Quick Update from Santa Rosa

Quick update. As you probably saw on TV, the Prologue went pretty well. A few bobbles here and there, but everything worked pretty solidly. Fred used TTWare and Matt used TTRemote to plug in the start times post facto, as the start was too far away from the finish to get the start times live.

We blew one finish (I forget who) because the DSL routers went out of synch for no apparent reason, so the clock kept running on the air. Fred got the time perfectly, but the finish packets to the AKI were lost by the routers. Sucks, but hey, it's a bike race on live TV, going to 150 countries. With all the warts. Schitt happens.

The guys over at 3G did a decent job with the RF, it blew to shit one time for a few minutes, but it pretty much worked, and the bar has been set so low by the previous RF company that it didn't take much to exceed expectations.

The weather tomorrow, for the first road stage, is supposed to be terrible, possibly even horrendous. My punch list:

1. Get the RADAR wired, powered, & working from the finish line. Fred is helping me with the hardware, and in fact came up with an ingenious idea - he's going to power the RADAR off the D-Line interconnect, since both the RADAR and the D-Lines hang on the Finish gantry.

2. Make a long RS-232 cable, run it over to the 3G truck, and get ready to suck down the GPS data from the 8 GPS transponders out on the race vehicles and relay it in real time to Adobe.

3. Run a long network cable to the TourTracker portable downlink, so the TourTracker infrastructure software can have a decent pipe.

4. Load the current GC standings on the Chyron interface and onto my own AKI software.

5. Review all my graphics with the TD and with Ally, our pretty and highly competent Font Coordinator, and Michelle, our equally cute Chyron operator, as there are a few inconsistencies between my AKI graphics and Michelle's Chyron graphics. Minor stuff, but the VERSUS Graphics Police are thorough and brutal.

6. Finish my own piece of the TourTracker TV graphics chain, a program to load the live course profile onto the AKI GS2 and display it on the air.

Got a nice note from my good friend GeorgeP, he was watching in Australia. The AKI guys said they were going to watch in The Czech Republic on EuroSport.

Will try to get some pikkies tomorrow if time allows.