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The Oswald and James Jacoby
Service Award

2003


 District 16

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Albert Lochli

 

Albert "Biigal" Lochli was awarded the 2003 Oswald and James Jacoby Service Award by District 16 at the September Fort Worth Regional. He earned this award as the D-16 Internet Coordinator.

It is hard to imagine Bridge in Texas without the Internet postings that we all enjoy today, but back in 1996 we had nothing. Tom Moore had a few pages up in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and ACBL itself had only a minor site. George Olivarri asked Al to see if a site was possible. Five simple pages were prepared and presented. Approval followed and the first D-16 site was hosted on Al's personal website. It expanded from 5 pages in just 45 kb of space to the current 80+ megabytes on the Internet. It also moved from being hosted privately to D-16's own domain and one of the best Bridge destination sites on the Internet.

So, in 1996 D-16 site started posting tournament results. A library was formed with reference material and D-16 Officers and contacts were posted. The site was constantly updated and improved, adding many features over the years. Links were provided to ACBL and other Bridge entities. Free hosting and training (by Al) for web personnel was provided for units and clubs. In some cases Biigal acted as the webmaster for units unable to have their own personnel take over. As Internet Coordinator he had up to 50 volunteers helping in some phase of the site. Some were webmasters; some were correspondents that just got the information to him. The District directors provided game files from tournaments and most were posted by Monday noon following a tournament -- some were posted daily during the tournaments. Biigal carried his camera to tournaments and captured the winners' photos. An outgrowth of these digital pictures was the increased ability of the Scorecard to use digital photos and increase the number published while eliminating the heavy cost previously associated with hard copy photos.

As Internet Coordinator, Biigal was constantly cajoling units and clubs to post more to the Internet and bring the District into the information age. He traveled to units, trained their personnel and set up sites and templates so that clubs could post their game results daily. Unit 207 had started doing this, before Biigal. Currently all the clubs in U237 Magic Valley, U187 South Texas, U 353 Wichita Falls and U207 Texas Capital post their results daily as do most of the clubs in U172 San Antonio, U183 Fort Western, U176 Dallas and U174 Houston. This has caused a revolution in getting the word out and has been a great player favorite.

The large Texas logo used on D-16 was specially made for Biigal by an artist in South Padre and is copyrighted to D-16.

Biigal is a retired US Army Warrant Officer CW3. He was in the Army Ordnance Corps and is an electronic hardware specialist. Since retirement he developed his computer interests and is the current President of SATLUG, the San Antonio Linux Users Group, and engaged in teaching the Linux operating system at the Alamo PC group in San Antonio. He is also the Linux InstallFest guru for SATLUG and at San Antonio College. He still maintains a few non-bridge websites. His daughter and three grandchildren live in Huntsville, Alabama. Biigal expects to have more time to play Bridge now and is expected to be at more nationals now. He has almost 2000 masterpoints.
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