Archives 2015

So you may recall I mentioned I was looking at a high tech sofa that Cindy saw at Rooms to Go.  I thought it would be cool if I could get it in time for the Super Bowl party next week.  I was originally going to stop after work to see if I could make it happen but instead I hopped on the RTG website.

I found the sofa online and was excited when I saw that if an item is marked as IN STOCK and you order before 2PM, often you can get it the next day.  When I punched in my zip it said my estimated delivery would not be until the 27th, not next day but still in plenty of time.

So I start stepping through the transaction and get to the point where I verify the delivery date.  February 4th pops up, wtf??  I choose the option to customize my delivery date, expecting I would be able to flip back the calendar to January.  Nope every day before Feb 4th was grayed out, argh.

So I hook up an online chat with one of the site reps.  They look up the item number and say that the sofa just recently went into OUT OF STOCK status which was why the delivery date flipped backwards.  They said the website data is not real time. Well that kind of sucks.  So I tabled the sofa idea, if I couldn’t get it in time for the gig I’ll just keep cruising along with my $200 Craigslist bachelor sofa and loveseat for now that has served me well the past nearly 3 years.

On Fridays I usually treat myself to a DD coffee instead of brewing it in the office.  I pulled into the parking lot behind a Penske straight body rental truck, probably a 12-16 footer.  Of course I assumed the truck would swing into one of the plentiful parking spots.  I watched in amazement as it entered the rather lengthy drive thru line.  What in the fck?

I thought to myself two things, there was no way in hell this thing is going to fit and how can the person driving the truck be so stupid and too lazy to park the damn thing.  Once the woman driving placed her order she finally realized the same thing herself as she saw the clearance sign was a good foot lower than the top of the truck.

So now she sat there with a row of 10 cars behind her with no room.  There was a a small turn off to her left but it was blocked by a parked car.  The woman passenger got out of the truck and went inside.  I got out of the car to survey the situation.  The woman apologized as I looked at her with stink eye.  I just said “uh huh…” as I returned to the Prius to wait.  In total she blocked the drive thru lane for around 10 minutes. It was a pretty amazing display of stupidity, the perfect way to start a Friday.

I will enjoy my one weekend break from race timing although I still have been quite involved with the half marathon aftermath.  The most recent task was generating mailing labels for the all of the age group winners that did not receive their prize on site because of the timing problems.

I have plenty of stuff to keep me busy this weekend and we also will have the dogs out for a Saturday night sleepover.  We will  get out to see American Sniper I’m sure.

Most of my recanting of the last four days has dealt with troubleshooting, data and logistics, the three things required for me to dig my way out of the hole I was in, at least most of the way.  I have not done much detail on the human and emotional aspects of this same period of time.  Let me do so briefly now.

Obviously I personally ran through  large ranges of emotion with what went down. Anxiety, fear, anger, frustration, panic, and despair all were part of the equation at one point or another.  On the flip side, the disaster also invoked others to jump in and support me in any way that they could which made me feel good and reaffirmed what I already knew, there is a large core of great people involved in our group. Their willingness to help make the best out of a bad situation really was touching.

When the 60 year old man dropped 20 yards from the finish line with a heart attack he was literally dead for a few moments with no pulse or breathing.  The fast actions of the on site medical staff brought him back and he is already back home and doing well.  I couldn’t help but think about how if somehow somebody got to my mom just as quickly she would be still here, reading this very blog entry.

The reaction of the race participants to the timing errors and my actions to correct them have have run the gambit.  I would say the appreciative, understanding, nice responses have outpaced the negative ones 3-1 which is nice of course.  However I can’t help but feel more impacted by the loud minority that apparently have never had anything go wrong in their lives and feel deeply offended that we had a timing problem.  Some of these people I have been able to flip around eventually as I continued to get more data available.  The ones that have not are just more comfortable being in a constant state of dissatisfaction I suppose.

These last few days have certainly put some mileage on my emotional odometer.  I look forward to clearer, calmer waters ahead.

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.

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.