Frank's Blog: 1st Event Registration – How Boring Was That?

FIRST General Forum
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Registration 2015: The Blog

1st Event Registration – How Boring Was That?
Blog Date:
Friday, September 26, 2014 - 10:17

Remember the old days during 1st event registration when you’d make your selection, click the button, and hope for the best? You never knew what would happen, or even if anything would happen. The last few years, and this year particularly, seems like it’s more click and go. Where’s the excitement in that? :slight_smile:

Our crack IT staff once again this year upped the system resources available for registration. For those interested in the details, changes from last year were:

    New VMware server cluster that increased the CPU core count and doubled the available system memory
    Additional monitoring capabilities with three products. We can now retain historical data for the network, VMware, and the storage systems. The new software also increases system visibility through alerting and reporting
    Eight new Lasso servers running on a 64 bit operating system. Lasso was also upgraded to take advantage of the new servers. Our IT development team worked to tune these servers to take advantage of the new hardware, operating system, and software

During peak load just after registration opened, CPUs were running at 35%.

[The huge registration monitors in the IT offices shortly after registration opened. Donut for scale. Happy IT folks (out of shot) sing, eat pizza, and organize an after-hours celebratory caber toss]

More information for you:

Number of teams registered or waitlisted in first 15 minutes:

    For 2014 season: 903
    For 2015 season: 1,081

Number of teams registered or waitlisted in first 12 hours:

    For 2014 season: 1,577
    For 2015 season: 1,796

I’d like to thank our IT staff, our Customer Service staff, and our Youth Protection Program staff for making sure we were ready for the big day. I’d also like to thank you, our teams – we recognize there were some new and unfamiliar steps in the process this year, but you came through. By the time registration opened at Noon Eastern time, over 2,000 FRC teams were ‘green to go’!

We’re off to a great start!

Frank

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I started to put this in the Reregistration 2015 thread…

Lets hope the same people run 1st choice this year. I like anticlimactic :slight_smile:

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Here’s the picture that was in the blog.

http://www.usfirst.org/sites/default/files/uploadedFiles/Robotics_Programs/FRC/bigscreens.jpg

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It’s nice to save all the drama and suspense for the actual events instead of signing up for them.

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The donut is a nice touch

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Great job all around! Let’s hope sign up for hotels with the new, yet to be identified, booking agency is even half as boring:D

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I’ve never seen this much excitement about being bored. :wink:

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Obviously hinting at an inner tube game this year

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And all the people said “AMEN!!”

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Welcome to my world of operations where boredom is a great thing. There is no fame in this career, only infamy.

What? No game hint conspiracy?

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Already got you covered

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Inner tubes, robots assisting other robots in inner tubes, Water Game confirmed…

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Well, the donut is approximately circular and what do we associate with circles? Pi. Given the frosting of the donut and its position perpendicular to the table, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the 2015 will involve throwing pies. The water part will come when we need to clean up!

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I’ve seen this both ways, and I much prefer the boring way. Great job of improving the system.

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The curse of IT: When everything works, no one notices. When something blows up, everyone knows who to blame!

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Nobody noticed the mention of caber tossing? That’s what jumped out at me as being strongly hint-flavored.

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ah the basement guys!

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Definitely an improvement!
I’ve never been able to register for an event at 6:00AM HST ever in the past. Yesterday was a first, even for us Hawaii teams!!

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Didn’t sound like an unusual pastime to me :slight_smile:

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And I thought field reset in 2013 was difficult…