to add records for non-ACBL members. Fortunately, if that ever happened, I could assign them a bogus number less than one million. The ACBL never used those numbers.

When a new roster was released I updated both the local and remote copies of the players table using scripts that I wrote in php. At first I did this only for currently active players in New England, but after a few months I decided to expand it to cover all of North America. The script¹¹ that updated the players table also wrote records on a history table that contained each player’s point total at the time that the roster was posted.

One of my jobs as webmaster was to post a list every month of the New England players who had advanced in rank during the month. I decided to maintain a sub-table for these advancements using the file that was sent to me by the ACBL.

I soon realized that what I really wanted to know was who had been attending the tournaments in New England. I knew that the results posted on the district’s website as well as on the websites of the units listed all players in attendance. There were two major difficulties: 1) the ACBL numbers were not on the lists; 2) the formats were not consistent. It was an ugly project, but I eventually came up with scripts that could handle nearly all of the entries on all of the lists.It wasn’t close to perfect, but it was much better than nothing. I convinced myself that it was worth the effort.

I created two sub-tables for attendance: one for players whose ACBL numbers I was able to deduce from the name and town on the list and one for the others. The biggest problem was people with more than one address. The second-biggest problem was people who changed their names. I figured out ways to handle these problems, but they were labor-intensive and introduced the possibility of mistakes. Since I knew from the beginning that the table would not be perfectly accurate, I felt that I could live with this approach.

I also went through the same process for the three NABC tournaments that were run every year. Those files were much larger. It took me a day or more to process each one. I learned the importance of processing them promptly. If even a month elapsed, a lot of addresses changed.

Sending emails: Eventually, I wanted to use the database to send emails promoting the district’s tournaments. The first problem was that the email addresses on the ACBL’s database were incomplete. I reached out to my acquaintances throughout the district and found correct email addresses for at least half of the ones that were missing. I also went through the wooden box containing index cards with member data at the HBC and found a few there. To make sure that my good addresses were not overridden by the ACBL’s blank, confidential, or wrong addresses, I added a field to the player’s table for the source of the email and changed the php script so that it only used the email address on the roster if the previous source was “ACBL”.

The second problem was that I had no authority and no budget for anything like this. At about the same time District 25’s president, Mark Aquino, had created a “B’s Needs Committee” to address the reasons that lower-level players (like myself) avoided attending the district’s events when their masterpoints exceeded the 750-point maximum for the “Gold Rush” games. Mark attended some of the meetings. I told the committee about the database that I had created, and I mentioned that I would like to send emails to promote the events sponsored by District 25. I was very pleased when Mark said, “Go for it!”

The great thing about php was that it was—even in those days—thoroughly documented on the Internet. I discovered a way of sending emails through php. My first project was to promote the 2014 Senior Regional/Cape Cod Sectional in Hyannis, MA. The chairperson was one of my partners, Ginny Farber (then Ginny Iannini), who was introduced here.

I sent the emails to all members of District 25 and to anyone who, according to the attendance table on the database, had attended a recent tournament in New England or a national tournament. Realizing that I needed to be careful about being considered a spammer, I stated quite clearly in the email that anyone who wished to be removed from the list should reply to the email with that indication, and I would take care of it. I added an “OK to email?” field to the players table. I never mailed to anyone who had asked to be removed, and I was scrupulous about keeping this designation up to date..

The emails were very well received, and the attendance at the tournament exceeded expectations. The chairperson of the next event, the Summer Regional in Nashua, NH, was Sarah Widhu. She asked me to promote that event, and I did so. It was also well received, and the attendance was quite good. I was pretty sure that I had this whole process was worthwhile.

Email problems: The php script that I executed on my Wavada.org account was not completely fool-proof. Every so often it would send up to fifteen copies of the email to one person. This was, to put it mildly, quite annoying. I contacted iPower about it. Because I was unable to reproduce the problem for them, they could not solve it. However, it eventually went away. I never understood how this could have happened.

Unfortunately, this problem was completely dwarfed by another issue that raised its ugly head shortly thereafter. There were no errors, but none of the emails went out! Once again I contacted iPower. It took several weeks, and they never told me what they did, but the support team somehow fixed this.

However, after a few successful executions, the problem appeared again. After several weeks of interchanges with iPower support, I was finally informed that my account had been black-listed as a spammer by someone. Therefore, the iPower email server did not send out my emails.

I used the one phone call that I was allowed to tell Bob Bertoni that I was in email jail, and I asked if he could bail me out. He did some research and eventually negotiated a contract with MailChimp, a company that specialized in sending mass emails for businesses and non-profits, for the purchase of two million “credits” for emails for only $2500. The Executive Committee approved the appropriation. From that point on I never tried to send emails directly from iPower.

MailChimp: My credentials on the district’s MailChimp had a user ID of Guastafeste, which is the Italian term for party-pooper. I taught myself how to use the software to create the lists, which MailChimp called audiences, and the body of the emails, which MailChimp called campaigns. For the first few years the account was allowed to create as many lists and emails as we wanted. I created a new list for each email until MailChimp prohibited me from creating any additional lists.

I generally sent out the first set of emails five weeks before the event. A second set would be sent two weeks later. Each set would consist of a few slightly different emails to groups based on geography, masterpoints, and/or tournament attendance. The content sent to each group would differ, at least a little.

Because I was accustomed to composing my emails in HTML, I always used the “Code your own” template. I always wrote the code for the emails in UltraEdit on my PC and pasted the HTML code into the editing window on MailChimp. The editing program would immediately display the way that the email would look in the window on the left side of the screen. This method allowed me to position and size images exactly. It also allowed for the use of tables and almost anything else that could be done on a webpage. An unanticipated benefit was that if someone who needed to promote something had sent me an email that was already formatted, I could extract the HTML code, tweak it a little, and then paste it into the HTML editing window.

I reported one bug that I found in this process. If I tried to change the color (or anything else) for part of a word, MailChimp inserted a space between the two parts. The example was GOLDmother, which MailChimp changed to GOLD mother (with a space before the “n”). MailChimp refused to fix this obvious problem. By the way, it was not easy to get WordPress. which is the product used for these blogs, to produce this effect either.

The oldest HTML file that I found in the MailChimp folder on my PC was dated July of 2015. I suspect that the first tournament promoted on MailChimp was the Individual Regional in 2015. From that time through 2021 I composed, tested, and sent almost all of the emails promoting District 25’s events. They were amazingly successful, and I became known in New England bridge as “the email guy” rather than “the webmaster”. All told, I sent over one million emails.

Other projects: The database also allowed me to undertake posting on NEBridge.org photos¹² of winners of events or strats at regionals (Winners Boards). The first tournament for which I implemented this feature was in the Knockout Regional in Cromwell in 2014. My plan was to ask winners to come to a spot where I could take their pictures with my point-and-shoot Canon. Only one or two complied.

There were several other problems. My friend Bob Derrah volunteered to help me chase winners down, but he had no camera of his own, and he could not figure out how to use mine. Eventually I discovered that the best time was either right after the round or the next day before the start of play. Still, I was lucky if I got photos of half of the winners.

I usually spent the better part of the week after every tournament assembling the five or six webpages of winners’ photos. I sent emails to every winner whose photo I lacked. A very high percentage of them responded, especially among the newer players. For the others I either pieced together substitutes from photos that I previously took or just put up an empty spot for them. The HTML code for the pages themselves was generated by a php script that ran off of a set of tables that was itself generated from a spreadsheet on my PC.

Was it worth the effort? I don’t know. I strongly believed that the regionals should be special, and the winners boards—and a lot of other things—contributed to making them feel that way to a lot of people. Most of those things disappeared during the pandemic. To me the post-pandemic regional tournaments seemed vacuous whereas before they always excited me.

The ACBL had two annual contests that rewarded the players in each of the fifteen ranks that had accumulated the most points. One exclusively counted points won at clubs. The other included all points. I decided in 2017 to create an award for each rank for points won in the events sponsored by District 25. That included the NAP and GNT qualifiers as well as the four regional tournaments and the two hybrid events—the Rainbow Weekend and the Senior Regional/Cape Cod Sectional.

My ability to do this without a great deal of effort was due to the access that I had to LZH files from the ACBL. An ACBL employee named Keith Wells provided me with these files that had all the information on the “masterpoint winners” lists that I had been using to populate the attendance tables, plus they had both the ACBL numbers and the total number of masterpoints that the players had at the time of the event. They also included players who had attended but earned no points. I was trained by Peter Marcus, the district’s chief director, in how to use the ACBLscore program to create csv files from the ones that I received from Keith.

It was pretty easy to keep the fifteen totals in the database. The only real difficulty I encountered was when a player who had participated in events in foreign countries was awarded masterpoints that the ACBL used solely for the purpose of eligibility. After each event I sent out emails to everyone in each of the fifteen masterpoint categories that listed the top fifteen players in that category. At the end of the year I created certificates honoring the winners.

I doubt that this effort by itself induced more than a few people to play, but, like the Winners’ Boards, they helped to contribute to the special atmosphere of regional events.

BridgeFinesse.com, a company in Florida established by Jay Whipple¹³, somehow got involved with sending emails to all players who had achieved a new rank in the previous month. The emails, which were signed by the appropriate district director encouraged the recipients to respond to the emails with their own ideas. Rich DeMartino was D25’s District Director (DD) when this process began. He asked me to post each comment that he received and to ask each player for whom I did not already have a suitable photo to send one. I did this for Rich and for his successor, Mark Aquino.

When Bob Bertoni became DD, he posted the comments he received on his own website. When he died in 2021, his temporary successor ignored the comments, but when the position was eliminated in favor of a Regional Director, the first one, Mark Aquino, asked me to post the new comments. I retrieved the ones from Bob’s website and posted them on NEBridge.org. I also posted the ones that Mark received.

The disaster: In October 2015 the system that hosted NEBridge.org suffered a catastrophic hardware failure. In the 30+ years that I had spent in the business I occasionally had to face some really bad situations, but I never had to deal with anything like Bob needed to address with this one. I told him that if I were he, I would be looking for a tall tree and a short rope.

NEBridge.org was the least of his problems. We were trying to get people to play our favorite card game at our events. His other customers’ depended on their websites for their very livelihoods.

Nevertheless, Bob got the district’s website back up and running pretty quickly, but most of what I had posted in the first few years was not recoverable, including all of the articles by Frank and Steve. I could have gone back to original sources and salvaged some of it, but all of the new projects that I had started left me no time to attempt more than I did.

Bob temporarily allowed me to use FTP to send files from my PC to the server. That saved me a lot of time. The new version of the website had a slightly different editing program for the pages. I liked it in some ways and hated it in others.

The Communications Committee: At the last meeting of the B’s Needs Committee Bob, who at that point was president of the NEBC, announced that he wanted to form a marketing committee. He then asked me to be its chairman. I wanted to be on the committee, but I had never been the chairman of a committee. I suggested Allan, but Bob was rather insistent. I eventually agreed, but I wanted it to be called the Communications Committee or, better yet, Comm Comm.

Beginning in 2016 a group of us met at tournaments for several years to talk about all aspects of communication—website, emails, tournament Bulletin, posting of results, guest lecturers at tournaments, signage, microphones, etc. I found the meetings useful, but a subsequent president, Jack Mahoney, decided that they were no longer necessary. I think that the biggest problem was that almost everyone on the committee was also on other committees. It also did not help that the only time available for the meetings was at 8:30 a.m. on Saturdays.

Bulletins: In 2018 I was asked by Lois DeBlois, NEBC president, to begin editing the Bulletin for tournaments. Previously it had been published every day, but Lois wanted to reduce it to one publication that covered the entire tournament. The results that had been printed in the daily editions were by then available online. So, it was not necessary to provide a daily edition. I took on the responsibility of creating it in the new format as well as the setup for online bulletins that were provided by the same service that provided Live Results.

After the pandemic the Executive Committee considered the cost of both bulletins to be excessive. I wrote one last Bulletin for the Optical Regional in Southbridge, MA, in November of 2022.

In November of 2021 I informed the Executive Committee that I intended to resign as webmaster and all of the other positions that I held at the end of 2022. I feared that it would be difficult to find people who were willing and able to keep going many of the things that I started. The story of that process has been recorded here. I did not immediately resign from any of the committees.

1. ACBL stands for American Contract Bridge League, the governing body for competitive bridge in North America. The Live Results program was run by BridgeFinesse.com, a private company in Florida.

2. NEBridge.org is the website of the New England Bridge Conference, the governing body of competitive bridge for District 25 of the ACBL.

3. At the time I was still working at TSI and playing bridge only on Tuesday evenings and weekends. Ausra also played in some of those games, but my skill level was far beneath hers.

4. HTML (hypertext markup language) is the language of browsers. JavaScript is an object-oriented language used for screen design. CSS (cascading style sheets) allow for organization of styles.

5. Bob was eight years younger than I was. He probably graduated from BC in or around 1978. Therefore, he was probably at the party that Don Huprich, Stewart Mandel, and I attended at BC in 1977. That hair-raising adventure was described here. Bob died in 2021. His obituary can be read here.

6. I hate to explain the jokes, but it may not be obvious that neither Bill Braucher nor I was paid anything as webmaster. I did get $100 for each Bulletin. They were always around twenty pages.

7. I later learned that Allan was also a Wolverine, but he was nineteen years older than I was. He was shocked to learn that I had been a math major. He died in 2018. His obituary can be found here.

8. Every tournament that held knockouts also scheduled Single-Session Swiss events. They were team events held in the afternoon for players who had been eliminated in the morning session of the knockout. The event was commonly called “Loser Swiss”.

9. Unfortunately, as of 2024 this statement is not true. Someone deleted or moved almost everything that I posted during the ten years that I managed the website. He/she/they did not notify me of their intentions, and I cannot conceive of any reason to do this other than spite or obsessive concern about disk space. However, I also recalled that the first thing that I did in my first professional programming assignment was equally foolish. I removed all comments from a program created by my predecessor. The details can be read here.

10. A csv (comma-separated values) file was a text file in which each element of data in a record was separated from the others by commas or other delineators.

11. Web-based programs are for some reason called scripts. The ones that I wrote for the district were all in the php (personal home page) program language that could be downloaded at no charge.

12. The website committee was eventually cool to the idea of publishing photos. Some members were worried about showing favoritism towards some players. Rich insisted that the criteria for inclusion be very clear. When I explained that I wanted to include anyone who won any strat or flight in any event and that I would send emails to solicit photos from players whom I could not reach at the tournament, he agreed to the idea.

13. Jay eventually became president of the ACBL. He visited the district’s tournament in Nashua when Mark Aquino was district director.

2014 TSI: The Smooth Landing

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Mike

The closing of TSI. Continue reading →

People have often asked me whether I was retired, and, if so, for how long. I have usually told them that I never exactly decided to retire. In 2014, however, TSI’s clients made it clear to me that it was time for me to quit.

That year was definitely a turning point in my own life. I did not rate the events and decisions of the early months of that year as a genuine crisis—unlike the four others that have been detailed in this project. During the previous several years I had seen the trends developing, I had explored every alternative that I could think of, and my financial position was good, at least in comparison with its state before the late nineties.

By late 2013 Denise Bessette, my partner, had moved from Stafford, CT, to Cape Cod. She was working from home with occasional trips to East Windsor. We could communicate by email, telephone, or through messaging on the AS/400. During this period I was 65 years old; Denise was ten years younger.

The cause: The precipitating event was a letter received in late 2013 from one of our contacts at Dick’s Sporting Goods¹, a long-time user of both AdDept and A^xN. I cannot find a copy of the letter, but it was basically an announcement that Dick’s had contracted with a media buying service to schedule and purchase its newspaper ads.

Other AdDept users had previously made similar decisions.² At RadioShack (discussed in detail here) the decision coincided with dropping the use of the AdDept system entirely. The advertising department there used it to place, manage, and pay for advertising in hundreds of papers, but it never used many of the other modules. Nevertheless, one of the employees most closely involved confided to me a few months after the outsourcing that she thought that they might have made a mistake.

A few years later Belk (described here) outsourced its newspaper buying. Unlike RadioShack, Belk by that time was using AdDept for a very large number of tasks besides scheduling and purchasing newspaper ads. Denise Podavini, the financial manager for advertising, never considered dropping AdDept. Moreover, when I explained to her that TSI would be losing a large source of revenue from Belk’s newspapers that had subscribed to A^xN³, she voluntarily authorized TSI to increase the maintenance charge to cover the difference. That reaction astounded me.

By 2013 most of TSI’s department store clients had been absorbed by Macy’s, which had then consolidated into one office in New York City. At that point that office was using neither AdDept not A^xN. Dick’s outsourcing would have little effect on the income from AdDept. It might actually have given us a custom programming assignment or two. However, it would certainly mean the loss of all the revenue from Dick’s papers that had subscribed to A^xN. There were over a hundred of them, and losing them would cost us thousands of dollars every month.

When we received the news from Dick’s my immediate evaluation was that this was the death knell for TSI. Denise was quite surprised at my reaction. We had worked together for thirty years, many of which were quite lean, and she had never seen me give up when the company faced a challenge. She spent a week or two manipulating possible projections on spreadsheets, but she finally came to the same conclusion that I had.

The plan: Denise and I met several times after working hours or out of the office in order to come up with a plan that treated our employees, Jason Dean and Ashley Elliott, our remaining clients, our vendors, and ourselves fairly. We began by making a list of things that we certainly needed to resolve:

A termination date for A^xN and support for AdDept.
A plan for the employees.
Taxes and other governmental issues.
Our lease for 7B Pasco Dr.
Letters to AdDept clients.
Notifications to vendors.
Disposition of assets.

We scheduled an appointment with our accountant, Tom Rathbun. As it happened, he was planning to retire. So, our news pretty much coincided with his plans. He provided us with a list of items that we needed to do to assure that we fulfilled our obligations to the government. We decided to terminate A^xN and software support for the AdDept product on July 31. That would provide four months to whittle down the accounts receivable and accounts payable for the final closing of the books on November 30, 2014.

The employees: Even before we met with Tom, Denise and I had decided to let the employees work until March 31 or to terminate as of January 31 and receive a four-week severance package. They both took the severance option. Denise had expected both of them to stay, but I was not too surprised when they resigned. I was amenable to either option. The severance option was actually a little better for TSI. We saved money on payroll, and it offered an immediate opportunity to sell more of the office equipment sooner.

We wrote letters of recommendation for both employees. Here is the one that Denise wrote for Jason Dean:

To Whom It May Concern,
TSI Tailored Systems, Inc., is a small company that has provided intricate and extensive software systems to businesses large and small since 1980. Jason Dean joined our staff on October 15, 2007 as a programmer analyst and quickly became an integral member of our programming and support team. In 2010 he was promoted to lead programmer analyst. Jason worked on the development of new systems and the modification of existing systems in free-form RPGLE, SQL, BASIC and CL on IBM midrange business systems. Development was focused on a comprehensive data base system for retail advertising clients. His responsibilities also included program testing and documentation, client support, and a myriad of in-house support tasks.
Jason’s performance on the job has been uniformly excellent. He is well-organized and has extremely high standards for the quality of work produced. You can depend on him to consistently deliver sophisticated applications that meet those standards, and within or well in advance of project deadlines. He quickly and easily comprehends new strategies and technologies. He is an outstanding quality control tester. His methods steadily test both the functionality and logic of the program with robust data sets. His diligence has called out a number of subtle issues during the development cycle. Jason also had the opportunity to train and impart those standards on a new programmer, the results of which were outstanding.
Jason’s ability to handle client support is impressive. He is very adept at posing the necessary questions to extract information required to resolve client issues. He consistently maintains a positive, professional and helpful attitude even when dealing with a difficult caller. He won consistent praise from our clients.
Jason’s termination had nothing to do with his job performance. Business conditions necessitated that we take steps to close the business.
I unhesitatingly and without qualification recommend Jason Dean for any similar position. I would be very happy to talk with any prospective employer about his work at TSI. I can be reached at Denise_Bessette@cox.net or 860 386-0700 (through July 31, 2014) or 508 760-2847 (home).

The letter that I wrote for Ashley was posted here.

The clients: I composed a short letter to the AdDept clients and mailed it on February 28, 2024, at which point I was the only person left in the office. Here is the text:

Denise Bessette and I have worked together for almost three decades. During this time we have taken great pride in our ability to provide first-class software and service to our clients at a reasonable price and first-class treatment of our employees and vendors. We have changed the business radically a few times to respond to various circumstances, but we have never sacrificed our basic principles.
Recent events now necessitate another change, one that we definitely regret. Two factors have made it impossible for us to continue doing business in the way that we have in the past. The first is the consolidation of the retail business. In one case thirteen of our installations collapsed into one and then, ultimately, none. The second is the trend toward outsourcing. The latter has led to the collapse of our Internet insertion-order business, on which we have come to rely. We were already running a very lean operation. There is nothing left to cut.
Therefore, we both feel that we have no choice but to shut down TSI as of July 31, 2014. We will do our best to provide the very best support of the AdDept system’s day-to-day operations through that date and even implement whatever programming changes are required on the same basis that we always have. We are definitely willing to act as consultants to help design a transitional process and to fill whatever other roles you feel are appropriate. If you wish to use AdDept beyond the above date, you are, of course, free to do so, and if you want one of us to provide some kind of support, it may be possible to make arrangements on an individual basis.
We both think that TSI has had a great run. We wish that it could continue forever because we really have enjoyed working with our clients to provide a system that provided them with what they needed to prosper.
Best wishes for the future.

As far as I know, no one asked for help designing a transition process. Some users may well have asked Denise for help. I have occasionally wondered how they coped with the situation.

Hundreds of papers received the orders for ads like these through AdDept and AxN.

After receiving the letter someone from Dick’s called us to assure us that they had not intended to drop the AdDept system. We explained that the problem was not AdDept; it was the imminent loss of revenue from the many newspapers that had subscribed to A^xN. Evidently no one at Dick’s had ever considered this ramification.

I have no information about how long any of the companies that were still using AdDept in 2014 continued to use it after July 31.

I did not write to any of the newspapers, but I did stop billing them for the subscriptions to A^xN after July 31. I was still receiving checks from a few of them through November. At that point I wrote off everything that was outstanding.

The lease: We had arranged with our landlord, Rene Dupuis (introduced here), to stay in his company’s building until July 31. Because a lot of equipment and furniture remained in the office in the middle of July, I asked Rene if we (i.e., I) could stay one more month. He said that because TSI had been an ideal tenant for such a long time, he was happy to accommodate us. Our section of the building was empty by August 31.

During the last month or two Rene brought one or two people up to TSI’s office to examine the property. I do not remember the name of the company that ended up renting it, but the lease was signed while I was still working there.The company even purchased TSI’s antiquated telephone system for $500.

Tax issues: TSI had been paying sales or use taxes to several jurisdictions. I found a copy of the Letter of Good Standing signed by a machine for Deborah Chandler, the Tax Collection Supervisor of the Compliance Support Unit. It stated that TSI owed the state of Connecticut nothing.

I also found a copy of a letter that I wrote to the state of Mississippi that stated that we had done no business there and that TSI was closing. No one replied to the letter.

I was not able to follow all of the dealings with the IRS, but in June of 2015 I definitely received two checks with income tax refunds for payments that TSI had previously made.

Tom provided me with all of the forms that I needed to file with state and federal agencies. None of them were difficult or time-consuming.

Furniture and equipment. I wore many hats in my time working at TSI. The most ill-fitting was probably the last one: used furniture salesman. I took photos of everything and placed ads on Craig’s List. To my great surprise I rapidly disposed of nearly everything. I probably should have charged more, but we had bought almost all of it second-hand many years earlier.

I found a list of the major items that I sold and their prices:

The desk in my office with one of the phone units.

Item	Price
Conference table	80
Black cabinet	50
Kitchen table, chairs	80
Three cabinets	133
Sales office desk	25
Twelve side chairs	125
Four trash cans	2
Cabinet	40
Black desk	25
Cubicles	100
Denise’s desk	25
Phone system	500
4-drawer cabinet	125

The biggest coup, aside from the sale of the telephone system, was the fact that I was able to get rid of the five-foot high⁴ dividers that were used to form cubicles. I was thrilled when a man whose wife (or maybe mother) was opening a dance studio in Windsor Locks almost directly across the Connecticut River from TSI’s office in East Windsor offered me $150 for all of the hardware. On a Saturday he drove a pickup towing a very long and flat trailer to the office. He and another fellow came upstairs, disassembled the cubicles, carried the individual sections down the stairs, and strapped them to the trailer. He thought that he got a bargain. I was afraid that I would end up needing to pay someone to take the dividers away.

The total that I received was $1,310, which I split with Denise.

I also remember giving out two very large plants to one of the guys who purchased the trash cans and some other mundane things. He took the plants that Eileen Sheehan-Willett had nursed from near-fatal neglect to monstrosities and put them in his truck. He was thoughtful enough to wait until he was out of sight to throw out the plants and save the pots.

I found the following notes in an Excel spreadsheet called equipment.xls:

The 515 server was sold to Saks Inc. for $2500 on 7/31/14.
The 270 server, color printer, Dell PC, scanner, and backup hub were taken by Mike on 7/31/14. The 270 will be scrapped when the company is closed. It has no market value.
The black & white laser printer was taken by Denise on 7/31/14.
Fax machine and copier were donated to a local church on 7/31/14.
Two dot matrix printers with no market value were donated to the New England Bridge Conference on 8/31/14.
All other equipment was scrapped on or about 7/31/14.

The 270 and 515 were iSeries (i.e., AS/400) models. The 270 and the other equipment were transported to our house at the end of August (not July) in a truck that my wife Sue borrowed from her friend and bridge partner, Jan Bailey.⁵ The equipment resided in my office for a few months until TSI’s books were closed, and I was pretty sure that I would not need the server. It, the backup hub, a twinax display, and a snake’s nest of cables have rested peacefully in the basement and are still there in 2024. The color printer, which supported two-sided printing, the scanner, and the PC lasted for quite a few years before they were scrapped or recycled somewhere.

A few other things made their way to our house. The kitchen at 7B had a microwave and a small refrigerator. The former is still in use in 2024, but the circular plat no longer spun around. It was due for the junk heat. The latter was given to David Basch, the grandson of another of Sue’s bridge partners, in exchange for doing the heavy lifting in the move. A small shelf and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase were moved to my office at the house in Enfield. A good many smaller items also made the journey back to Enfield.

The largest item that I neither sold nor brought back to Enfield was the Uninterruptible Power Supplu (UPS). The UPS was a large battery with outlets for several power cables. Our AS/400 and a few other devices were attached to it. The UPS could provide enough electricity to last for a few hours.

Power failures were not unknown in Connecticut. Denise and I discussed purchasing a generator, but we could never justify the expense. We only experienced a couple of power failures in the nearly fourteen years that TSI’s headquarters was in East Windsor, and the UPS was sufficient to to get us through them.

The UPS was very heavy. I carried it out to my car and transported it to a nearby dumpster. It was all that I could do to lift it to shoulder height and drop it in.

The one-man show: From February through August I drove into East Windsor every morning. Every evening I drove back to Enfield. When I arrived at work I checked to make sure that all the equipment was working. I encountered absolutely no hardware problems. Once a month I sent out invoices for software support and for A^xN subscriptions. I usually ate lunch in the office by myself.

The highlight of the day was when the mail came. If there were any checks, I processed them in our home-grown accounts receivable system and then deposited them in the bank. I was often amazed that newspapers that I was fairly certain were no longer using A^xN continued to pay for the service. I attributed this to the fact that so many newspapers had outsourced their processing of accounts payable to an outside service. TSI’s bills seemed to slip through the cracks of the approval process.

I spent most of the rest of my days sitting at the PC. I already had a pretty good command of HTML, JavaScript, php and MySQL. I did a lot of work on the NEBridge.org website, and it was also during this period that I got the idea of maintaining a database of ACBL members who resided in District 25 (New England). Allan Clamage (introduced here), who served as the editor of the website, told me how to download roster files from the ACBL and set it up so that I had the authority to do so. The details of the database are described here.

The other major project that I worked on was my historical novel about Pope Benedict IX. The story of its genesis and why it was posted on Wavada.org but was never at Barnes & Noble is described in some detail here.

In some ways I wished that I had been a history major and gotten a PhD. Then I probably would have found someone with whom I could discuss my ideas about eleventh-century papal politics. On the other hand, I should remember that I only became interested in the popes in the twenty-first century, and I finished grad school in the seventies. Moreover, my interest in the eleventh century was a byproduct of a rather random introduction to a somewhat obscure ninth-century pope named Formosus.

I did not take a vacation in 2014, but I did go to quite a few bridge tournaments. This was the period during which I implemented a system of posting photographs of winners of regional events on NEBridge.org webpages. I called those pages “Winners Boards” because the background that I used looked like boards. I kept that feature up through 2021.

At about the same time I also began sending emails promoting the regional tournaments in New England. At first I composed the emails myself and sent them through my Wavada.org account. When I got blacklisted as a spammer, Bob Bertoni came to my rescue. That harrowing situation was described here.

The regional tournaments in 2014 were the first to include meetings of a committee that was known as “The B’s Needs”. It was initially chaired by Ausra Geaski, the president of the district. I attended every meeting.

The initial purpose of the committee was to recommend ways to make the tournaments more enjoyable for Flight B players, those with too many points to play in the “Gold Rush” events that were limited to less than 750 masterpoints. These people found themselves up against people with many thousands of points and years of experience. It was not generally a pleasant experience.

Over the next few years the committee produced a large number of suggestions for making the tournaments more attractive to B players and to everyone else. Many of them were implemented, and there is very little doubt that they had, for the most part, a profoundly positive effect on the tournaments. I took great pride in what we did as a group and what I personally implemented. This activity provided a purpose to my life at a time when I really needed one. It made me feel that I was using my time and skills to make life more enjoyable for people who shared one of my principal interests. Most of my contributions were cast aside in the post-Pandemic environment, and it saddened me greatly.

I found some materials about this committee. I have posted Ausra’s minutes of the meetings in Newton, MA, in January (here), Cromwell, CT, in February (here), and Nashua, NH, in September (here). I have also posted here the notes that Allan wrote up about the group’s first few ideas.

The version with a possible career in mining was the best.

While I was occupied with closing down TSI Sue had knee-replacement surgery on both legs. Afterwards she spent several days getting rehabilitated at Suffield House. I went to see her every evening. On one evening my friend Tom Corcoran joined us, and we played a game of Careers. Sue had to remind me of this event while I was in the process of writing this entry.

September.through December: For the last three months I ran what was left of TSI from my office at the house. I still received payments from newspapers almost right up to when I closed the books for good at the end of November.

I still had some communications with Tom Rathbun in December of 2014, but after that TSI has been nothing but a source of incredible memories. The process of closing it down was somewhat complicated, but I don’t remember making any serious mistakes.

1. Details of the installations at Dick’s Sporting Goods have been posted here.

2. I am not sure why these companies made the decisions. It is possible that the media buying services claimed that the fact that they represented several large advertisers would give them more clout in negotiating with newspapers. They may also have been able to claim more expertise in choosing between papers in the few markets that had more than one.

3. In theory it would have been possible for TSI to construct an interface that could be used by media buying services. We had written many interfaces to both send and receive records in other modules. However, the information that A^xN required from AdDept contained four different types of records: headers for ads, special instructions at the header level, individual ads, and special instructions for individual ads. Could we persuade the buying service to send records in that format? I considered it unlikely in the extreme even if we did not charge them for using the service. Even if they were persuaded, we would have had to devise foolproof ways of dealing with errors in their files. Moreover, the process of fixing errors would need to be very efficient. Time could be of the essence. It appeared to me to be a nightmarish situation.

4. I am pretty sure about the height because I remember being just barely able to kick my right foot up and rest my ankle on the top of one to stretch my quads before running.

5. Jan Bailey, Ginny Basch, and Sue were regular participants in an unsanctioned bridge game that was held on Thursday evenings in Somers.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Clamage, Allan

2013 Bridge: Webmaster for District 25

2014 TSI: The Smooth Landing