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[AGA-Contest] update
I've been e-mailing some of your individually, but thought you'd all
appreciate it if I give an update to the whole small group. Of course,
3/4 of these updates are of a geeky nature, so you've been warned:
* Computer upgraded - photos now automated! I changed over the server a
few weeks back to an Athlon 64, so it's now super fast and able to
generate all the photo resolutions by itself. I've got the regenerator on
a continuous loop in the background so that within a few minutes of an
entrant uploading their photograph, the "Awaiting Verification" box is
replaced by the actual photograph. Oh, and the DSL line got upgraded to
triple its speed so perhaps things won't be so bad on November 12th when
everyone who isn't at the convention tries to hit the site.
* UTF-8 - Truly International! I have rewritten the software that runs
the site so that it now encodes in utf-8 instead of different iso8859
character sets. This means that any given page can be truly
international. For instance, last year on the index Page, Herbert
Franzbäcker's name showed up right as iso8859-1 (Western European), but we
had "Bart³omiej Lipczyñski"'s name completely mangled from its iso8859-2
form on the same page. This year one should be able to see both
side-by-side, unless you're running Windows 95 or really old Mac software.
This also raises the unlikely but cool possibility of our foreign judges
typing comments directly in their native (say Asian) language.
* Entries - not bad so far... mostly-complete entries number in the low
30's. That's a good sign, as over half the entries typically show up in
the last week. I'm starting to get registered mail from all over the
world; in fact, we're getting an incredible international interest this
year, as you guys will see soon enough. Nobody has entered 100% via
postal mail yet (though I am sure that I will get 9 individually mailed
UPS overnight packages from the Senske's on September 15th that will all
need to be typed in manually. :P ). Also weird - nothing from Singapore
again.
* Last PR push - remind your friends. Carlos has been doing an excellent
job this year. I would say that, with a little more than 2 weeks left,
now is the time to bug your friends who have been "thinking about it
but..." This is the place where we lose most of the entries. Folks plan,
but then forget, get busy, or have the "well, it's just not GOOD enough,
maybe next year" blues, and bail last minute. (I will claim the latter
two as my personal excuses.)
* TAG - Any minute now... The cover of this issue of TAG is going to have
the contest logo on the cover, and was theoretically the July-September
issue. Hoping it gets received before the contest closes, as it has a
blurb on the contest.
OK, that's enough for now.
- Erik
--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
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