Booked finally, fine print, Tech repair Thursday
So yesterday I finalized the travel arrangements to NYC for the Ireland trip. My first goal was to secure the discounted airline tickets via RCI. You may recall I tried early yesterday and again ran into typical RCI website problems. I went through the entire process 3 times only to run into a cryptic error at the last step.
I did what the customer service masters at RCI recommended, waited and tried later, yesterday afternoon to be exact. Once again I went through the entire selection process and had the site blow up at the end. I had enough. I had no resort but to once again call my buddies at RCI.
I explained to the woman that answered the phone that I have tried several times online to secure the tickets and keep experiencing errors, despite RCI’s previous claim that nothing was wrong with the site. I told the woman I would like for RCI to do what I mentioned in the blog, book the reservations on the phone but don’t charge the higher processing fees.
To my surprise she agreed to do that, probably sensing the pent up anger and frustration in my voice that was sitting on a hair trigger to dump all over her. She transferred me to another guy to take the actual reservation.
The way we had to do it was sort of dumb, once again thanks to RCI’s apparently inflexible order system. We had to process the tickets with the full boat phone fee and then I was transferred again to have someone credit back the difference. Dumb but the final result was what I wanted.
Ok one done, now I needed to book the hotel. I targeted the Hotel Manhattan that I found through my RCI search. Even though it was not available to be booked with my RCI points they were quite happy to take a regular reservation. The place looked nice and is in a great location to see a number of sights via foot.
So I hop on their web site, enter the dates of our travel and amount of people. They have rooms available, no problem, imagine that. The total of $430 with taxes for two nights was stiff but from what I could see in my research, a pretty normal price for that area of the city. I enter my CC info and purchase the room, done. It felt good to have the accommodations finished, until I got the confirmation email from the hotel which included the info below.
Rate plan: Getaway Partner Promo
*ELIGIBILITY -In order to be eligible for this offer, you must have a verifiable, minimum annual household income of $100,000. During your stay, you will enjoy a private 90-minute preview of The Manhattan Club, NYC’s premier vacation ownership property. The Manhattan Club is registered in NY, NJ, CT, PA, MA, MD, NC, VA, and DC. This offer is not available to residents of any state in which registration is not complete. Residents of other states please select an alternative rate package. For full details, please click here. (http://www.nypreview.com/restWin06/leg.htm). You must attend the presentation. If married, cohabiting or engaged both parties must attend the full presentation together to qualify for the reduced rate. Net non-commissionable and non-refundable. If this rate plan is modified you will be charged the new rate plan difference.
I was not pleased. Evidently the default rate that they display on their site is the one that requires you sit through the 90 minute time share pitch. That is annoying but ok I guess. The part that concerned me in reading this was it almost seemed like if you lived in a state other than the ones listed you were not eligible.
I called up the place and talked to a woman. I told her I had not realized that the rate posted was dependent on the timeshare pitch. It certainly wasn’t emphasized enough on the site in my opinion. I told her we already had a timeshare and there was zero chance we were buying another. She said that I could rebook the room at the NORMAL rate if I didn’t want to bother with the presentation.
So I quickly loaded the site and looked at NORMAL rates. I almost shit my pants when I saw they were practically double the price. I told the woman I would just do the presentation, thank you very much. I also asked about the state restriction. She said it was a bit confusing, you can live in any state and be eligible for the promotion. Ok, great. So it looks like our stay in NYC will include 90 minutes of yawning and watch looking while we endure a mandatory sales pitch.
Jeremy sent me some good info on NYC, including a sweet option for getting from JFK to the city. I had dreaded the idea of getting bilked by a cabbie. It turns out you can get a round trip bus from and to the airport for $22 a head, not bad at all. Once we are at the hotel I think we will be relying pretty much exclusively on leg power.
Last night I was quite busy. First I tackled repairing the running club time clock. This was one of the clocks I replaced the battery on a few months ago. I was told the LED charging light was working erratically. The thought was maybe I knocked something loose when I had it apart the first time.
Once I had the clock apart I confirmed that all of the connections involving the LED were tight and undisturbed. I plugged the clock in and pulled out my volt meter. I took a few readings and was not getting anything coming in, even at the main transformer, weird.
I noticed as I was plugging and unplugging the clock I got the LED to flash on and off briefly. After some more trial and error I determined an unlikely source, the main AC plug. If I tapped or moved the plug area I would be able to kick the LED on and off.
Now the ideal way to repair something like this would be to replace the cord assembly with a replacement cord that has bare wires on one end. I didn’t have that. I decided to instead cut off the plug end of a spare PC power cord and solder it onto the cut off wire from the timing clock.
It was a pretty tedious process. I insulated the repair with a combination of duct tape and shrink tubing. If we are careful with the cord the repair should hold up, if we aren’t a total cord replacement will be necessary. I let the box charge up overnight, the LED worked perfectly.
Ipico BNC repair
Next up was repairing one of the timing mats. The BNC connector for one of the mats had broken on Monday. I had received some direction from an Ipico rep regarding how to fix it myself instead of dropping a chunk of change to ship it to them for repair. He recommended a solderless right angle BNC connector available from Radio Shack.
This connector is nice not only because it doesn’t require me to utilize my poor soldering skills, it’s right angle design provides strain relief and should be more durable than the original connector.
Replacing the connector wasn’t very difficult at all. After applying the shrink tube it looked good as new. I attached the mat to the timing box to verify all was functioning properly which it was.
Since I had the equipment out already I decided to do some additional experimentation that was on my mind. Our timing software has the ability to display a real time scoreboard as runners finish the race. I had briefly messed with this function before and determined in order for this to work I would need a complete second set of timing hardware which is a considerable $5-6k expense so it wasn’t real feasible.
I had gotten a suggestion from the software author about a possible way to do this with only one set of timing hardware but it didn’t work. I decided to try something else.
Instead of plugging the timing box directly into the laptop’s ethernet port I plugged it into a port on my 4 port switch. I then fired up two of my laptops and plugged each of them into the same switch.
Ipico Lite Box
I copied all of the data from my test race from one laptop to the other laptop and then brought up the other laptop as it’s own race instead of being networked to the other laptop. Once I did this I fired up the chip finish utility on one laptop and the real time scoreboard on the other laptop, pointing them both to the timing box as their source of data. I was able to stream the data to both laptops without a problem, sweet.
The real time scoreboard also has the ability to send text messages of the finisher results as they cross the mats which would be a pretty neat feature as well. That however would require the club getting a portable wi-fi hot spot that I could use at races.
This Sunday I am participating in the Naples Fitness Challenge, my first time participating in this local triathlon. Ali did the event last year as a team, doing the running and bike portion of the event. This event is an oddball because they do the events in reverse order. You run a 5K, then bike 15k, then swim a 400.
I mentioned to Ali that transition-wise this should be great for me since I will be basically just stripping down instead of putting stuff on which should be MUCH faster. The short bike distance should also considerably shorten my finish time compared to the FGCU tri. Should be fun.