The final countdown, projecting, Bern’d it up
So yesterday I burned up a vacation day in order to help time a local cross country meet. The guy that helps me at GCR races was renting my Ipico timing equipment to do several county meets, this was the first one so I wanted to be on site to make sure everything went ok. The meet started at 10AM, rather late considering it is still quite warm this time of year. I was quite glad I brought my custom GMT shelter to keep the bright sun from beating on me the entire time.
The meet was held in a large, mostly unmowed field in the back of the high school that was next door to the track Cindy and I run at. It was a small county meet with only 7 teams so I didn’t expect many problems. Things were going great until the tail end of the girls varsity race where we started hearing THE beep.
The beep was coming from the timing box. It was the low battery warning, shit. This made no sense to me since I brought my DC power supply to power the timing box which should give virtually unlimited run time. I had hooked up the power supply earlier and turned on the timing box. The box had been up and running probably at least an hour before the race started. I instantly looked at my connections from the power supply and the timing box, they looked fine. I then look at the on/off switch for the power supply and see it is dark, meaning it is turned off….. son of a bitch.
This meant the box has been draining the battery all this time. Simply switching on the power supply was not a solution as the supply will hold a battery at it’s current voltage when the box is running, but since the battery was already on life support it would not help. I had no idea just how much time we had until the battery totally conked out. Luckily it stayed up long enough for the last girl finisher to cross.
Now we had an even larger problem facing us, we still had the boys varsity race to run. As soon as the last girl crossed the line we turned off the timing box and turned on the power supply, hoping to pump as much juice into the battery as possible. We left the box off and charging until we were a few minutes away from the first boy crossing. At first we tried to bring the box up with the power supply connected and it would not initialize correctly because the battery level was still low. Our only option was to remove the power supply and cross our fingers the Ipico box made it through the race.
A few minutes after restarting the box the low battery beep returned. Chris and I felt like we were listening to the beep of a bomb detonator counting down. We knew we had 47 boys on the course so each one that crossed was one step closer to success. Finally the 47th and last finisher came into view as the beeping continued. He crossed the mats and almost as if it was preordained, the timing box stopped beeping and instead went to the solid “I am now dead” tone.
We had pulled files prior to the death of the box so we only needed to get the last few finishers. I just needed to get the box alive for a few more seconds to pull the final file. I managed to do so with some technical CPR. I disconnected both timing mats to make power draw as minimal as possible. I then turned the box on. It reinitialized and stayed up long enough for us to pull the final times. Wow, that was exciting.
Now the bottom line was even if the timing box did die I had my security DVR up and running so we could have pieced together the results if we had to via video which would have been painful but possible. However it was a wake up call as I originally assumed that I could have simply powered the box with the DC power supply, even if the battery was depleted. That was not the case.
I felt bad for the kids running in the heat. I saw a ton of them finish and collapse, it was pretty severe. I didn’t get off site until shortly after noon because of the late start. In the end everything turned out fine but it sure had a lot more drama than I expected.
Tuesday afternoon I gave the Tacoma a much needed bath. When I was at the CC meet I realized I was actually embarrassed with how dirty it was. I also washed the SSR a little later after I finished my LED projector install project.
Finishing the LED project was not tough since I already did most of the mounting work over the weekend. The only thing I needed to do was use better electrical tap connectors so I could utilize the wires for the rear back up lights. Once I made the electrical connections I put the truck in reverse and saw the LED illuminate. In the bright sunshine it was tough to see much but if I held my hand up closer to the projector I saw the SSR logo. Once it got dark outside I went back out to get a real look at the end result which I was very happy with. I think it looks very sweet having a 2-3 foot SSR logo displayed underneath. I posted the work to the SSRFanatics forum and got similar approvals with relocating the projector from the normal door location to the rear of the truck.
Last night Cindy and I watched almost all of the democratic debate. I literally never heard of three of the five candidates on the stage. The guy on the right, who impressed me so little I can’t even recall his name was the weakest of the five by a large margin. O’Malley, the former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor seemed to have a decent resume but his mannerisms struck me as odd. I suspect he may botox his face.
Jim Webb has an impressive military record and positions on some issues that were contrary to most of the other candidates. He seemed clearly to be the least progressive of the five. The two things I took away from his performance was he hates China and he was very pissed off that Anderson Cooper gave much more time and attention to Bernie and Hilary. I can understand his grumpiness but come on, let’s be realistic, none of those three candidates have a chance in hell of making a dent in the presidential campaign.
So the debate was mostly the Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton show. I honestly do not know how somebody could dislike Bernie Sanders, even if you do not agree with some of his self admittedly socialist positions. You can tell that Bernie is not like most politicians that are simply regurgitating well rehearsed positions that are based on whatever consultants tell them to say. Bernie is passionate about his beliefs and is beholden to nobody looking to influence them. To me he is like a breath of fresh air, especially when compared to Hilary who is a classic politician that just happens to have female genitalia.
I think it would be a truly incredible thing to have somebody like Bernie running things but the reality is his continued ranting against the massive money that rules politics today will likely be his ultimate demise. Even if somehow he could wake enough people up to get to the voting booth to be elected president, how he would be able to implement significant change in the White House when he would still be tasked with dealing with a congress that is filled with bought and paid for politicians whom ultimately do whatever they are paid (under the table) to do by corporate interests.
I can only hope Bernie continues to fight the good fight, refusing to dip into all too typical political mudslinging where the choice is who is the less dirty of the two candidates. His steadfast, laser focus on issues, and specifically the four decade long descent into corporate control of the federal government that has resulted in the largest income inequality in nearly 100 years is admirable. 2016 is looking to be the most interesting presidential campaigns of my lifetime.