The Perfect Storm

I normally don’t like to blog on a day off but I suppose the events of the past weekend merit it.

On Friday my new beastly HP Envy pc arrived. At first I didn’t think I would have time to work on it until today but my eagerness kept me up late Friday getting the process started. I got a lot done on the new pc in a short amount of time and in fact am working on it right now as my main box.  My older, slightly less beastly pc is now Cindy’s new computer.

I have a lot of smaller things to migrate to the new pc but the core things I use are in place.  I am a big fan of the mean red glow my 3.5 i7, 32 gigs of ram, SSD drive toting machine has. It comes with Windows 8.1 Pro which at first I assumed I would downgrade to Windows 7.  However after doing some messing around in 8.1 I found that it isn’t as debilitating as Windows 8 felt.  Even without installing a start menu replacement like Start Menu 8 I can navigate around just fine so I think I will leave the OS as it is.

On Friday I had received an email that I originally assumed was spam, saying that I had a UPS delivery from Blizzard, the guys that make World of Warcaft.  Well when I checked the tracking number it said a 7 pound box from them had actually been delivered to my door??!!

I had no idea what it could be.  When I cracked the box I could hardly believe it.  For being an original customer/player of theirs from the beginning, some 10 years now, they sent me this heavy, incredibly detailed statue of one of the Horde leaders.  Even though I am an Alliance player I still appreciated the gesture.  They made no announcement of this happening ahead of time, just a “here is a cool gift for being with us for so long” thing.  My already sky high opinion of Blizzard went up a few notches Friday night.

Cindy and I actually started our Saturday morning off in a normal fashion, getting stuff done around the house including giving the yard it’s first full mow and weed whack since Thanksgiving.  The property looked so much better when we were done.

Mid afternoon on Saturday Cindy and I headed down to the running store.  I brought my laptop with so I could catch up on the data work.  Cindy ran over to get her haircut first before joining me later to close out packet pick up.  I was set up right at the packet/shirt hand out table so I got to see first hand the disappointment in runners faces when they were handed their event shirt.  It was frustrating.

It was pretty amazing how many people wait till the last day before a race, even a long race like a half marathon, to sign up.  Both online sign ups and paper applications were pretty steady all day.  Cindy and I hauled ass home to begin the final prep for the race.  I was bringing more equipment than I ever have to a race in order to ensure I had no problems.  The van was STUFFED with 12 timing mats, 4 timing boxes, 5 laptops and all of the other paraphernalia I bring to a race. It was nuts.   Cindy and I were in bed before 9pm with a 2:45 alarm set.

So the alarm went off and I got out of bed without delay, despite feeling the need for additional sleep.  After shoving down some food we were out the door and on site before 4AM.  Cindy and I dropped off stuff at the appropriate spots and got busy along with the other volunteers on site, some of which had been there since 3AM.  We had the registration area set up and ready to roll well in advance of the first participants showing up.

I then went over and worked on setting up the finish line equipment.  Part of that equipment was one timing box dedicated to flashing up people’s names on a laptop for our race announcer.  After I had it configured a couple girls I know from the club who were running the race were near by.  I asked them to go run over the mat to test it for me.  They happily did so.  When they approached the mat the code for their chip displayed instead of their names.  I instantly knew I had a problem as I have had a similar situation happen once before.  It was now 6AM, 1 hour before race time and I knew I was in trouble.

I ran over to the registration area where I had my main laptop which is connected to my Dropbox account.  In there I had the file that is used to connect timing chips to bid codes.  I did a search for the code that flashed up from the test and got “result not found”.   I grabbed a code off a few bibs to see if maybe this was an isolated problem, nope, all missing.

I have a pretty good trouble shooting mind, if the shit hits the fan I normally can quickly find my way to a plan B or C to get me out of it.  The file I was checking was straight from the vendor, I had no other files available, I had just run into a brick wall.  I knew that without that file NOBODY would have a posted chip time.  Mixed in with that scary realization and anger at the vendor for sending me bad data, was frustration with myself.  There were things I could do ahead of time to verify that the chip file was good.  I had so many other things going on leading up to the race I didn’t put that additional layer of double checking in place, making what I now know to be a bad assumption I would be sent good data.  I was internally freaking out while trying to process exactly what needs to be done to salvage what I could from this burning building.

After getting the start line mats set up I left messages with two of my contacts at Ipico explaining the situation and how I needed an answer asap.  The race, with all of the excited participants started.  As they passed by I felt guilt knowing that unless Ipico could get me the correct file within an hour I was going to be disappointing all of them.

So all of a sudden Cindy’s role in the race became very, very important.  I had already tasked her with running the club’s 20 year old Time Machine, a box where you can punch in a runners bib number as they cross the line, as a backup to the chip system.  The machine then prints out each finish time line by line as well as recording it in internal memory. She was going to basically be a human timing box.  In addition my buddy John who is a timer came back from the halfway split to help me out.  He was able to capture runners bibs and times more in real time for me.  Ali was also in the race chute with a laptop typing in bib numbers in order as best she could so we could use it as a cross reference for finish place if need be.  I heard nothing from Ipico as the first runner approached so I knew we were on our own, trying to time a 2400 person race by hand.

My role the entire race was data entry.  I punched in bibs and finish times into the system as fast as I could, first from the stuff John was recording and then later from the print outs on the Time Machine.  It was tedious work and something that just does not go that quickly.  By the time I picked my head up at the 3 hour race mark I had only keyed in roughly 500 of the finishers.

I talked to the race directors and told them the only times that we know we captured completely were the open runners that finished first. There was no way we could do any age group awards as the Time Machine can’t correlate bib number to times when you have a pack of a dozen runners finishing in close proximity. All I had in those situations was a time and no bib number.  I told them all we can do are the overall awards with an apology to the rest of the participants and a promise to get them their award/prize if they won their age group.

During the race I did finally talk to some Ipico people.  I explained that they sent me the wrong file.  They didn’t seem to believe me as  they sent me the same file I already had.  They then thought that I possibly corrupted the file when I created the format used to import it into the timing software.  I assured them I didn’t but they then sent me a converted file which was still the incorrect data.

I felt like a failure. Having to tell runners that came up to the tent that I did not have their official time again and again was humiliating.  Without the support of everyone that acted like a human timing system I don’t know what I would have done.  I am very grateful for their help, it was a high stress, high pressure situation to put everyone in.

So finally Ipico realized that indeed they sent me bad data.  The next step was getting the right data from their location in China that produces the bib tags.  Unfortunately it was the middle of the night in China so nothing was going to happen until much later in the evening our time.  When I got home I immediately sent out an email to all of the race participants, letting them know what happened, what we were doing to fix it and of course apologizing.  Sure I got some of the expected “you suck” replies but there was a surprising amount of people that were nice, said they understood, and had a general “shit happens” attitude.

I then turned my attention to the Time Machine.  My goal was to find a way to download the information instead of manually keying it.  John said he thought there was a way to interface the Time Machine with the timing software and he was right.  Making it happen required a combination of luck and knowledge.  The Time Machine is literally at least 20 years old.  It uses a serial interface to download data.  Serial ports are something that just are not part of most modern computers.  Luckily for me, (and actually suggested by Cindy), the older Dell I use for an in home server still had a 9 pin serial port.

After reading the Time Machine manual to set port parameters I eventually was able to start sucking in times that Cindy punched directly into the system.  It was a slow process but light years faster and more accurate than trying to key it myself line by line.  When it was all said and done I had 1255 times in the system, probably at least 800-900 short of everyone but at least it was something.

I spent the rest of my Sunday working on whatever I could get done while checking with Ipico for updates, which the last of is still, “we are working on it”.

I did take the time to unwind with Cindy a bit and watch Maze Runner which was better than I anticipated it to be, I’d give it a strong B+ rating, definitely worth renting.

Despite waking up at 2:45 AM I stayed up until 10:30, hoping for a file from Ipico.  As of this morning that file has still not arrived and I am imagining what is going to transpire if the final answer I get back from them is “it’s lost, our bad”.