February 2007 archives

While the Internet winds have gently caressed the tranquil appearing facade of Under the Bar, yours truly has been whacking away at the keyboard like a maniac hoping to be able to climb Mount Everest in two hours (give or take).

Backtracking just a week or so, it was a sunny day before the big snowfall. I was filled with joy over finally, finally, finally having finished all the graphs for my megalomaniac foray into determining what relative strength formula would be best suited for Virtualmeet.net. TERROR! COLD SWEATY MURDER!! I discovered a rounding bug in the Powerlifting Relative Strength Calculator which I had meticulously used to relative strength adjust three powerlifting classifications standards over three code points using six relative strength formulas… then the same thing all over for the women’s tables. Although this bug doesn’t decisively alter the general results, it makes the details useless without a recalculation. Anyway. Fixed that, then decided to run the calculator through its paces by graphing out all the coefficients of all formulas to find any anomalies. Found more than I bargained for, most of them being errors in the coefficient tables used as source data for the calculator. Sherlock Holmes sprung into action. Done. Ooops. Did I just find a rare specimen of Acronicta Sortulae that only appears when the correct mantra is chanted to the tune of The Final Countdown? Jackpot!

Hallucinating hands deep in the source code, I recalled cake and something about icing. Adding a host of queued improvements to the calculator seemed the logical thing to do now that I had the beast firmly pinned under my analytic gaze. Without going into all of them, let me just say one word… Formula dump! 82 pages of bug-fixed relative strength tables ready to be meet any situation in the gym involving people arguing who is really strongest. Hit them in the head with hard science (first, check your shoelaces).

Tomorrow I will redo the essential calculations for the virtual meet to give all of you some tangible goals to rig your meet attempts for. Stay tuned to your inbox!

Erick who signed up for the virtual meet back in August, could you e-mail me at kris@tsampa.org with your e-mail address? I need it to send out some virtual meet info shortly. I had it on the laptop that died at the end of August, am unable to retrieve it.

E-mails with the rules have gone out to all of those who have pre-registered. If you didn’t get yours or still want to join in on the fun this weekend as a lifter or a judge, shoot me an e-mail at kris@tsampa.org and I’ll bring you up to speed in no time.

Registration and discussion is now open at the Virtualmeet.net Community forum. This marks the end of using this blog as the main communication channel for the project; henceforth, head over to Virtualmeet.net for the latest. RSS feeds and e-mail subscription options will be added over the next week or so making it easy to keep track of what’s happening. Enjoy… and for those of you participating in this weekends inaugural event… TIME TO SIGN UP FOLKS!

Exciting times indeed!