It was good. Better-than-last-year good, but that was sort of antic­i­pated. There were 19 per­form­ers all up, rang­ing from skits to musi­cal per­for­mances to stand-up com­edy to political-campaign style baby wielding.

The vot­ing was a suc­cess, with about 160 peo­ple throw­ing in their voice — but pri­mar­ily just via stan­dard vot­ing ter­mi­nals, with SMS vot­ing not being heav­ily used. I don’t think it was the result of people’s hes­i­tance to use SMS, but rather incor­rect pro­mo­tion — the pro­gramme should have fea­tured SMS codes for all acts, as well as instruc­tions on how to vote on the back cover. We were going to do a brief “how to vote” video, but ran out of time to cut it together, which also didn’t help things.

The tick­et­ing sys­tem was also par­tially to blame — there were two types of ticket; stan­dard vot­ing tokens (for use at the ter­mi­nals) and SMS tick­ets, which fea­tured a unique code. More than a few audi­ence mem­bers were look­ing for the non-existant SMS code on their ticket — more sig­nage out­side was required, and I didn’t get a chance to talk to the ticket sell­ers, so it’s pos­si­ble they weren’t ask­ing peo­ple how they’d like to vote.

Any­way, SMS vot­ing was barely used, but needed a query that was stu­pidly com­pli­cated to fig­ure out who voted for what (at least com­pared to last year’s sys­tem). I hadn’t thought about how the votes would be returned that hard, think­ing I’d be able to quickly cook up some SQL to do it, as per last year… so at about 4pm (FOH opened at 6:30pm) I realised that it was a lit­tle more com­pli­cated than antic­i­pated, and I made a slightly-anxious phone call to Michael, who man­aged to cook up the fol­low­ing over the phone.

SELECT participants.name, count( votes.For_ID ) AS count
FROM participants
LEFT JOIN votes ON participants.ID = votes.For_ID
GROUP BY participants.ID
ORDER BY `count` DESC

Dale, you’re a freak, but thankyou!

Learn­ing how to use LEFT JOIN is now high on my to-learn list.

Any­way, the results them­selves were won­der­fully con­tro­ver­sial — the win­ner was The Aaron Carter Trib­ute Band, of Year 11, which was in direct com­pe­ti­tion with The Back­street Toys of Year 12 all night — and Back­street Toys came in sec­ond place with just one vote between them!

Third place was Jack Wright, who was a mere three votes from the win­ner — and all three were leap frog­ging each other for the dura­tion of the vot­ing period. Excit­ing stuff to watch!

Thanks to all who went on the night, you helped raise over $700 for Assis­tance Dogs, and hope­fully had a lot of fun in doing so! Spe­cial thanks also to Ben for his abil­ity to keep dri­ving in the small hours of the morn­ing, to Steve and Guy for com­ing back and cook­ing up vision, and to Digi­hire for reduced-rate hire of a MX-50 vision mixer!

Tags: Aaron, Ben, Guy, Jack Wright, SMS, Steve, Tribute