Final 2013 PT Standings
- Thread starter vanhook
- Start date
jameseolsen
Flight Levels
I'm going to go way out on a limb and say I did not win, so at least one member is out of the running.
rgschmi
Around The Moon
We've had some issues accessing all the fly-in numbers after Dan's resignation. As soon as we can pull the numbers off the BAC database, John Redmon will be doing the calculations. The last published numbers are in error. We just need someone with database access to find the time to do the query.
j_w_bruce
Orbiting Earth
Check your email.
Why is this such a big issue?
bmitchell
Flight Levels
According to the published rules for PT points, all fly-in points were to be sent to Dan Jonas by the Regional Directors. Did the RDs not keep copies of what they submitted to Dan?
Personally, I much preferred the old way PT points were published. An ongoing Excel spreadsheet was available on the website and could be viewed throughout the year, rather than the top 5 or so published each month in BACFire. If a fly-in was omitted or points were not calculated accurately, a correction could readily be made and all members were aware. This also added more interest in that members could keep tabs on their competitors.
I hope Rap returns to this type presentation so everyone stays in the know.
Personally, I much preferred the old way PT points were published. An ongoing Excel spreadsheet was available on the website and could be viewed throughout the year, rather than the top 5 or so published each month in BACFire. If a fly-in was omitted or points were not calculated accurately, a correction could readily be made and all members were aware. This also added more interest in that members could keep tabs on their competitors.
I hope Rap returns to this type presentation so everyone stays in the know.
CalifDan
Around The Moon
Brad,
Everyone is going to have their way of doing things. When I took over, I saw a lot of mechanical requirements to make a monthly newsletter and keep up with PT Points and the administration of the club. While a spreadsheet works fine as a stand-alone record, it does not automatically post to a newsletter. On the other hand, a database, which includes PT Points and PT Events can be queried to produce both a newsletter and a spreadsheet. It can also be queried to produce reports which can be used to verify the accuracy of the records. Additionally, having a master database of membership (present and past) provided an automated way to include New Member and Five Year Member processes. Not to mention that it also produces an ability to make radius reports for marketing and fly-in promotion. I did spend considerable time geo-coding our membership to allow such reports.
When I resigned, the PT Points were essentially up to date in the database. I did not take the database with me. It is a club database and resides on the club servers. As of my resignation, I asked Mark G. to eliminate my access to the data. I have not accessed the data since my resignation. All one needs to do to extract any information is to query the database.
While I think that having the current PT Point standings present on the web site is a great idea, I did not have time to maintain such and still complete the other ongoing activities I was performing for the club. The PT Points have no award for second or third place. I think your characterization of the top five appearing in the newsletter is a little misleading. True, during the early part of the year there was not always much more than five. In fact, sometimes there was nothing to publish except the prior years standings until about March or April. But a review of some of the BACFire issues will show that as time moved on, I included a longer list.
Chris told me when I took over that I was under no obligation to do things his way. I thought that his monthly newsletter was a great idea and endeavored to continue that. I also continued his implementation of the five year pins and letters to new members. I did choose to produce those processes and the newsletter in a manner which I felt was less time consuming.
I think that spreadsheets make fine ledgers. However, they are not great repositories of data. Particularly data which ultimately might be better expressed in other ways. The membership data, event data, PT point data are all data. I used a database. In fact, this website is just a series of tables of data.
Everyone needs to give the new leadership time to decide and implement how they want to run the club.
Everyone is going to have their way of doing things. When I took over, I saw a lot of mechanical requirements to make a monthly newsletter and keep up with PT Points and the administration of the club. While a spreadsheet works fine as a stand-alone record, it does not automatically post to a newsletter. On the other hand, a database, which includes PT Points and PT Events can be queried to produce both a newsletter and a spreadsheet. It can also be queried to produce reports which can be used to verify the accuracy of the records. Additionally, having a master database of membership (present and past) provided an automated way to include New Member and Five Year Member processes. Not to mention that it also produces an ability to make radius reports for marketing and fly-in promotion. I did spend considerable time geo-coding our membership to allow such reports.
When I resigned, the PT Points were essentially up to date in the database. I did not take the database with me. It is a club database and resides on the club servers. As of my resignation, I asked Mark G. to eliminate my access to the data. I have not accessed the data since my resignation. All one needs to do to extract any information is to query the database.
While I think that having the current PT Point standings present on the web site is a great idea, I did not have time to maintain such and still complete the other ongoing activities I was performing for the club. The PT Points have no award for second or third place. I think your characterization of the top five appearing in the newsletter is a little misleading. True, during the early part of the year there was not always much more than five. In fact, sometimes there was nothing to publish except the prior years standings until about March or April. But a review of some of the BACFire issues will show that as time moved on, I included a longer list.
Chris told me when I took over that I was under no obligation to do things his way. I thought that his monthly newsletter was a great idea and endeavored to continue that. I also continued his implementation of the five year pins and letters to new members. I did choose to produce those processes and the newsletter in a manner which I felt was less time consuming.
I think that spreadsheets make fine ledgers. However, they are not great repositories of data. Particularly data which ultimately might be better expressed in other ways. The membership data, event data, PT point data are all data. I used a database. In fact, this website is just a series of tables of data.
Everyone needs to give the new leadership time to decide and implement how they want to run the club.
CalifDan
Around The Moon
Cloyd,
I do not have access to the data. I have not been asked. I have pretty much lost my interest in being a volunteer.
I also did not create anything. The club data is in standard MySQL compatible tables and the ability to access such can be granted by the webmaster. Millions of people have the ability to manipulate these tables. I thought that everything the club needed to operate could be handled in five minutes? Sorry, could not resist.
I am sure that the leadership has kept track of PT Points since I resigned. Once they have someone (webmaster?) run the simple query necessary to recordset the 2013 PT Points, they can manually move them to a spreadsheet and add the subsequent records (opps, sorry, ledger entries).
I do not have access to the data. I have not been asked. I have pretty much lost my interest in being a volunteer.
I also did not create anything. The club data is in standard MySQL compatible tables and the ability to access such can be granted by the webmaster. Millions of people have the ability to manipulate these tables. I thought that everything the club needed to operate could be handled in five minutes? Sorry, could not resist.
I am sure that the leadership has kept track of PT Points since I resigned. Once they have someone (webmaster?) run the simple query necessary to recordset the 2013 PT Points, they can manually move them to a spreadsheet and add the subsequent records (opps, sorry, ledger entries).
j_w_bruce
Orbiting Earth
We had a bad index in our link to the MySQL data. For every fly-in that had been entered it appeared that one member and one mileage had been entered multiple times. That has now been corrected, and the updated copy of what was in the database has been sent to Bob to be entered, checked, and finalized. I don't have a time frame on that.
JB
JB
CalifDan
Around The Moon
Jay,
I expect that you were able to retrieve all the information. However, in each record, besides the associated event and mileage are also fields which indicate if the member hosted, how they traveled (affects the mileage calculation) the start and end point of the travel and notes indicating if the mileage might be shared, etc.
I expect that you were able to retrieve all the information. However, in each record, besides the associated event and mileage are also fields which indicate if the member hosted, how they traveled (affects the mileage calculation) the start and end point of the travel and notes indicating if the mileage might be shared, etc.
j_w_bruce
Orbiting Earth
Thanks Dan, I did send all that over to Bob and it looks surprisingly better now that the data is indexed. That was kind of like carb ice, I sent it out before I realized what would cause what I was seeing... Then I was kind of like 'well duh'.
CalifDan
Around The Moon
Jay,
Formation of the queries is critical. Historically, the database has all PT records for 2011, 2012 and 2013 up to my resignation. I also manually entered the top 10 or so from 2010 (before my time) for historical information. The goal was to be able to produce numerous reports and auto place into the newsletter. While the spreadsheet does pretty well at keeping a current ledger for competitive purposes, it would be harder to answer other kinds of questions without manipulation. Such as...which events have posted the largest PT points over a number of years? Who has traveled the most or attended the most events over a number of years? Or because of the geo-coding, which events posted the longest average travel when only counting club aircraft as mode of transportation? That is what I liked about having data as data in a database rather than dealing with flat spreadsheet files. Once there, you can ask for results in just about any combination desired.
Also, I used it to normalize and increase the accuracy of the information. Prior to that, someone might call the same event over multiple years by slightly difference names. I kept the events and associated PT Points indexed with the event name (table of events) and airport identifiers (table of airports) to created consistency and accuracy over time. Any particular piece of information is only entered once. Duplication of data was easier to spot by using strategic record naming conventions. An event could have multiple participants (the event is entered once, the participation entered for each participant), a member could participate in multiple events (member entered once, participation handled at the same time as the PT entry), etc. It saves a lot of recording time if each piece of information is only entered once and then associated to the other pertinent records at time of entry.
Formation of the queries is critical. Historically, the database has all PT records for 2011, 2012 and 2013 up to my resignation. I also manually entered the top 10 or so from 2010 (before my time) for historical information. The goal was to be able to produce numerous reports and auto place into the newsletter. While the spreadsheet does pretty well at keeping a current ledger for competitive purposes, it would be harder to answer other kinds of questions without manipulation. Such as...which events have posted the largest PT points over a number of years? Who has traveled the most or attended the most events over a number of years? Or because of the geo-coding, which events posted the longest average travel when only counting club aircraft as mode of transportation? That is what I liked about having data as data in a database rather than dealing with flat spreadsheet files. Once there, you can ask for results in just about any combination desired.
Also, I used it to normalize and increase the accuracy of the information. Prior to that, someone might call the same event over multiple years by slightly difference names. I kept the events and associated PT Points indexed with the event name (table of events) and airport identifiers (table of airports) to created consistency and accuracy over time. Any particular piece of information is only entered once. Duplication of data was easier to spot by using strategic record naming conventions. An event could have multiple participants (the event is entered once, the participation entered for each participant), a member could participate in multiple events (member entered once, participation handled at the same time as the PT entry), etc. It saves a lot of recording time if each piece of information is only entered once and then associated to the other pertinent records at time of entry.
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