April Comments

 

Adjectives

Seems like there’s a lot of controversy about the state of our sport today…  Although social media increases the level of static, there has always been active debate among the sport’s supporters.  We all know that regardless of our personal opinions, obedience is more.  Like it or not, obedience is just another human endeavor posing as a sign of the times.  

The New York Times completed a poll asking readers for adjectives describing our current state of affairs and the top three responses were exhausting, lost, and chaotic.  Other popular reactions were relentless, perseverance, surreal, ugh, fallow, limbo, heartbreaking, nightmare, stifling, and transformative.  As a sign of the times, are these words accurate descriptors for the state of our sport too?

Wishes

Since these seem to be times for change, I’d like to get my order in…  I wish the AKC would allow judges the autonomy to choose their own order of exercises for the B classes (or at least Open & Utility B).  Given the busy assignments with multiple classes judges are facing today, it would be much more productive if they could design their own patterns to make for more efficient judging.  From what I hear, I have little doubt that most judges would discard several of the pattern options available today and opt for designs aimed at success.

Website

We are finally past the transition to our new website and we’re all happy it’s behind us!  All in all the move went well for most.  We did run into a security certificate problem that issued warnings to some subscribers.  A few other subscribers ran into issues getting our new site to recognize their email addresses.  At this point though we think most of the problems have been resolved.  Of course working with technology is like training dogs…  Some days it seems like a trade-off…

We did run into one final unexpected issue but it turned out to be a blessing.  Our original hosting plan was too slow to manage the activity on our site so we’ve upgraded to a faster server.  If you felt the site was running slow before it should feel faster now.