Determined to get the data

Yesterday once again was spent primarily attending to half marathon items.  Although I finished the manual keying of times from finish line pictures I still was making additions from participants that did not have a bib visible when they crossed the finish.  I also created  a race survey for participants, knowing full well we were going to take some abuse in it.  It still was important to allow the angry people to vent and the not so angry people let us know how we did otherwise.

Later in the day I turned my attention to the chip data from the race that has been locked away due to the missing chip file.  I was interested in finding out how well the chip timing hardware did, since going into the race my biggest concern was how the bib timing chips would hold up over 13.1 miles.  We used an older version of these chips two years ago and had nearly a 5% failure rate.

In order to find this out I again leaned on the author of Race Director, Roger Bradshaw, to help me figure out how to do this. When I was trying to pull in the chip data files I was generating errors.  Roger gave me a few steps that allowed me to clear the manual time data and import the chip information.  I was able to pull in data from all three timing points, the start line, halfway split and finish line.  The data showed that the timing system worked well, I had 1921 chip finish times, 70 or 80 more than I came up with manually keying in times.

As I was looking at the chip report a light bulb in my head went off.  I realized that this data could be used by runners to find all of their chip time info by doing a simple cross reference.  All they would need to do is match up the gun time we already had posted to the gun times in this report.  Once they found that gun time, the rest of their chip time info was in the other columns of that line of data. Awesome! I posted the chip report last night along with the instructions on how to reference it.  Many people that were very irate about not having chip times were thrilled to now have access to that information.

I’m still not done with work unfortunately.  The next task at hand is collecting the shipping address information for all of the age group winners so that we can ship awards to them.  I am building a list one email at a time.

Tonight after work I am stopping by the furniture place to talk to someone about that high tech sofa Cindy found.  If I can get it delivered before the super bowl party I may pull the trigger now instead of later.