And a small addition as we begin...

If you have taken the direct route to this 'Monday' page, this page has information on Monday events, and later will change to include results from Monday, but much more general information on the tournament itself is on the Welcome page, including information on the tournament schedule, parking, how to get here, the surrounding area, along with links to the other ever-updating pages that make up the Daily Bulletin. There is a links bar at the top and bottom of each page that gets you easily from one page to another.

April 17 Historical Headlines (from Wikipedia)

Can you fill in the blanks and then put them into the correct chronological order? (Answers at the bottom of the page...)

• 11,747 people were processed, more than on any other day, at the immigration center at [blank].
• A declaration of peace was declared between the Isles of Scilly, off the southwest coast of England, and [blank], 335 years after the war had been declared but without a single shot ever being fired!
• A proclamation in Ottawa by Queen Elizabeth II makes active the new [blank] of Canada.
• CIA-trained exiles land in their former country with the aim of ousting new leader [blank].
• The ill-fated [blank] spacecraft returns to Earth safely after aborting a lunar landing.

Thus Spoke the ACBLscore database (Part 1)

A good reason to get yourself an ACBL number!

At the previous version of the Victoria Regional, while making the Daily Bulletins and looking for errors to correct, I noticed a player from Spoke BC. I had never heard of this place, but there is a lovely place a short drive from Victoria called Sooke, and I made the correction in the Bulletin. The reason these things happen is that when a player who has no ACBL number plays, his or her name and city/province/state (and occasionally country) need to be entered into the computer's database by a Director, possibly one from a different part of the country without local knowledge of nearby places. Since this data comes from an entry form, legibility and handwriting enter into the mix, and errors sometimes happen. Players who get themselves a guest membership a few days before the tournament will be added to the database in time and their details will be automatically available inside ACBLscore. Guest memberships are free now if you have never had a number before, by the way.

But at the club level, when a player comes in for the first time and has to be added to the database, the club director must add the details manually. And after a recent Mentor-Mentee game that I was scheduled to direct before being sent to a sectional in Kamloops, I had to get the file upon my return. Most players had played at our club before, but a lot of the mentees had not gotten an ACBL player number yet. And I discovered that a majority of these players were from an unknown city: Van BC. I can see a busy director trying to save a bit of time by entering this quicker version to get the names in quickly, but I think I would go back and correct them with the missing six keystrokes later when there was time. We're not talking about a bunch of people at the same time, we're talking just one or two or rarely three per game. They didn't all come in at the same time! By the time they were eager enough to play in the Mentor-Mentee game, they had played dozens of 0-500 games at the club.

So at a recent club game I had a closer look at the Vancouver Bridge Centre's database of players, which probably contains data from the earliest days of ACBLscore in the mid 1990s, only a few years after the VBC's opening. The club database has been kept going from infrequent backups where needed through computer disasters, for at least thirty years. I wanted to see how many players were from "Van" and asked for a report by city.

"Van" was near the bottom of a very long and entertaining alphabetical list.

City Van                 Players: 71

Seventy-one players from the abbreviated version of our city! 71! That's a bit too many for me to go in and change them all. And before you tell me there is some whizbang SQL command that can probably do the job, consider this...

City Van.                Players: 21

Apparently the period justified the abbreviation, 21 times. A new city heard from! And then...

City Van,                Players: 2

Ooops, missed the period, typed a comma instead. Whatever....

City Van;                Players: 1

Semicolon! We're in such a hurry here....

City Vaan                Players: 1

Clearly this is the Dutch area of Vancouver.

City VAN                 Players: 6

CAPS LOCK is such a problem at our club I once printed and taped this haiku to the bottom of the monitor:

yOU tURNED caps lock oN
pLEASE tURN iT oFF wHEN yOU'RE dONE
(iT'S tHE sAME bUTTON)

Nobody laughed.

But CAPS LOCK added a few more predictable variants...

City VAN.                Players: 2

City VANCOUVER           Players: 2

At least we got the spelling right, even with CAPS LOCK on. But there were many mispellings....

City Vab.                Players: 1

The B key is fairly close to the N....

City Vancouvr            Players: 1

There is a literary genre known as a lipogram — a passage of writing that deliberately avoids a letter or a group of letters. In 1969, French writer Georges Perec published an entire 100,000-word novel called La Disparition without a single letter 'e' (except for the title page, where he needed four for his own name). It was translated into English (also without any 'e's) as A Void, and an online summary explains (with 'e's) that the novel tells the "tale of Anton Voyl, a man who disappears shortly after noticing a nagging omission in reality that he just can't put his finger on, and whose friends search for him throughout the novel."

City Vanacouver          Players: 1

That's-a spicy meat-a-ball!

City Vanouver            Players: 2

Twice this happened!

City ancouver            Players: 1

Occasionally while directing I see East-West players pressing the BridgeMate button to confirm a result while clearly looking elsewhere. I guess this is the club director's version of that unreccommended action.

City Vancouver,          Players: 1

I suppose the idea here is that when the city and the state/province appear together, it will fit nicely: "Vancouver, BC". Trouble is, ACBLscore does this automatically in reports, and adding the comma makes it a completely different city in the eyes of the computer.

Well, that's just Vancouver. All of the Victoria players we have in the database have a correctly-spelled city, and to my surprise there are no instances of "Vic BC". We'll see tomorrow what happens with the rest of the Lower Mainland....

Brain Warmup Department: Bridges

For those of you who used to like the puzzles I printed in the old bulletins, here is a link to an online version: one of the puzzles that I used to feature in the old paper Bulletins, but it is easy to play on a computer as well. Not so easy on a tablet or phone, since most of the puzzles require right-clicks, not easily done in a tablet or phone environment. Bridges gives you a grid of islands, circles containing a number. Your objective is connect the islands with bridges so that 1) all bridges are horizontal or vertical only, no diagonal or curved bridges, 2) The numbers in the circles indicate the number of bridges that go to that island, 3) Two islands may be connected with one or two bridges, but no more, 4) Bridges may not cross one another or go over an island, and 5) All of the islands need to be connected together with the network of bridges. Strategy: bigger numbers usually allow you to connect one bridge in each possible direction and later decide which directions have second bridges as well; check how many islands can actually be connected with up-down or left-right lines, often this will give you clues as to where the bridges must be. Click on the puzzle you want to try at the right (or the caption below) to go to the page with all the instructions you'll need. These puzzles come from Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection (see below) and there are links there to apps for most devices.	Easy puzzle (McBruce's time: 1min 5sec)
	Medium puzzle (McBruce's time: 0min 26sec)
	Tricky puzzle (McBruce's time: 0min 48sec)

Day One (Monday) Results

Answers from the questions at the top of the page:

• 1907 — 11,747 people were processed, more than on any other day, at the immigration center at Ellis Island.
• 1961 — CIA-trained exiles land in their former country with the aim of ousting new leader Fidel Castro.
• 1970 — The ill-fated Apollo 13 spacecraft returns to Earth safely after aborting a lunar landing.
• 1982 — A proclamation in Ottawa by Queen Elizabeth II makes active the new Constitution of Canada.
• 1986 — A declaration of peace was declared between the Isles of Scilly, off the southwest coast of England, and the Netherlands, 335 years after the war had been declared but without a single shot ever being fired! (In 1648 Cromwell had fought the Royalists to the edges of England and the Royalist Navy retreated to the islands, where they menaced the Dutch merchant navy until war was declared by the Dutch, but the English Parliamentarians soon forced the final Royalist surrender and the Dutch left, but the state of war remained for 335 years!)

Click on 'Tuesday' below to see information about tomorrow's events! Once the play for the day is over, and the results are processed, the daily pages will switch from event information to results.