No comments on using alcohol to clean your ball? That’s pretty huge... I can take 100% of the oil off a ball with just a moistened paper towel.

They don’t appear to serve any actual purpose, except to set the rules. Yet every league bowler pays them money every year to be ‘sanctioned’.

They used to give out awards for scoring achievements, but can’t even manage to produce a simple patch anymore.

We have 9-pin no tap leagues in Ohio. Amateur bowlers seem to love it.

There are always a few old-timer groups, but the majority are 30-50 y/o.

So it seems that BLS’s only real competitor was Perfect Secretary, and they folded 2 years ago.

Got into the demo version of BLS 2019 and... wow. They don’t seem to be even trying.

boomer wrote: ↑

April 22nd, 2020, 3:10 pm

start by making better brackets / sweeper / tournament software.

I HATE those systems. Keep thinking to do it but . . . nah. LOL

Then you can creep into the leagues from there.

What are they using now, excel sheets? I assumed there was already a product for that.

FORTRAN lmao Yeah, the interface is probably ancient. I snuck a peek at the hookup at my local center, and it had a bunch of either coax or RCA lines running to the back of a win 98 computer. Amazing that stuff still works really. The ghost bowling is probably a non-starter. No way to get into that ...

Nice to meet you. Me too. DB2/LUW for 11 years. Oracle now, for 1 year. MS SQL for 8 years. I can’t even Oracle to save my life lol So I was thinking a big private azure DB for a few bucks a month, and the charts/reports in crystal or something similar. I know powerBI is beautiful but stupid expens...

I used BLS on its own a while ago and that sucked. Like really. . . such a pain. You WANT the APIs to latch into the scoring systems that the house uses. You really do not want to be doing it by hand. What features do you have in yours? have you compared back to back? BLS has been doing this for qu...

Yeah, I guess I reinvented league secretary. I’d love to know what they’re charging though, because I could do it for a lot less.

Does anyone have knowledge of the typical contract a bowling center signs for their scoring software? I have an idea for a new program that could do it better.

For me, hitting something close to a ‘number’ would help eliminate one more variable from the game. We’re already playing on an invisible set of conditions, and every shift in balance/release can change the result. I don’t even want to try and think about another ‘unknown’ in a 3-game set.

Are you sanding it wet or dry? I’ve seen a lot of information stating that a wet pad does next to nothing.

This makes me glad that I’ve never bowled much with rangefinders lol

I’d imagine that any sort of speed camera would do the trick for ball speed, mounted near the lane. But to analyze hook and revs, you’ll need some pretty serious software chops, as well as a tracking camera of some kind to follow the ball. The Kegel system appears to have gone with dozens of station...

I struggle with this as well. The key is to get your shoulders lined up with the target when you get to the foul line. Your arm will naturally follow the path of the shoulders.

They’re definitely trying like hell to bring hype, to the point of being a bit embarrassing. The commentary has gone into cheerleader territory. It doesn’t look so much like a sport, as an x-games or something.

Going through the exact same learning process now. The hardest part was realizing that I needed to tighten the thumb hole when I got stuck in the ball (gripping with the end of my thumb)

It helps to have a hand that can wrap halfway around the ball.

Yeah, remember the arrows are 1/3 the distance to the end of the pattern (15’ vs ‘45’ or so). So just aim for 1/3 the sideways distance to your target from where you lay it down.