Archives January 2015

So after countless hours of matching finish times to pictures I keyed in my last set of times yesterday.  Flipping through the roughly 10,000 pictures allowed us to capture/verify over 1800 finish times.  The process was not perfect as there were some people whose bibs were not visible to the camera as they crossed the line.  Last night I posted the updated results with an email that instructed runners that did not show up because of an invisible bib to review the finish line video to find themselves and their time, which I could then verify with the pictures.

The posting of the results brought another onslaught of emails from people that either did not read the email in it’s entirety or did not understand what it meant.  Despite what I thought were pretty clear explanations, some people did not understand that the problem we experienced meant there would be no chip start times for the race.  I also had to resume my official race apologist role as I addressed comments posted on the race Facebook page.  I tried to use the same approach  as I did with the timing snafu, just honest answers.

Tonight I will be posting another set of results which will include any of the additions that come in.  We will then use those results as “official” and distribute the age group awards that were not able to be handed out on race day. I have continued to receive mostly positive feedback in response to my effort to remedy the timing problems and it somehow made the hours of data entry feel slightly less arduous.

I am hoping within a day or two things have settled down and I can take a nice deep sigh.  It won’t last for long however as Ali’s race is in 10 days which brings it’s own set of challenges along with it.

Well yesterday sure didn’t feel like much of a day off.  The weather was glorious but I spent only limited time outdoors enjoying it when I changed the oil in the Prius as well as swapping out all of it’s marker lights.  Pretty much the rest of the day was wrapped up in half marathon aftermath. I was answering emails from runners asking where their times were, trying to get status updates from Ipico and hashing out a contingency plan.

Mid-day I talked to the Ipico tech guy.  He was making it sound like the odds of them recovering the file were pretty slim.  He also made a Captain Obvious statement that if I would have kept the files from when I scanned all the bibs I would have been ok.  No kidding….  In my email later to my sales rep to open dialogue about what sort of compensation Ipico is going to offer us for this screw up I used this analogy.

To me this this sort of is like taking your car to an oil change place, paying for the service and then having your engine blow up on the way home because they forgot to tighten the oil plug and being told, well, “you could have checked the oil plug to make sure we tightened it”.

That being said, I no doubt am shouldering some of the blame for this happening and will never trust a file from outside source to be legit until I test it.  Later on in the day I got the official word from Ipico that they have exhausted all avenues in trying to recover the chip mapping file, I was on my own.

I had already been working on plan B.  The event photographer, Ken Shelton, had an automatic finish line camera rig on top of a ladder.  It takes a picture every one second.  I contacted him and asked him if he would be willing to upload all roughly 10,000 picture to my home server so I could use them to rebuild results.  He has a vested interest in me getting this done as he uses finish times to correlate with personalized photos that are sent to runners.  He said he was fine with doing that.

My plan was to get all of these files on my network, copy them locally to my SSD drive which will give me lightning quick load times and then flip picture by picture rapid fire to identify each runner and their finish time.  This plan also required me to contact the author of our race timing software.  He made a custom import routine which would allow me to send him a dirt simple file in the format of bibnumber.finishtime, one per line, which would allow me to quickly punch in data exclusively on the number pad.

I started the process myself but things really got cranking when Cindy got home.  I loaded the pictures on her computer and had her be the caller and I was the data entry monkey.  We worked late into the night, getting to almost the 2:19 time in the race which added up to around 1230 people.

This system is not perfect.  If a runner was wearing their bib on their back, on their right side, under clothing or had it obstructed by another runner we could not associate a time with them.  My hope is between the pictures, the manual timing Cindy did on site and the dvr finish line video I posted we can get a reasonably comprehensive set of results.

Now of course this method will not account for chip start times or halfway splits but there isn’t much I can do about that at this point.  I am hoping to finish this tedious process today and be able to post refreshed results this evening.  It’s been quite the journey.  What does not kill you makes you stronger, right?

I shot a brief video of the process last night linked below.

This is how Cindy and I spent the majority of our evening last night.

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”.

Last night after stopping at the running store to collect half marathon entries I stopped at Ali’s place on the way home.  She was stuck working late and asked if I could let the girls out.  Of course I said I would, I hate the idea of the dogs sitting around with bursting bladders.

As soon as I opened the door from the garage the dogs came charging out, thinking it was time for a ride.  I had to calm them down and direct them around the side of Ali’s place to take a leak.  Ali wasn’t getting home until later so I prepared their supper as well which they both chowed down rapidly.  I was going to head out but decided to leash both of them up to take an extended walk since they were cooped up all day.

Walking Nicki and Sadie on leash at the same time is challenging.  Sadie wants to constantly plow ahead while Nicki is constantly lagging behind investigating and smelling anything of interest.  As the leash anchor I wind up spending much of the walk with my arms in a T position.

There is actually a nice walking trail in front of the development that the three of us meandered on for a little while before heading back.  I was glad I took the time to take them out.  When I was ready to leave my heart broke a little bit as Nicki rushed the door, trying to follow me out.

This weekend will of course be mostly consumed by the demands of the half marathon which takes place Sunday morning.  The first day of race packet pick up went smoothly from a logistical stand point.  Unfortunately there has been a lot of negative feedback about this years race shirt which is not what has been advertised on the web site.  Some complaints have been quite loud directed unfortunately at the volunteers handing out the shirts as well as additional commentary coming in via social media and email.  Obviously there is nothing that can be done about it at this point except use it as a fulcrum to make sure the situation never occurs again.

The race giveaway is one of those things that are out of my control but I still feel badly when race participants are disappointed with any aspect of a race.  I simply imagine myself in their shoes and then think about how I would feel in them.  That attitude is what keeps me pleasant when dealing with race participants if they have an issue.  Do things you would want done for yourself, it isn’t rocket science.

Half marathon weekend is one of those times I am quite grateful for having a government job that allows me to have Monday off as a federal holiday.  If there is ever a Monday I need off it is this upcoming one.  I will be bringing and utilizing the most tech ever at this weekends event.  Here is to hoping that I can keep the short circuits to a minimum.

My house has become filled with various piles of race related items the last few days.   Last night I had a whole new, HUGE pile outside my garage door.  It was the new equipment that I ordered for the running club.

In total it was nine boxes of stuff which had to all be unpacked and added to the various piles of stuff that are already in the house.  One of the bedrooms in my house is now pretty much dedicated to race equipment storage.

I spent a good portion of the evening once again doing race related legwork, including carefully crafting an email that was sent to all 2200+ participants to provide as much information as possible to simplify the events leading up to race day as much as possible.

Last night I was at the running club board meeting, albeit briefly to discuss details regarding Sunday’s half marathon.  It felt a bit odd to see the chair I occupied for many years seating somebody else. Regret however wasn’t an emotion that crept into my head.  I have no doubt that my new role in relation to the club was the best direction for me.  I was spending too much time getting frustrated over things that I was not in control of. Sometimes a shoulder shrug is simply the best avenue to follow for sanity maintenance.

I instead sat on the peripheral of the room as most guests do at the meetings.  The half marathon discussion was pretty brief, wrapping up in less than 15 minutes.  I excused myself and was on my way home where I had a long mental list of things I wanted to do, some race and some work related.

I had technology barfing all over the house last night with three laptops on the kitchen island, an Ipad on the counter and a 25 year old Time Machine charging as well.  Luckily I only had around 20 new entries to pull down and label.  Tomorrow early packet pickup for the race begins meaning most of my free time ends for the next four days.

My goal on the days leading up to the half marathon is to stay ahead of the workload curve. This year that load includes entering/downloading race entries daily and then printing/affixing the custom labels to each assigned bib number.  Last night I had a huge pile of paper entries in front of me and as I looked through them I got annoyed for several reasons.

The majority of the entries were from two schools that were entering a number of runners.  The way we handle this normally is the entries are paid for in bulk and then we give the group a code which allows their people to sign up online for free.  Well these groups were not aware of this policy so as a result I had a bunch of incomplete, chicken scratched paper entries to squint at.    The one group didn’t even use our official race entry forms, they made their own and considered it close enough.

This race gets more paper entries than any other race we do all year long.  If you have read my blog over the years you know that paper race entries are one of my least favorite things.  When many people fill them out they don’t give any thought to the ability of others to read their information.  These are the same people that will come find me on race day complaining their information is incorrect (because I couldn’t read it).

This race is paper heavy for two reasons, there are a lot of older, less tech savy people that participate who prefer a pen and paper to a keyboard.  Second, this is the only race where were still charge a premium for online entry.  If you sign up online you will pay roughly $2.50 more than if you fill out a paper form.  Evidently a couple bucks is enough to convince many runners to slap a 50 cent stamp on an envelope and send in a scribbled entry for me to get annoyed with.

So the shirts I ordered for GMT showed up on Friday.  They showed up much faster than I expected because CustomInk.com just happens to be located in Florida so they only had one day of transit time.

The heather white shirts (another word for light gray) were good quality although the sizing was on the small side.  An XL shirt fit me like most larges would.  This is only the first run of GMT logo gear, there will be other stuff coming for sure. Cindy was quite happy to try on the shirt I got for her as well.

Our Saturday was quite busy.  In addition to the things I had in my head Cindy had her own extensive list of things she wrote out to get done.

Part of the list involved picking up some stuff.  On the way we picked up the dogs for a sleepover.  Ali said she had a very busy weekend going on which meant the dogs would be home alone for most of it.  The mental image of them moping around inside alone bothers me so I was glad to have them out so they could have some fun.  Nicki and Sadie were so excited when I opened the door.

During our stop at Home Depot we spotted some reasonably priced cushions for the patio chairs that we repainted.  We threw them in the shopping cart hoping they would fit the chair frames, they did.  The cushions were pretty much the last thing we needed to purchase for the deck re-do.

We also stopped at Rooms to Go to look at a high tech sofa that Cindy saw earlier in the week.  Since the recliner has left the great room I now have space to think about replacing my $200 Craigslist sofa and loveseat I bought after Ali and I separated.   The new stuff was sweet with everything a geek could want like power recliners, power headrest, touch button controls as well as built in cup holders, reading lights, and USB power ports.

On Saturday night Cindy and I went to see Taken 3.  Now is the only time of the year that we have to deal with anything resembling crowds at Coconut Point.  The unfortunate side effect is you wind up with much greater odds of sitting somewhere in the vicinity of douche bags that see no issue with smart phone usage or loud talking throughout the film.  It makes me appreciate the joys of taking in cinema at home.

I have enjoyed the Taken series of films.  This 3rd iteration however was probably the most silly with absolutely ridiculous outcomes at times.  I also have to question doing fight scenes when one combatant is wearing a white speedo.  It’s an average B action flick.

We started Sunday with a run. I suggested we do a new route that did not involve a dozen or more loops around the track at the middle school.  Instead we ran to the middle school from the house.  I found that running on a changing, open road helped offset the additional mileage we put in, covering almost 5.5 miles at just under a 10 minute mile pace.  The cool temps in the low 60’s definitely helped as well. It felt good to be knocking on the door of 10k distance.

So a good portion of Sunday was consumed with half marathon related work.  I had to affix labels to over 2000 race bibs.  I rearranged the house to do so, moving the dining room table in front of the 73 incher so we could watch football as we toiled.  I sent out an email to a bunch of people asking for help in affixing the labels, only Mary and her friend Maureen came out.

As I unpacked 3000 race bibs I thought we were going to be in big trouble only having 4 people working on the project.  I had visions of it taking 4-5 hours, it was A LOT of bibs.

Before Mary and Maureen arrived I had printed all the labels and was already in bib scanning mode, factory worker style.  I took each and every bib I opened and ran them across a reader to make sure I didn’t have any duds.  I only came up with one bad bib out of 2300 so that wasn’t bad.  Once we got some logistics worked out things flowed pretty well.  Attaching the small label went quickly since not much precision was needed.

The somewhat tedious work was made better by watching the Cowboys go down in flames to the Packers, this time being on the receiving end of a controversial call at the end of the game, unlike last week when they were the benefactor of a pass interference non-call.  The Cowboys had a good season for sure, outperforming the Eagles.  I just hope their fans enjoyed getting a playoff win for the first time in nearly 20 years, it may be another 20 years until it happens again.

Cindy and I thanked Mary and Maureen for the help, it was much appreciated.  Them being willing to come out and lend a hand on relatively short notice was awesome.  After we were done they got to go out and mingle with the chickens as well as take home a few of their eggs.  Everyone loves the chickens.

I returned to dogs to Ali’s last night after we fed them.  Ali was not home when I dropped them off.  I HATE dropping them off to an empty house.  They look so sad as I walk out the door.

This week will be a grindfest, mostly consumed with half marathon related things.  After so many years you get used to it but it doesn’t help make it more enjoyable.  I just remind myself that by this time next week I will feel much better.

Yesterday was a looong day at work.  I was working on an issue from 10AM to almost 6PM pretty much non-stop.  My eyes were burning from staring at a screen for so long.  It made me appreciate how my lunch time gym visits help break up some of that strain.  The issue appears to be mostly handled at this point thank goodness.

Yesterday I got confirmation for my first Green Machine Timing gig.  It’s going to be interesting as it’s a private corporate event.   Even more interesting, and something I did not realize at first was it takes place on a Monday morning, meaning I am going to have to burn a vacation day to do the event but that’s ok. I am looking forward to the challenge and if this event goes well it could open up other avenues doing similar events in the future.  I also should be receiving my GMT shirts I ordered today, much quicker than I expected.

I am now about a week from the half marathon meaning the all of the fuzzy details now have to be brought into focus over the next few days.  I decided I am going to put custom labels on each bib this year which includes a QR code that links to each runners individual results on the internet.  To put this into place I need to do a lot of data work followed by extensive manual labor to stick a label on over 2000 race bibs.  I am hoping to get some extra hands to help in that part of things.

So the big news yesterday was the terrorist attack on a French newspaper that has consistently produced cartoons poking at radical Islamists for many years.  These cartoons have resulted in many threats against the paper from various terrorist organizations.  There was a firebomb at the building several years ago.

Well yesterday’s attack was brutal, fast and ruthless with two gunmen executing specific targets within the building during a scheduled meeting.  It was obviously a well orchestrated attack, so much so that they were able to carry out the attack AND escape. Most of the time these sort of things seem to have a one way ticket where the attacker has no intention of walking away.

Attacks like this of course incite all sorts of anxiety and fear into the populace when they happen in more “civilized” areas that do not have acts of terrorism occurring on a near daily basis.  If gunmen took out a dozen people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, or Palestine it would have hardly gotten a headline, but in France it suddenly gains 100x the amount of importance.

This attack of course was condemned by most of the modern world but I don’t know exactly what good it does.  The attackers accomplished their two main goals, making good on their threats and implanting an element of fear in anyone in the media that brazenly publishes anti-Islamic content in the future. Until yesterday these threats were seen mostly as paper tigers, now any future threats will have real teeth.

It’s a further reflection of just how messed up this world is and how religious beliefs continue to be the common seed for evil acts in the human race today just as has been the case through history.