Ears ringing, Stumbled Upon Stumble Upon again

Last night was the monthly running club board meeting.  It was a long one that got a little more spirited than normal.  A couple parts of the debate revolved around me.

One discussion was about if the running club wanted to pick up ownership of another local race.  Some of the board members pointed out how it would be throwing additional load on the club resources and specifically me since that means I need to make myself available to time it.

Over the past couple years it has been the consensus of the club that we put on enough races, somewhere in the neighborhood of 21 or 22 per year.  Our general response to someone that comes to us to put on a race has been thanks but no thanks, our schedule is full.

Well over these same few years there has been a large increase in the amount of races being held locally.  A new organization started up in our area that started it’s own series of events.  Their activities have negatively affected the attendance in our events.  If there are more and more races available, they become less unique.

Runners only have the time/money to do a finite amount of races.  When that pool of races grows substantially there aren’t enough participants to keep race numbers high. So anyway the end result of this has been a steady decline of entries in almost all of our races the past 2-3 years.

So the club president was pushing hard for us to buck our trend of maintaining our current workload.  Before even asking me to chime in he went on a small rant saying how we can’t make my availability as the driving force behind our decisions on adding races to the schedule.  He said we should have another person available to time races if need be so I would not be the on the hook each and every time.

Finally he gave me a chance to speak.  I told him that I wasn’t necessarily opposed to timing the event.  In the past I expressed that I was content to maintain the current workload however my new financial reality has adjusted my tolerance level for additional race timing.

I said my bigger concerns were the group that puts on this race was the same group that we decided to part ways with several years ago because of multiple issues.  Basically, they were a big pain in the ass to work with.  My other point was putting on additional races is not just asking more of me, it is asking more of all of the people that are involved with a race, including the volunteers and the core club members that show up to help nearly every race.

I also understand the club is a bit nervous having all of their timing eggs in my basket.  Multiple times it has been expressed that if something happened to me or if I just said “f it, I am sick of this”, the club would be in deep shit.  That was pretty much true up until a year or so ago.  There is another local race timer that uses the exact same equipment we do.  He would be able to pick up the ball and run with it if need be, of course it would cost the club much more.

I have had some others involved in helping me time here and there however to have someone be able to run things from floor to ceiling they really need to broil in the fire.  Learning how everything is supposed to work isn’t the tough part if you have solid computer skills.  It’s learning how to handle things when stuff doesn’t work when the pressure is on.  That is not a skill that can be easily taught, it is something that is developed in the heat of the moment.

So the end result of that discussion was that we would more than likely be adding this race to our schedule.

The second bullet item that involved me was the club website.  The president said the website needed to be “refreshed” and he already had talked to a 3rd party about doing the refresh.  Well this had me pretty dumbfounded since last night was the first time this was ever communicated to me.  Especially since I have been the person solely responsible for all updating of the web content for the last 5 or so years.

So after expressing my confusion about why this would not be discussed with me ahead of time, since it directly involves me, I said that the I agreed the site could use some updating.  Based on my extensive work on the Bar-barians website I have a solid grasp of just how interactive and connected a web site can be nowadays using tie ins to various social media and a dynamic back end running it all.

They were talking about paying this person a substantial sum of money to redesign the site, money that would fit just as comfortably in my pocket as well.  It’s a matter of if I want to dedicate the time to do so.  Plus adding ANOTHER WordPress site to my shared hosting account could be pushing the limit since it took me over a month to get the BB site to play nice on my host.

So the end result of that discussion was I will talk to the guy that was interested in redoing the site and see what he is thinking.  Whatever the web site would wind up as, it needs to be easy to keep updated since a running club’s web site content is constantly changing as pages on the calendar turn.

After the meeting, many of the usual suspects headed to South Street for some pizza and beer.  I had fun as usual, laughing out loud at many of the adjectives that were thrown around the table.  The one downside was the live two man band that was playing. They were awful.  Not only were their musical/vocal skills subpar, their amps were turned up way too loud, making the entire bar unsuitable for conversation.  You literally had to scream so the person 3 feet away could hear you.  I left sooner than I would have otherwise just to get away from the noise.

I hadn’t used Stumble Upon in quite awhile, the site aggregator that presents you with content it thinks you will find interesting based on your surfing habits.  Well yesterday I had a number of “damn that’s cool” sites in front of my face in only a few minutes of “stumbling”

First was an awesome site for would be coders, http://codeacademy.com  On this site you get to go through a ton of interactive training on various coding languages, including HTML, CSS, Java, PHP and many more.  It’s totally free and totally awesome.  I am hoping to dig into the site to expand my knowledge base.

Next was http://wetransfer.com  This is a site that allows you to get large files to others, up to 2 GB in size, simply and quickly.  No ftp skills needed.  I have used another site to do similar things, http://justbeamit.com, another StumbleUpon find.

Finally I was shown http://searchtempest.com  If you are a Craigs List junkie, this site is for you.  It will search ALL of CraigsList for you in a few clicks, adhering the search to the distance and keyword parameters you supply.  It is AWESOME.  You can even have the search expand to include Ebay and Amazon if you like.  Try it out.