The first year of my three-year term on the Hartford Bridge Club’s Board of Trustees has been posted here.
Ben Bishop.
The officers for fiscal 2023 were John Willoughby (president), Ben Bishop (vice-president), Eric Vogel (treasurer), and Ann Lohrand (secretary). The first three were new. The new trustees were Rob Stillman and Diane Tracy. The returning trustees were Nancy Calderbank, Carole Amaio, Bill Wininger, and myself.
I was unable to attend the first meeting on November 15, 2022, because I had committed to play in the first Spectacle Regional in Southbridge, MA, with Sally Kirtley. It was a pretty big mistake to schedule the meeting for the first day of the nearest regional tournament.
A new computer was purchased for the office. Ben installed it.
The mentoring program was again active. The Sunday High-Low game has been a successful adjunct to it.
The club decided to investigate holding a limited sectional in the Spring. Linda Starr was running it. I told her that I would help with publicity. The board also approved her idea for a game with a celebratory aspect on the afternoon of December 31.
December
1. My adventures at this tournament have been recorded here.
The first tournament of the year was held in Johnston, RI, on the weekend of February1-2. I had no interest in playing in the pairs game on Saturday. Abhi Dutta asked me to team up with him and his partner, Vipin Mayar. I was pretty certain that Eric Vogel would not want to play on Sunday, and so I asked John Lloyd again. The four of us had played in a sectional at the same location in September 2024. That adventure has been described here.
John and I again agreed to meet at the Park and Ride lot on Route 32 near I-84, this time at 8:45. Since John had driven from there to Johnston in September, I volunteered to drive this time. I was a little worried about the return trip. My cataracts had recently been diagnosed, and some kind of precipitation was expected.
I arrived at the lot seven minutes late. It was completely my fault, and I apologized. I left a minute or two after I planned. I planned on stopping at the McDonald’s in the Scitico shopping center, but I missed the turn from Taylor Rd., and when I passed it on Route 190 there was a line. So, I decided to keep going and stop at the one in West Stafford.
A feared sight in Somers and Enfield.
Unfortunately, I found myself two cars behind a NETTTS truck2. We only followed it as far as Somers, but its still cost us another five minutes or so as it poked along at 25-30 mph on Route 190.
There was also a slow-moving line at the West Stafford McDonald’s as well. I lost at least another five or ten minutes there.
No, thanks.
The worse news was that they messed up my order. Instead of the sausage biscuit with egg that I always ordered, they gave me a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. The bacon was tasteless, I don’t like McD’s cheese, and the biscuit had been hardened by time under the heat lamp.
I drove as fast as I reasonably could the rest of the way, but I did not arrive at the parking lot until 8:52. The rest of the trip was uneventful, but it was 9:55 by the time that we reached the Johnston Senior Center. I gave my credit card to John and parked the car. I then got my materials from the back seat. The lunch that I had prepared was there, but I could not find my convention card holder, which contained our convention card, old scoresheets, and my mechanical pencil. I was almost certain that I had remembered to place it there, but I could not find it, and I had no time to spend searching.
We were, of course, the last of the twenty-four teams to register. After a fair amount of effort I found our table, which was U12. John gave me back my credit card, and I then went back to the registration area to obtain a scoresheet and little golf pencil.
One opponent informed us that he had only played in one or two previous team games. His partner did not even know how to keep score. We were scheduled to play eight rounds of six boards. In the first round they bid and made several games that seemed unremarkable to me. Afterwards I told John to compare without me; I intended to search for my convention card holder. My scoresheet was unreadable anyway. I could not write legibly with that tiny pencil on bare paper.
I could not find the convention card holder. Our second assignment was at the same table. I was shocked to learn that we had decisively lost the first round. Usually I am a good judge of our performance. We did, however, win the second round in a close match.
I could not believe the team that we drew for our third round—a team of A players from the Hartford Bridge Club. John and I played against Tom Gerchman and Lesley Myers. Our teammates faced Doug Deacon and Bob Hughes. I did not think that we played well enough to win. I was shocked that our teammates had scored +1700 on the first hand. Evidently Doug and Bob had a disastrous misunderstanding that got doubled. So, after three of eight rounds we had two wins.
We lost the fourth match. I made a serious error in the play. I then ate lunch by myself.
We won only one match in the afternoon. We played against two ladies. John was late getting to the table, and I had painfully shuffled at least one deck at every table. I refused to shuffle again and left the deck for John. He arrived a minute or two later, during which time I had to listen to my LHO declaim about shuffling in spite of the fact that she had arthritis.
That one victory was taken away from us by the director, Tim Hill. On the crucial hand John opened 1♥. The lady to my right bid 2♣. I doubled. When the arthritic opponent asked what my double meant, John hemmed and hawed and then said, “I think that that was a support double for my hearts.”
They ended up playing in a notrump contract. After the play ended, I announced that they had received erroneous information. I had made a negative double showing at least four spades, not a support double showing three hearts. I told them that they could call the director if they felt damaged. They did. Tim took the board to see if their claim as being damaged was legitimate. This took such a long time that we ended up playing on five of the six boards. The ladies complained loudly about this.
Tim later explained to me that there were so many ways that the hand could have gone that he could not determine whether they were damaged. He said that the law said that in that case the party that gave the wrong information gets an average minus. We ended up losing three imps and the match.
At the end of the last frustrating mach I was just ready to hit the road immediately. Fortunately there was no bad weather for the drive back. I had no difficulty whatsoever.
Connecticut’s first tournament was scheduled for the last weekend in March, beginning on Friday the 28th. I was on the tournament committee, chaired by Cindy Lyall, that planned and marketed this event. The marketing part was previously handled by the communications director, Ken Steele, who had resigned. Bill Segraves, the president of the Connecticut Bridge Association, said in an email that the communications committee, of which I was a member, was no longer functioning. That was news to me.
I did not really care what was sent to the players with more than 500 masterpoints. They were probably familiar with CBA sectionals. They just needed to know the dates and where to find the flyer. I volunteered to write an email to be sent to the players with less than 500 masterpoints in February. I composed them in HTML for my MailChimp account. I sent a test version (posted here). They all liked it a lot.
Unfortunately, Bill said that “Mike cannot send the email.” So, I had to rework the text to use Pianola to send it. Since I never received the email itself, I was not able to post it. The text is posted here. I asked for the photo of the playing area to be included. Even with that, I think that the final version was better than nothing, but it was a poor substitute for my original submission.
1. For the first time in recent memory the time for the Sunday Swiss event was moved from 9:30 to 10:00. So we arranged to meet a half-hour later than previously.
2. NETTTS is the New England Tractor Trailer Training School, which was
In the composition of this entry I relied heavily on the minutes written by Ann Lohrand. I took my own notes at every meeting, but I did not save them.
The state of the club in 2021: Because of the pandemic the club had closed its doors in March of 2020 and did not reopen for face-to-face (F2F) play until the summer of 2021. In the interim the club had begun sponsoring online games on the website Bridge Base Online while it continued to pay rent on its headquarters near the border of Hartford and West Hartford. The revenue from the online games did not come close to covering the club’s overhead expenses.
It took several months for the attendance at the F2F games to reach a reasonable level. Only players who had been vaccinated were allowed to play, and they were also required to wear a mask. The quality of the masks was not enforced, but several players complained about being required to wear them. Some players were wary of being in close quarters with others even with the masks and vaccination requirements.
So, as of the autumn of 2021 the club was close to crisis mode. Although there was still quite a bit of money in the bank, the financial people warned that the club’s dues and game fees were bringing in about $2,000 per month less than it was paying in expenses.
John Willoughby.
During the summer of 2021 Trevor Reeves, who was the HBC’s treasurer and the most immediate past president, called me to ask if I would be willing to serve on the club’s Board of Trustees. I said that I would be happy to do so, and I did not mind committing for three years. At the club’s annual meeting, which was held via Zoom on October 24, 2021, I learned the complete list of the people on the board. The other officers besides Trevor were Felix Springer (president), John Willoughby (vice-president), and Ann Lohrand (secretary). There were three returning board members. Roger Pikor had one year remaining on his term. Carole Amaio and Bill Wininger had two years. There were only six board members at a time. Nevertheless, at the meeting Felix announced that four members had “departed” and three new ones elected, all for three-year terms.1 The other two newbies were Nancy Calderbank and Ben Bishop. I knew Felix, Trevor, John, and Nancy pretty well. I was much less familiar with the others.
Carole Amaio.
The board met once a month on a designated Tuesday afternoon. Since I played bridge at the club every Tuesday morning, this was quite convenient for me.
Bill Wininger.
Before the pandemic Felix had asked me to be on the Long-range Planning Committee. This group discussed how to prepare for the loss of any key people, especially Donna Feir, who had been the Club Manager for decades. We also discussed what could be done to improve the club in other ways. The necessity of educational programs was emphasized, and the nature of them was discussed. Use of special games available from the ACBL was a common topic, as well as the mentorship program that I had participated in every time it was offered. It no longer seemed to be flourishing.
Tom Joyce.
I have retained a few distinct memories from the first board meeting that I attended on November 9, 2021. The first concerned the report of the Policy Committee. I had not been aware of its existence. Apparently Tom Joyce and Pat Salve were the driving forces behind it. I had played against both of them countless times, but I had never worked with either one.
They proposed three motions. The first amended the by-laws to allow one board member to be a director. The second delegated authority to create the game schedule to the directors. The third reduced the number of past presidents on the nominating committee from three to two. All three items passed.
Pat Salve.
Evidently the primary focus of the committee was to negotiate a new lease for the existing property or a new one. Although many people supported the idea of finding an appropriate facility, Donna was clearly not in favor of considering the prospect of moving.
John Dinius.
The second thing that stands out in my recollection of that first meeting was the treasurer’s report. In previous years the treasurer’s report at the annual meeting basically just indicated how much cash the club had. Trevor and John Dinius had converted the club’s books to the accrual method. They had also taken the steps needed to be recognized as a 501(c)(3) exempt organization. What impressed me the most was that they had implemented a budgeting and planning system so that they could project the effect of changes in attendance and rates for both online and F2F games.
I also remember giving my own assessment of the state of bridge in general. I was convinced that Covid-19 had seriously wounded competitive bridge at all levels—club, unit, district, national, and even international. To me, however, the real enemy was online play for masterpoints. In my opinion this had broken the link carefully crafted to provide the incentives for advancement to sustain clubs, units, and districts. Trevor indicated that he agreed with me.
Roger Pikor.
I had never had any association with Roger Pikor. In this and subsequent meetings whenever any aspect of the pandemic was mentioned he made us aware of the fact that his wife had some kind of access to technical information about Covid-19 and how it spread. This only bothered me after the third or fourth time.
The Planning Committee, of which I was an original member, had not met since the pandemic closed the club. John Willoughby, as vice-president, inherited the committee and mentioned some topics that needed to be addressed. The focal one was to try to get prepared if we needed a new club manager.
A special meeting was held on December 30. The positivity rate for Covid-19 had risen to 20 percent. After a discussion that lasted for three hours and forty-five minutes. The only decision was to restore the mask mandate with an emphasis on N95 masks2.
2022 began with a Zoom meeting on January 4. Linda Starr, who had kept everyone informed of the club’s activities before, during, and after the pandemic, resigned from her post as composer and sender of emails through MailChimp. Lori Leopold took over that responsibility for a while. Eventually I sort of inherited it until Linda resumed doing it a few years later. In 2025 I was still acting as Linda’s backup.
Laurie Robbins.
Laurie Robbins had already enrolled thirty-six people for an introductory bridge class using an online service called Shark Bridge.
The water cooler leaked over the holidays. It was replaced. An effort to require Pure Health to reimburse the club was undertaken. A new photocopy machine was purchased.
At the next meeting on February 1 it was revealed that Pure Health paid the club $1,000, and Laurie’s lessons netted a total of $1900.
John Calderbank assumed control of the Gmail account that Linda Starr had previously managed.
John Willoughby took over as the club’s Partnership Coordinator, which basically meant that he agreed to play with people who had trouble finding partners. My wife Sue played with him a few times.
The property tax levied by West Hartford will be appealed.
2021 was the 90th anniversary of the club. A celebration that had been planned for the spring was postponed to the annual meeting.
I was unable to find the minutes for the meeting on March 15. Beware the Ides of March.
At the Zoom meeting on April 12 a lot of time was spent on Trevor’s successor as treasurer. Trevor had introduced accrual accounting, which provided the basis for reasonable budgeting. Some people expressed the opinion that it was overkill, but I could see the value.
The property tax appeal was denied, but another appeal was in the works.
Victor died his hair as a birthday tribute to his partner, Sheila Gabay.
Victor King, a Grand Life Master who had occasionally played at the club had been tragically murdered. The Board approved the idea of sponsoring an In Memoriam for him at the Nationals scheduled for Providence, RI, in the summer. . A donation jar was provided for member contributions.
One of my clearest memories of Victor was a 1NT contract that he played against Tom Gerchman and me. Tom had doubled for takeout and Victor redoubled. I passed and his partner, another very good player, also passed. I had eight hearts headed by the ace, king, and queen at the top. I took the first eight tricks, and Tom signaled to me what to lead next. We ended up writing the number 2200 in the PLUS column.
At the meeting on May 2 a good bit of time was dedicated to the subject of decreased attendance, both online and F2F. Some of the pain was offset by an anonymous donation of $5,000.
Donna announced that the membership number had reached 412 and that by table count the HBC was the 33rd largest club in the country. Two or three people had shown interest in the treasurer’s job. My Wednesday morning partner, Eric Vogel, ended up taking the job. The position of bookkeeper was maintained.
My idea of a Bracketed Swiss3 was endorsed by John Willoughby and the planning committee. Unfortunately, I later discovered that the ACBL did not authorize this event at the club level.
The meeting on June 14 was not terribly eventful. The success of Laurie’s lessons on defense was confirmed. There was no meeting in July because of the NABC in Providence4 that was attended by many members of the club.
Felix asked John Willoughby to run the meeting held on August 23. I don’t remember the precise reason for this. Perhaps Felix just wanted to give John some practice.
Even though July was, as expected because of the twelve-day NABC in Providence, a horrible month for attendance, the cash balance was still within sight of $100,000. The discrepancy between Donna’s figure and Trevor’s as to the number of members persisted.
A motion to raise membership dues to $40 for the coming fiscal year was passed. At the same time game fees would be raised from $7 to $8.
A committee was set up to negotiate the lease with Marjam, the current owners of the industrial park in which the club rented space, and to examine alternatives.
A 24-board open game was scheduled to start at 9:30 on Monday mornings.
Felix and Trevor have petitioned West Hartford for a grant to help cover the club’s Covid-19 losses.
Someone set up a Facebook page for the club.
Felix ran the meeting on September 13.
The cash account in the club’s treasury was back up to $100K. It was boosted by lesson fees and donations.
Donna’s final membership count for 2021-22 was 417. This seemed to me an incredibly high number. My gut feeling was that about half of the members from before the pandemic no longer played. That would indicate a membership of about 300. Who were all these people?
John Calderbank and Mary Sullivan, two people whom I had mentored in previous years, presented a plan to restart the mentorship program.
Since the discussion of the honoraria (money awarded by the board to individuals who did extra work for the club) was held in camera, I won’t discuss other people’s opinions. I argued that they all did superb work and were underpaid.
The last meeting of the fiscal year was held on October 18.
Trevor’s budget for the next year projected a $5,000 loss. Donna reported that 290 members had renewed at the new rate.
Fifteen mentors had committed to help the same number of newer players when the next three-month mentoring program started. I was one of the mentors.
The lease committee was operational. Felix encouraged them to be active, but Donna was clearly aghast at the idea that the board was even considering moving to a new building.
The annual meeting was scheduled for October 23. $1,000 was allocated for the luncheon items. Carole was in charge. The meeting would be held at the club, but members could also attend via Zoom.
Someone had been leaving Seventh Day Adventist literature on the table in the back room. This practice was expressly forbidden in the bylaws.
At the annual meeting on October 23 the cash account showed a year-to-year gain of a little over $1400. So, despite all of the hand-wringing, the club had actually prospered under very trying circumstances. The total donations for the year were over $26,000!
The bylaws proposed by the Policy Committee were all passed.
John Willoughby was elected as the new president. Ben Bishop took the VP slot. Eric Vogel succeeded Trevor as treasurer. The new board members were Rob Stillman and Diane Tracy.
The story of my second term on the board is recounted here.
1. Linda Erickson (introduced here) had been the vice-president. She resigned, and John Willoughby, who had been a trustee, took her place. So, three new trustees were needed.
2. Perhaps the most neglected story of the entire pandemic was the Center for Disease Control’s original position on masks. CDC statements indicated that any kind of face covering was good enough. In actuality the N95 masks were proven more effective against the type of aerosols that spread Covid-19 by a very large margin. Once I learned this I wore N95 masks any time that I was in the presence of strangers indoors.
3. A Bracketed Swiss is a team game in which the participants are divided into brackets based on the number of total masterpoints. Usually each team plays every team in its bracket and no teams in the other brackets. I envisioned two of three brackets of six teams each. Everyone would play five rounds.
4. My participation in the planning of this event is documented here. I played in ten of the eleven days. Details of that mostly miserable experience is described here. During the twelve days of the event a great many people were stricken by Covid-19, including four of my teammates and both of the co-chairs of the event.
In November of 2024 two dates were circled on everyone’s calendar. The presidential election that featured Kamala Harris (after Joe Biden was convinced to stay on the sidelines) and Donald Trump was scheduled for Tuesday, the fifth. It was difficult to imagine a pair of candidates any more different than they were. Most supporters of each considered that the election of the other would be disastrous. The experts judged it a toss-up.
The other big day was Thursday the 28th, Thanksgiving. Sue and I had been invited to Burlington, VT, to celebrate the occasion with the extended Corcoran family, but we had felt awkward at the previous such gathering that we had attended, and so we declined.
The last regional bridge tournament on the calendar in New England was scheduled for Monday the 18th through Saturday the 23rd at the Holiday Inn in Norwich, CT. The Nutmeg State had not hosted a regional tournament since February of 2019.1 I had amassed lot of hotel points for IHG, the company that owned both Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza. During the summer I had unsuccessfully tried to use them for the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, in September. No such rooms were available. Since the dates for the Harvest Regional in Norwich had already been published, I immediately reserved a room for all five nights and paid for it with points.
Xenia Coulter.
Abhi Dutta asked me to play with him on the first three days. Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider were looking for teammates for the Swiss team games all week.2 My other three prospective partners were fellow members of the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). John Lloyd agreed to play in the bracketed pairs on Friday, and Eric Vogel committed to the Get-Away Teams on Saturday.
Xenia Coulter, who grew up in Ann Arbor, attended U-M, and lived in a town near Norwich, volunteered to play with me in the open Swiss scheduled for Thursday. Xenia and I had never played together before. We spent quite a bit of time going over the convention card via email. The HBC scheduled a special game for Veterans Day, November 11. We played together in that event and finished third out of eight, which was worth 1.34 masterpoints. I added Xenia to my list of partners, which at the time totaled 151.
Here, then, is a snapshot of my calendar for early November.
In addition to what is shown above, I also played in my regularly scheduled bridge games on the first two Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays at the HBC as well as the Sunday afternoon game with Sue. I also played in the two Wednesday evening games at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). In the week before the tournament I played Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday (twice), and the following Saturday. All of my preparation was relegated to the remaining three days.
The latest iteration of Covid was spreading fairly rapidly through the HBC. YL tested positive for Covid after the game on Saturday the ninth. Mike Carmiggelt. tested positive after the game on the tenth. I played against YL, but Sue and I did not play against Mike. We both wore masks because we had the sniffles. Other regular players at the HBC who reportedly had contracted Covid were Jim Macomber, Laurie Robbins, Lesley Meyers, and Bill Watson.
Wednesday, November 13: I never felt even a little sick, and by Wednesday my congestion was no worse than usual. However, Sue was much worse. She told me when I returned from the evening bridge game at about 11:00 that she had trouble breathing and could not sleep. I was very alarmed at this development. For the last few years she generally slept with a CPAP machine and supplemental oxygen. She asked me if we had any Alka Seltzer Cold Plus packets. I remembered seeing one in a drawer in my bathroom. I fetched, and she dissolved it in a glass of water and drank it.
I was already in a very bad mood. After playing two nondescript bridge games it occurred to me that I had come to enjoy the game a lot less than most of the other players. Almost everyone talked about the hands at the table, a practice that annoyed me greatly. People made the same old jokes, such as Eric’s “best for last” comment in the last round of almost every session, just to have something to say. I would have laughed if the remarks were original or funny, but I could not remember doing so even once since the lockdown. So, I had become almost completely a silent participant in club games.
Thursday, November 14: In the morning I drove to CBS and bought Sue Package of Alka Seltzer Cold Plus. It seemed to help, but she complained that it tasted terrible. I also picked up some groceries.
I had nothing of great importance scheduled for either the 14th or 15th. I am almost always worn out after the Wednesday night game. On Thursday I planned to go walking at about 2:00, but between shopping, naps and preparing supper, I never managed to do it. I had heard from Charles Schwab that one of my Treasury bills would mature on that day.
Friday, November 15: I sent out an email to the regulars at the SBC at around 8:00. It announced that there would be no more games in November and erroneously stated that the next game would be on December 3, which was a Tuesday.
I also did my cash worksheet for the rest of the month. I transferred a few thousand dollars from the Schwab account to cover the cash needed rest of the year. I discovered that I could not afford any of the T-bills that were available. I decided to buy a CD from Chase instead.
I did not find time to walk on Friday either. For the previous six weeks I had been reading a massive novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle that I had checked out from the Enfield Public Library. It was certainly one of the strangest books that I had ever read. It was published in 1969, when Nabokov was 90. The two main characters, who are siblings as well as cousins, converse in French, Russian, and English, with a little Italian thrown in. The main plot is about their torrid off-and-on sexual relationship, reportedly consummated more than one thousand times! There are also many subplots, and the setting is not on Earth (called Terra in Ada), but a similar place called Antiterra3. Despite the fact that Ada had been on the shelf for fifty-five years, no one in Enfield had ever filled out the little form provided for short comments at the back of the book. I rated it as 8. My comment was “Incomprehensible but awesome.”
I finished Ada on Friday and returned it to the Library. I checked out two new books, Pnin, a much shorter and more light-hearted novel by Nabokov, and Mrs. Osmond, the only “literary” novel by John Banville on the shelves that I had not read. I was surprised to see that Banville had also published a new crime novel called The Drowned. It featured both of his pathetic sleuths, Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford.
Before going to play bridge at the HBC on Saturday I took an antihistamine to assure that I did not need to cough or blow my nose much. I wore an N95 mask. My partner, as always, was Peter Katz.
I played pretty well throughout most of the game. We finished second for the third week in a row.
My most grievous error came on the hand shown at the right. I, sitting West, passed. If the vulnerability had been reversed, I might have tried 2♦. Tom Katsouleas bid 4♠, and everyone passed. Peter led the ♠A. I played my lowest club (encouraging). Peter continued with the king and a third club, which I ruffed.
I neglected to notice that Peter led the 10 rather than the 8. I had to decide between ♥10 and ♦A. Peter had, in fact, asked me to return a heart. If I had, we would have set the contract. It would not have helped us much because the only team that beat the contract also doubled, and we did not.
Sue finally felt better. She fixed Jambalaya for supper, but she complained that she could not smell it. I ate my serving, and I even had dessert. I had been constipated for a few days, but it in no way affected my appetite.
While we ate supper I washed three pairs of bluejeans and one sweatshirt. An hour or so later Sue moved the clothes to the dryer and set it for thirty minutes. I checked them when the dryer stopped. They were all still a little damp. I put them on for ten more minutes, and I noticed that the dryer’s drum was not rotating. I had to hang the garments on the shower rod and hope that they would dry by the time that I left for Norwich on Monday.
Juan Cole was a professor of history at the University of Michigan. His website was called “Informed Comment.” He specialty was the countries of the Mideast.
Sunday, November 17: I woke at around 6:00 on the morning after a good night’s sleep. Michigan’s football team had had its second bye week, and so I did not rush into my office to check the results on the Internet. I tried to think of everything that I needed to do before leaving the next morning for the tournament. Aside from packing, the most important item was to pay Cox Cable and the statement balance on my Chase IHG credit card. I had some tea and a red Delicious apple (4016) while I scrolled through the websites that I checked every morning—The New York Times and Washington Post, Doonesbury and Non Sequitur, Juan Cole, the Onion’s “opinions”, CNN, and Twitter.
I then sent out an email that corrected the date for the next game at the SBC. It was scheduled for December 4, not, as designated in Friday’s email, December 3.
After a while I had a hankering for some Bowl & Basket chicken noodle soup, an envelope of which was surely the best bargain available for $.495. Really! A box with two envelopes still cost only $.99. I always ate two bowls. On this morning, however, I could barely finish the first one. I felt a little woozy and very weak. At 8:30 I woke Sue up and immediately went back to sleep.
When I woke up an hour or two later I vomited. I drove to CVS and bought a box of ten pouches of Purelax, the store brand of polyethylene glycol 3350. I dissolved one in a glass of water, drank it, and lay down. I got up three times to go to the bathroom and each time I had a small bowel movement. I felt much better. However, the next time that I got up I vomited again. There was no way that I could drive to Norwich and play two sessions of bridge the next day if I could not keep any food down.
I called the hotel in Norwich and postponed my arrival until Tuesday. I let Abhi, Mike, and Jim know that I would not be there on Monday. For supper Sue fixed me a piece of chicken, some leftover vegetables, and two biscuits. I had no appetite. I had a few nibbles, but I uncharacteristically left most of it on my plate. I did not vomit.
My negative result is on top. Sue’s positive one is below.
Monday, November 18: I did not rise from bed on Monday, the first day of the tournament, until after 8:00. Sleeping that late was extremely unusual for me. When I woke Sue up she informed me that she had tested positive for Covid. I was not surprised. Her coughs had diminished only a little, and she was still quite congested. She also said that she could not smell the Jambalaya. Her doctor advised her that if I tested negative, I should get the Covid booster and the flu shot.
I ate two bowls of soup. I ate most of a sleeve of crackers over a period of a few hours. I took the second sleeve of Purelax. It seemed to work pretty well. I felt somewhat better, but I had little energy, and I could not concentrate. Although I did not vomit all day, I canceled my hotel reservations and let Abhi, Jim, Mike, John, Xenia, and Eric know that I would not be coming. So, I would be on a “staycation” until at least Tuesday the 26th.
Sue and I watched TV all evening. Our chairs are ten feet apart, and I wore my N95 mask whenever I was around her.
Tuesday, November 19: My energy was better, but I doubted that I could have mustered the power of concentration necessary for two sessions of tournament-level bridge. I slept most of the day, but I had no other symptoms.
In the afternoon I drove to ShopRite and Stop and Shop and bought almost $50 worth of groceries. The most important purchases were the restocking of my personal staples that I had allowed to get very low because I expected to be at the tournament—Caffeine-free Diet Coke, soup, brats, apples, and potato chips.
I tried to schedule an emissions inspection for Sue’s car for Wednesday, but no one answered the phone at The Mad Hatter at 4:45. They reportedly closed at five.
Wednesday, November 20: I tested myself for Covid right after I awoke. The result was clearly negative. Sue spent most of the day in bed, as she had been doing for a week or so. She could breathe OK, but she was still very stuffy and had even less energy than usual.
I drove Sue’s Subaru Forester to The Mad Hatter Auto Repair. Only one other customer was inside, and he was not there for an emissions test.
What a throwback this place was. Three very stoic guys came in and out. The one who took my $20 and key seemed to be in charge, but the other guy who stood at the cash register might have been a partner. There was no one under 40.
I began to suspect that I might have had a very light case of Covid when my nose was running constantly on Sunday. Sue’s case is certainly not light.
The seven remaining envelopes of Purelax.
Thursday, November 21: I still did not feel “regular”. I therefore drank a third sleeve of Purelax.
I made an appointment for a flu shot and a Covid booster at Walgreens at 3:30. However, the questionnaire that I filled in online asked if I had been in close contact with anyone with Covid in the last fourteen days. When I answered in the affirmative, the program said that I was not eligible for the shots.
The pharmacy it the all-brick area to the right of the last awning.
Sue called Jason, the pharmacist at Walgreens. He advised her to tell me to answer the “close contact” question in the negative and to then fill out and submit the rest of the form. Unfortunately, I could not find a way on the web page to add my patient info to the existing appointment, and so I made a new appointment for 4pm.I arrived at Walgreens shortly after 3:30. I explained the situation to the lady at the counter. About ten minutes later she administered one shot in each of my muscle-bound arm. I did not even feel the first one. This was different from the previous occasion in that she did not ask me to wait around afterwards for fifteen minutes to see if I had an adverse reaction, and she never asked for my insurance card.
It rained for the first time in several months, but Enfield received less than an inch.
The heater in my car was not working again. I had tried every combination of settings. Nothing seemed to work. This happened in 2023. On that occasion I took it into Lia Honda. After a few minutes they told me that there was nothing wrong with it. It functioned correctly for the rest of the winter.
Friday, November 22: I slept until 8:10. I awoke after a very vivid dream about driving in the snow. I was behind the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler that contained file cabinets. It crashed because someone tried to get an oversized load through a snow-covered narrow road and got stuck. After the crash someone drove off with my tractor-trailer. Incidentally, I have never driven a truck of any kind. I did drive a pickup in the army. I got into trouble when I moved it without fastening the seat belt. That maneuver involved a journey of less than 50 feet that began and ended in a parking lot. An Air Force captain chewed me out for fifteen or twenty minutes.
Both arms were a little sore when I woke up, but I was in no way impaired.
Sue ordered some food from Olive Garden. I drove there and picked up the bag.It cost a little over $50 with the tip. I parked in pick-up space #6. To my left was space #8. To the left of that was space #7. Go figure.
In the afternoon I received a phone message from Lynn Duncan, a bridge player from the Boston area, asking me to play in the Swiss in Norwich on Saturday. I wondered if a card for me was on the partnership desk. I was probably feeling good enough to play, but I could not risk attending when Sue was sick. She was feeling better, but she still spent a lot of time in bed.
Saturday November 23: I walked six laps (3.33 miles) in the Mall. Santaland was up set up very nicely in front of the old entrance to JC Penney, but there were very few walkers or shoppers. Haven Games was the only place that was busy. I probably could have done the remaining three laps, but I did not want to overdo it.
U-M defeated Northwestern 50-6. That gave the Wolverines a 6-5 record going into the final game with Ohio State. It also clinched a slot in a bowl game.
Sunday November 24: I walked 5 miles outside, two laps of my usual circuit. It was 51° when I started and 45° when I finished. I noticed that the pine tree behind the fence at the corner of School St. and North St. that suffered from the same disease as the one that had blown over in our yard had broken in two. A ten-foot tall stump remained.
It never occurred to me to examine the results from the bridge tournament that I had just missed.
Monday November 25: I walked 4 miles outside. The weather was very nice, but a bit of pain in the lower right section of my back led me to cut off one mile by turning onto School St. from Hazard Ave. Still, I managed to walk 12.33 miles in three days, a post-Covid record.
Tuesday November 26: The staycation was over. For the first time in more than a week I drove on the highway. There was not much sunshine. I resolved to make an appointment for my car’s heating problems when I returned. I was pleased to see that the price of a sausage biscuit with egg at the McDonald’s was still $5.25 (including tax).
Geof Brod.
I played bridge with John C. We did badly. I overheard Sally Kirtley tell Geof Brod that the attendance at the regional tournament in Norwich was not very good. She also mentioned that approximately 90 tables worth of people played in an online regional that ran from the 18th through the 20th. The tournament’s flyer has been posted here. Geof remarked that it had not occurred to him that the ACBL was competing with regionals. This had long been obvious to me. Incidentally, no other district had scheduled a regional during this period.
Just before supper I watched episode 7 of Reindeer Mafia.4
1. I started playing bridge at regional tournaments in 2006. For the next fifteen years a regional had been held in February in Cromwell, CT. One was scheduled for 2020, but only a week or two before the event the Red Lion Hotel was closed by the state for failure to pay taxes. The tournament was hurriedly moved to Sturbridge, MA, that year.
2. The flyer and schedule for the tournament have been posted here. It included no knockouts, and the only bracketed games—in which all participants played against people with similar levels of experience—were pairs games on Friday and team games on Sunday. I intended to complain about this when the Tournament Scheduling Committee reported at the Executive Committee meeting in Warwick in September. However, the TSC presented no report. So, I tried to make my point at the end of the meeting, but no one was paying attention because we were being pressured to play in the evening side game. I was just told that they wanted to emphasize the NAP and the bracketed pairs.
3. Antiterra was described as a sort of inside-out version of Terra. The two calendars were out of kilter a bit. Antiterra had banned electronic technology. The telephone system, which was invented by the deranged aunt of the two principal characters, was somehow based on water.
4. A description of this streamed series from Finland can be found here.
Since I had not really described in much derail any of the software projects that I designed and implemented over my long career as a cowboy coder, it seemed appropriate to provide quite a few details about my approach to this one, the first that I had attempted after the pandemic. My apologies if the entry became a little wonky at times.
The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) has been recognized as the oldest such group in the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), the governing agency for competitive bridge in North America. The club boasted more than five hundred members before the pandemic. Unlike most bridge clubs, it was owned by its members, who paid dues every year for the privilege of playing there. The club had a manager, but her contract specified no salary.1 The decision makers consisted of the usual four officers—president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer—and six “trustees” who usually served three-year terms. Nominees for both officers and trustees were selected by a committee and elected at the club’s annual meeting in the fall. Additional nominations were possible, but usually the entire slate was elected.
In practice, of course, a lot of the responsibility was handed off by the Board of Trustees to the club manager.
In the fall of 2021 I was asked to serve on the HBC’s board. My three years on that board have been chronicled here. One of the most frustrating experiences for me and for many others else was the fact that the club seemed to have no definite notion of which people were actually members. The count done by the treasurer, Trevor Reeves, was significantly less than the “official” number reported by the club’s manager, Donna Feir. Both were well short of the pre-pandemic standard of over five hundred. No one seemed able to reconcile the two in a systematic manner.
Donna kept track of membership using the ACBLscore program provided by IBM. Its primary purposes were to set up different types of games and tabulate results, but it also kept track of who had played at the club. The software was written decades earlier in dBase or something similar that ran in DOS or windows. It did not employ a relational database. The files were in a proprietary format. The screens were antiquated. It performed many functions admirably, but there were limitations.
The discrepancies between membership lists persisted throughout the next two years. Near the end of 2023 I decided to try to address this situation. I interviewed most of the major players. I did not interview Donna because my experience was that she seemed very nervous about anything that might upset the club’s day-to-day activities. I learned that the club had several lists of members. No automated method connected them:
The ACBLscore list that Donna maintained could be used to print phone lists and masterpoint lists if those fields were kept up to date. Other reports were also feasible. Files with comma-separated values3 (csv) could be created for exporting to software. Many programs, including spreadsheets, could read these files
The club’s gmail account had a contact file associated with it.
The club used its MailChimp account for mailings to all members. Names and email addresses of members were stored in an “audience” from which files could be imported and exported.
The financial people on or associated with the board had at least one list.
Other ad hoc lists sometimes were created.
The member table.
Transaction layout.
I determined that a relatively risk-free system composed of a membership file and a transaction file stored on relational database that everyone who needed it could access would probably address many of these issues without requiring a great deal of work. In addition to the main files, I envisioned three background tables:
A very small table to discriminate between memberships, contributions, and any other basic type of transaction. There were not many of the latter, but better to plan than neglect.
The table for transaction types contained the a description, fiscal year2, and a code designating the main type.The last two were required fields.
A user table for security.
I envisioned only one very flexible output program that could simply count of the number of items selected, produce a list on the screen, or create a csv file to be downloaded. If that proved insufficient, I felt confident of being able to add more options later without a great deal of difficulty..
I also saw an opportunity to integrate data from the players table that I downloaded monthly from the ACBL roster. So, users could easily compare what was on the new system’s members table with what the ACBL had: address, phone numbers, email address, masterpoints, etc.
In my heyday I could have designed and coded this sort of project on an AS/400 in less than a week4. However, I had done almost no programming at all since the beginning of the pandemic and precious little in the previous four or five years. Furthermore, I would be working in a less forgiving environment than what I had been accustomed to at the turn of the century. I would not have the AS/400’s tools and IBM’s support. This project required an Internet-based system for others to use that ran on php scripts, a MySQL database, and an Apache server on a computer on which I rented space. I had only designed one web-based project, and it did not use the php programming environment. It also did not help that I was in my mid-seventies and becoming more senile every day.
In early 2022 I had undertaken a project to provide Ben Bishop, the president of the HBC, with breakdowns of the number of active club members in various masterpoint ranges. I had asked for a csv file that contained one record for each active5 member of the club. Someone extracted the data from the ACBLscore program that the club used, and I received it in early February. I then used MySQL to populate the “HBC?” field on the players table in the database that I had created for District 25. This information allowed me to provide the club with accurate and timely data.
After I had decided on the fields in the files and tables6 for the membership database project and used MySQL to create empty versions of each table, I wrote sets of php scripts for recording, updating, and deleting main types and transaction types. Since I modeled these scripts on ones that I had written previously, I was able to produce them relatively quickly. It was at this time that I decided to save all of the scripts in the same folder as the other php work that I had already done. This allowed me to have easy access to dozens of scripts that I had used repeatedly.
I wrote and tested the scripts on Asus, my local desktop system. I planned to copy it to my wavada.org account on the iPower system when enough had been completed that I could demonstrate its functionality to others at the HBC.
I then entered two main types and several transaction types for the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years.
The csv file from ACBLscore had columns for first name, last name, ACBL number, and email address. I loaded it into a spreadsheet. Nine records had no ACBL number. I assigned numbers 1-9 to them. This was safe because the lowest number used by the ACBL was 9999999. I also changed the first character for the Life Masters to the numerical equivalent. I imported the file to my local MySQL database and created one record in the members file and one transaction record for membership in 2022 and another one for 2023..
Next came the script for maintaining the member table. There was nothing remarkable about this program except for the fact that it showed a history of all of the transactions for the selected member and extracted and displayed pertinent information from the players table in the database that I created for District 25.
All of the fields from the original ACBLscore file—first name, last name, email address—as well as five fields that I added in anticipation of future needs—phone number, photo link, emergency contact name and phone, and concatenated name and town—could be changed.
I deliberately made no provision for deleting a member. I could not foresee any reason for deletion, and if someone did it accidentally, it could cause significant problems.
Coding the main program that users would use for data entry was the next target. Entering a transaction would probably be perceived as an extra step. Therefore, its design must emphasize speed and simplicity so that it did not seem onerous. Here is a screenshot:
Transaction types were ordered in the selection window so that those for the latest fiscal year were on top and obsolete ones were excluded. Members were selected from an alphabetical (by last name) list. The current date appeared as the default for both the Transaction Date and the Deposit Date. The Deposit Reference # and the Note were optional. It should be possible to record any transaction in under a minute.
When the transaction entry program was finished, I was familiar enough with the way that the system flowed that I could design the security. This was new for me. IBM provided security on the midrange programs that I had worked, and I had been the only user for my previous work for the district on wavada.org. I created a table of authorized users that had only two fields, user ID and password. I created a few records using MySQL. I then wrote scripts for a routine to check whether the user has provided the user ID and password or not. If not, it forced them to select the former from a list and enter the latter. The script was inserted at the beginning of every program on the menu.
I did not provide a way for anyone the HBC to maintain the user table. I figured that I might need to do that at some point, but I felt that I should control creation of user IDs at least during the installation and testing phase.
Before I coded the scripts for producing the output I designed and executed a very simple menu. It contained three sets of buttons.
The buttons on the left were for maintenance of the three tables. The middle group originally contained only the program to record transactions. The one on the right was for output.
I used the <BUTTON> HTML tag for the buttons. I had never used it before, but I had little difficulty in adapting to its syntax.
I decided that I needed two more sets of scripts for transactions. I had decided not to let users delete or edit them, but they certainly required a method of correcting mistakes. I decided to let them reverse the erroneous transactions and enter new ones. They also might need a way to edit fields that did not affect auditing such as the notes. If so, I will provide a way to do that.
The other item in the second column of the menu, “Change Member Numbers”, was designed to handle the situation in which a person who was not an ACBL member joined the club and was assigned a low number. If that person later became an ACBL member, it was important that everything associated with the low number be changed to reflect the new number. After that the old number could be reused.
When TSI was writing programs for its customers we would usually provide the output in the same format that the users were accustomed to or what they wished that they could have. Then we would design the selection screen so that they could get that output rapidly.
The HBC directors occasionally got reports or exports from ACBLscore. They first selected the format of the output. The next steps involved a very flexible method of selecting. It began with the window at the right that allowed them to specify which fields that they wanted to use for selections. This was a fairly sophisticated approach7, but most of the users were terrified by it.
The space bar key was used for selection. Depending on which field was selected, a new set of windows allowed them to specify the details of the “restriction”. A user who designated two or three restrictions might need to navigate six to ten additional windows to get to the next step. If “Cancel” was selected anywhere in the process, control reverted to the format selection window that preceded the one displayed here. When all restrictions had been specified, a new window to list the columns on the report appeared.
Once again the space bar key was used to indicate the fields. In this case the indicated fields would appear as columns on the report or the file exported.
There was no way to designate a set of fields that was commonly used. The user either needed to start with a blank slate and select the needed columns or select all first and then designate the columns that were not needed.
There was a lot to like in this approach. Virtually anything could be extracted from the master files. However, the process was quite involved and was subject to time-consuming mistakes and corrections.
When I had to use the field screen for a project to upload tournament results to the District 25 database that I designed, I had to memorize the selection routine, which was something like “Press the space bar key eleven times, press the down arrow six times, one space bar, five down arrows, one space bar, four down arrows, one space bar, OK.”
I had the advantage of not needing to provide a method as comprehensive as what the users struggled with. For example, close to 100 percent of the people in the club’s database resided in District 25. In any case the unit or district in which they resided was seldom useful to the directors or anyone else in the club’s administration. Many of the other fields were of no use at all to directors or anyone else at the club.
I decided to try to provide sufficient selection and reporting flexibility on only one screen. Here is what I eventually came up with8:
The screen had four sections. The upper left section was used for determining which transactions would be selected. Starting and ending values could be specified for the first five fields. The Masterpoints and YTD Masterpoints fields were the values at the time that the program was run, not the time of the transactions.
Only valid Type Codes and Main Types were allowed. The Fiscal Year was a two-digit number. Only transactions with a type code for which that year had been specified were selected.
If the User ID, which referred to the person who recorded the transactions, was specified, it was validated against the user table.
Reversed transaction and transactions for deceased members were ordinarily excluded. A user who wanted to include either of them could check the appropriate box.
If all of the defaults in the fields for the selection criteria were accepted, all living individuals who were members for the specified fiscal year would be selected.
The upper right section was for determining which columns should appear on the report. The member’s name and town always appeared. The two columns for masterpoints came from the roster file and reflected the most recent ACBL roster, not the one at the time of the transaction. The phone number came from the member record.
Up to three sort fields could be selected by clicking on the appropriate radio button. The same field could not be selected twice.
There were three possible kinds of output—the number of records selected, the number selected plus a list of the transactions, or a csv file downloaded to the user’s computer. This iappeared when the transaction type was set to M14, and otherwise the defaults were selected:
It is hard to see, but a slide bar was on the right so that the rest of the list could easily be viewed.
When I showed the system to Ben Bishop for the first time during the late summer of 2024 the screen listed all three types of reports, but the one to produce and download the csv file did not work.
I researched on the web how to execute the download of the csv file in php. I found several articles with useful samples. I had expected that I could do it by defining a function that was invoked when the user specified the radio button for “Download a csv file” and then clicked on the Submit button. I was wrong. It worked when the URL for the script with SQL statement embedded in the code was executed directly in the browser, but it did not work when the SQL statement was passed to the same script through an argument for a function arguments. It just displayed the contents of the csv file on the screen.
I beat my head against this wall for an embarrassingly long time. I eventually realized that the problem was that nothing could be displayed on the screen when the csv script began. Everything must be initialized as it was when the URL was executed directly in the browser. I considered creating a file in the database that was only used to hold the SQL statement, but if two people were downloading at the same time, confusion might result. I finally figured out that I needed a JavaScript routine that passed the variables. The key statement was f.action = \”$Bin\” + \”HBC_CSV.php?sq=$sq\”.
The backslashes before the quotation marks indicated that the quotation marks were to be preserved. They did not indicate the beginning or end of a string constant.
The $Bin php variable delineated whether the script was running on the local server or iPower. HBC_CSV.php was the name of the script that executed the SQL statement, put it in csv format, and downloaded it.
The question mark after php indicated that a list of variables and values followed.
The $sq variable contained the MySQL statement.
I was quite excited when I finally got this to work.
The members table that I showed to Ben did not have a way of flagging records for deceased members. I added a field for that and a checkbox to the output selection screen to allow inclusion or exclusion.
At the first presentation the output screen did not have the list of columns to be included. Providing this flexibility proved to be much more time-consuming than I expected. It was difficult enough to put conditions in front of every statement that referenced any of the fields. It was very easy to get the syntax slightly wrong or to leave out a brace, bracket, parenthesis, or semicolon. When that happened, the syntax error that was thrown returned a message that something was “unexpected” in line 123 (or whatever the line number was). The cause of the error was usually something missing either before or after that line. My seventy-six year old eyes—never that good since the third grade—tired of looking for likely suspects quite easily.
The worst was the use of a dollar sign as the first character in every variable name. I had spent three decades placing dollar signs as the last character in names of string variables. I discovered that I had not broken myself of that habit. The very last syntax errors that I corrected were two occasions when I overcorrected for my BASIC programming habits and placed two dollar signs at the beginning of a variable name in the csv script.
On January 18 I went into the club an hour before the Saturday afternoon game. I seated myself at the “old” directors’ computer in the back room. A search program that I had never seen was in the middle of the screen. I closed it down and deleted the “run-time” messages. I then was able to see the icon on the desktop for ACBLscore. It was a little different from what I was used to, but I was able to find the program to create a csv file.
I had brought a flash drive with me. I tried to insert it into one of the USB ports on the box on the floor next to me. I had difficulty fitting it in. I had to turn it around so that it was going in with the logo facing to the right.
I ran the exporting program. When I went to select a group I was surprised to find over a hundred choices. I first looked at the ones that started with D. None of them looked like they might stand for deceased.
In the H’s I discovered what I was looking for. H00 had only one record for Marsha Futterman. It must have been a test. H01 through H26 had hundreds of records. There were also mysterious groups for H, H2, and H35.
I selected H01 and specified six fields: first and last names, ACBL numbers, the two phone numbers, and the email addresses. I saved the file onto my flash drive as H01.csv. I then repeated the process for H02 and so on.
At about the time that I was working on H05 a group of novices from the beginner class took seats in the back room and peppered Bob Hughes with questions. I tried to ignore them, and I wished that I had brought my earplugs, but I forgot them. The only thing that required much concentration was choosing a name for the file that matched the group selected. I made a few mistakes that I noticed almost immediately, but I feared that I may have saved the same group under two different names at least once or twice. I finished with H25 at about 12:45, fifteen minutes before game time.
After the game, in which I played pretty well, I drove home and immediately downloaded the twenty-six files onto Asus. I loaded them one-by-one so that I could count the records. I found the following anomalies: H02 had a small number of records that included players (Sue and I) who were definitely not members in 2002. H09 was missing entirely. H11 had only 306 records with no Wavadas. H15, H16, and H17 all had 508 records. H22 and H23 both had 430 record.
Since I was also playing on Sunday, I resolved to come in a little early and redo those files. In that session I was careful to upload H09, H10, H11, H15, H16, H17, H22, and H23 into the correct files. After those files were processed, the only file that seemed really erroneous to me was H02.
On Tuesday I saved H02 again. When I restored it, I was satisfied with the look of the data. I noticed that two new players were entered twice in H23, and one of them had been entered twice again in H24.
I started the upload process by creating database files named h01 through h25. Each contained the same fields as the associated Hxx file in the same order.
The biggest difficulty I that encountered in writing the script that used the Hxx files to add records for new members and transactions for everyone involved the players who did not have ACBL numbers. The program that I had written a few years earlier to update the “HBC?” field on the player table skipped players without ACBL numbers. I started with that program, but I was stumped by the step of automatically assigning low numbers to the ACBL number field because there was no completely reliable way to tell if the member had already been added to the database with a low number. In retrospect I think that I should have been able to figure it out, but I decided to assign numbers to the Hxx file and save it as HxxA.
At first I started with 1 and incremented by 1 or, if I could not remember the last one I used, I skipped to a number that I was certain that I had not used and incremented from there. After the first few years, I decided to start each file with xx times 100. So, the first number used in processing H24 was 2400. I saved the result as HxxA.
To make sure that I was not assigning two different numbers to the same player I wrote a SQL statement to list on the screen all the existing members with low numbers in the same order as the HxxA file. When I came to a member with a blank ACBL number or NM in the field, I would scroll down to the appropriate part of the SQL list and, if I found the matching name, I entered the previously assigned number. If not, I entered the next available number as explained above. A few of the records had other entries that I had to fix by hand. At least one started with a # sign.
When I reached the bottom of the HxxA file, I scanned for blank records that I missed and searched for NMs that I had skipped.
I kept track of my progress on an 8½x11 sheet of paper. There were four steps. The first step, “N” on the sheet, stood for the process of inserting fake ACBL numbers into the spreadsheet. “I” stood for the process of importing the HxxA.cvs file into the MySQL file, hxx. The only trick to this was to remember to use the TRUNCATE command to empty the file if this was not the first time.
“C” stood for running the script that I wrote to create the transaction records and, for new members, the member records. This crashed about half the time, but I seldom had difficulty ascertaining what the source of the problem was. It was usually that one of the values in the ACBL number field was not valid. I had to fix the spreadsheet and go back to the “N” step.
“T” stood for comparing the the number of records reportedly written on the file with the number of records on HxxA.csv. After the first few files these always matched.
The last step, “L”, required that I run the list program on the menu with the default parameters to make sure that it produced the same number of records as the file contained. I was shocked to find a discrepancy when I ran it on the second or third file. After a little research I discovered that the “JOIN” clauses were coded incorrectly. I needed to “LEFT JOIN” members to the trans file and the players file independently. I was happy that I discovered this before anyone tried to use it.
At the end of the migration process I discovered that I had assigned two separate bogus ACBL numbers to a handful of members. If I had added a step to check for this, I would have saved myself some grief. I could have easily fixed the erroneous records using SQL statements, but I remembered that the ACBLscore program had an option to combine two players’ records into one. I decided to add a new option to the transaction section of the menu to do the same thing.
The program to combine the records for two members was added as the fourth option on the center section of the member. The user had to designate two members—the erroneous one and the one to be used henceforward.
1. An annual “honorarium” was voted annually to the manager and other officials.
2. The club’s fiscal year began on November 1. Thus fiscal 2025 ran from 11/01/24 to 10/31/25.
3. A file with the extension “.csv” contains rows that are formatted identically. Fields (columns) are separated by a comma or another delimiter. Spreadsheet programs such as Excel can read these files.
4. I could code extremely rapidly in the native environment on the AS/400, but the resulting data entry screens, although equally functional, would have been much less attractive. When the company closed in 2014 there was no way to export a csv file on a user’s computer. That would take several steps using third-party software. The AS/400 could serve as a file server for php programs, but if that method were used for a project like this, development would be much more tedious and time-consuming.
5. Some club members were not required to pay the prescribed annual dues in order to participate as members. I assumed that every person on the file had paid the dues, but there 6ere doubtless some who were not required to.
6. There is no fundamental difference between a table and a file. I have always used the word “table” to delineate files that are established at the beginning have a relatively small number of records, and are primarily used to maintain consistency. The other two files in this system can be maintained at will and are much larger.
7. Why “unit” and “gender” were capitalized on this window remainder a mystery throughout my investigation.
