Day One In The Barn at World Equestrian Games

1st reining competition and the Opening Ceremonies are done. Today it's 7 AM and there are already two venues going.

One of CBS's NFL trucks, Super-Shooter 10

That CBS logo is already hidden under tape.

These days, a full HD production truck is actually two double-blowout trucks connected by a power bus and a data bus.
This is Super-B, which is essentially an edit suite here.

Monument to Rolex

Rolex isn't just a sponsor here...they are an object of worship. Here is the altar, all 8,000 lbs of it.




Does this horse have brass balls?

Just a thought. I'll check and get back to you.

BANDWIDTH, Anyone?

Looks like the Scoring & Timing network has plenty of bandwidth!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

T3 speed on the download side (34 Megs)

T2 speed on the upload side (6 Megs)

Just like Alpine Ski World Cup @ Lake Louise! (Not)

World Equestrian Games

After 2 1/2 years of preparation, it's finally here.

A lot of work ahead, but I've got my own office. With a T3 line! Wheeeeeeeee!

TSA - Could it Be That John Pistole Is Actually Doing His Job?

With a few minutes to kill before driving to the airport today, I happened to surf onto the TSA blog, and saw the following comments from John Pistole, the head of the TSA:

"There seems to be a trend of TSO’s not recognizing TWIC cards at our checkpoints. As a result of your feedback, I will ensure that TSA officers receive the necessary refresher training to recognize TWIC cards and other government-issued ID's (Including NEXUS cards) brought to the checkpoint.

Thank you for raising this issue so we can improve our security screening process moving forward."

My bullshit detector went off like a nuclear bomb, given my experiences trying to use my Nexus card as ID at Kahului airport (OGG - the land that time forgot).

Pistole's comments were dated 8/20 (about three weeks ago).

As a refresher to my loyal readers, a Nexus card is several security levels above a passport. Obtaining one requires first getting a passport, then applying for Nexus status, agreeing to have your background investigated by the Feds, attending a personal interview with a TSA investigator, getting your retinas scanned, and undergoing a proctological exam.

Just kidding about the last part.

I haven't even attempted to use my Nexus card at OGG all summer, as the highly-trained TSA numbskulls are so clueless that they seldom even know what it is - even though it's 5 levels above a passport and about 25 levels above a drivers license - and when they do, they won't accept it anyway. Even with a printout of the TSA list of qualifying IDs, they never once have accepted it as my ID.

So, arriving at OGG plenty early, with no line whatsoever at TSA, I whipped out my Nexus card.

First TSA Agent: "Oh cool, a Nexus card. Hey Joe, check this out, a Nexus card".

Joe: "Hmmm, wow. I've never seen one either".

Both examine it carefully, front and back.

First guy, to Joe (who's apparently a supervisor): "The scan code is on the back, right?"

Joe: "Yes, same code as his passport".

First guy puts it under his light.

First guy, handing it back to me: "Very cool. Have a nice flight".

Me: "Thanks. That card is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Takes me a maximum of 15 seconds to get through Customs, no matter how long the line is".

First guy: "Nice."

So...amazingly....astoundingly....it appears that John Pistole, head of the TSA, is actually doing his job. Given my faith in the US Government, it could have been a fluke. But perhaps not.

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

They're Packin'm in At Spruce Meadows

Nations Cup day. What....are they giving away free beer? The place is packed.

Not one empty seat in this grandstand.

Nor in this one.
Also Holland day. Tulips and clogs.

The Americans won! Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!

Holland: Close but no cigar.
Look at that fabulous video wall interface. Who is the ingenious programmer who came up with that? Oh yeah, that would be....me.
Big flags on the video wall for the Nations Cup. Big sponsor logo (BMO) too.

It's Raining..... It's Pouring..... And Q.E.D, The Old Man....

.....the old man must be in Calgary for The Masters at Spruce Meadows.


Soggy at Spruce.


Must be The Masters - says so right on top of the grandstand.

One good thing about rain: the gloomy skies make the video walls look like they're a few billion candlepower.
Foul weather gear.

No Bullseye

Damn. If any place on this planet deserves to be flattened by a natural disaster, it's the US Open. But not this year.

A few rain delays is all they got out of Earl.

Will Earl Hit The Bullseye At The US Open?

Should be an interesting weekend at the US Open, with Hurricane Earl bearing down on Long Island.

On one hand, I feel sorry for my good friends at That Sports Technology Company From Jacksonville, because bad weather only makes a terrible event even worse. WAY worse. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the roof of The Batcave leaks - directly onto my former desk.

A bad-weather shout-out to Lloyd, Trampass, Dingo, Cockroach, and all the other poor bastards marooned in Hell. Break out the trash cans, boys!

On the other hand, I do SO enjoy reading about USTA officials squirming and ahem-ing and haw-ing at those contentious, weather-delay press conferences. Trying to explain how they managed to spend $270 million of USTA members' money on a poorly designed, poorly built, leaky stadium. In the midst of a blighted, violent slum. Which was obsolete before it was finished. And which remains the only Grand Slam tournament without a retractable roof (Melbourne has TWO, Wimbledon's Centre Court has one, Roland Garros' roof will be ready in 2011).

Answering to a bored, pissed-off, stir-crazy press corp is the yearly cross the USTA must bear for amazingly bad decision-making and incompetence.

The middle weekend is, in relative terms, the best time for a hurricane to hit The Open. If the weather has been decent for the first 4 or 5 days, the schedule collapses from 16 to 10 courts. The Juniors can wait, or they can always be farmed out to local indoor facilities. But the ticketholders get screwed. Let's say you flew in to NY from (wherever) for Labor Day Weekend to enjoy some tennis. Odds are you'll get back on the plane without ever having seen a ball struck, with a "rain check" for a Monday or Tuesday session you'll never attend. If this was the Australian Open in Melbourne (by far the best tennis tournament in the world), you'd have gotten a belly full of tennis at Rod Laver Arena and Hisense Arena, both of which have retractable roofs.

Labor Day weekend tix to the US Open are the hottest tickets in NY. This year, it looks like they may be worthless. And the USTA has nobody to blame other than themselves.

It's All Taking Shape at TBird

Notice the integration of video and timing data. The cycling video is an AVI from Solvang TT at the Tour of California last year.


A rack mount holds all the guts.

This studly young feller is the boss of showjumping operations at Thunderbird



The "real" mounting hardware won't be here until tomorrow, so for now the display is strapped to a flatbed.

Christmas in August. And it's 92 degrees. In Vancouver.

Overseeing delivery & installation of the new Signco-EDS video wall to Thunderbird Show Park in Langley, BC.

Instead of cold & drizzling, there's not a cloud in the sky and it's 92 degrees. In Vancouver?




Their old Daktronics Galaxy is looking like the middle-aged wife who's just been dumped for the hot blonde grad student.

Thunderbird has it's Grand Prix weekend next week, so this is all happening just in time.

I love Nexus. I LOVE Nexus. I LOVE NEXUS!!!!!

Flew Seattle - Vancouver today on a Horizon Air Bombardier Q400 turbo-prop. Seating capacity : 76. At least 1/3 empty.

Unfortunately, we arrived YVR just after a China Air 747 and another big honkin' tin can from somewhere else. Customs wasn't exactly jammed to capacity, but the line stretched three lengths of the corral.

I started a stopwatch when I got within sight of Customs. I didn't check any bags, so I was going for a New World Record.

1. Bypass the line, go straight to the Nexus kiosks.

2. Stick my face in the Nexus kiosk super-shooter.

3. Poke at the touchscreen a couple of times.

4. Walk about 250 meters, past baggage claim, directly to the exit.

5. Hand my declaration and NEXUS receipt to Dudley DooRight.

6. Out the doors, into Canada. Bienvenue a Canada!

Elapsed time: 2 minutes, 41 seconds.


And that's why I love Nexus. I LOVE NEXUS!

I LOVE NEXUS!

I LOVE NEXUS!

I LOVE NEXUS!

I LOVE NEXUS!

I LOVE NEXUS!

I only wish a Nexus-like program was available from TSA. In this age of science & technology, where things like iPhones and Skype and Paypal change our lives overnight, I am infuriated that we still have to take our shoes off, take our laptops out of our roll-aboards, and do the TSA Barefoot Kabuki Dance in front of hourly workers who I wouldn't hire to empty my trash can.

And a huge, major-league FUCK YOU to the ACLU and the other lefties who are suing to halt the use of the new TSA full-body scanners. I would get on the damn plane stark naked if it would just speed things up and make the process scientific, effective, and objective.

SATIRE!

This week NPR featured an interview with a geeky, nebbish-y, Jewish, middle-aged, Russian-born literature professor from Columbia University by the name of Gary Shteyngart. Shteyngart is also, according to many, the greatest living American writer.

I love good satire (Carl Hiassen, for example). Shteyngart's latest book, Super Sad True Love Story, sounded wickedly funny, so I bought a copy.

SSTLS is kind of like a modern version of A Confederacy of Dunces.....on acid. America is a post-apocalyptic (financial apocalypse, not nuclear) wasteland owned, part and parcel, by China. The US buck is called the "Yuan-pegged dollar". All major US corporations have collapsed into bankrupt oligarchies, such as the airline UnitedContinentalDeltamerican. No Asians fly commercial because they're all rich enough to have their own private jets. All global citizens wear a device called an "aparat", which is a cross between a smartphone and the Big Brother channel from 1984. Upon walking into a room, one's aparat ranks everybody in the room according to their wealth, their attractiveness, and their health (bad cholesterol, genetic defects). People also use their aparat to communicate via a ubiquitous internet-based presence called GLOBALTEENS, which is sort of a global Twitter, Facebook, and satellite TV all rolled into one. Using their aparats, everyone has their own TV network.

SSTLS is a wild roller-coaster ride. I read about 100 pages (of 350) today, and I can't put it down.

Ironically, the main theme of Shteyngart's interview was that nobody buys books any more, because everybody wants to write. Nobody wants to read.

I do.

Ooma Telo VOIP

I bought one of these gadgets today:

http://www.ooma.com

I have been looking at VOIP solutions for a while. Cellular coverage near my house in Kula totally sucks, so I rarely use my mobile when I'm at home. My mobile winds up being strictly a business phone. I continue to have a home phone, really, out of habit. I do probably 75% of my voice communicating via SKYPE.

My monthly phone bill from Hawaii Telcom runs about $33. I also get a bill from ATT every month for about $12 for long distance access. So I was paying $45 a month for virtually nothing, except for calls from the occasional telemarketer. I looked at Vonage, which is about $30 / month. Oceanic Time Warner Cable has VOIP available, but it was also about $30 / month.

I heard about this Ooma Telo gadget, which has no recurring costs, and I found one online for $220. I figured what the hell, I'll give it a try. Ending my current arrangements with Hawaii Telcom / ATT will pay for the Telo well before the end of the year.

I hooked it up and it installed itself fine, first try. Voice quality is good. Probably not quite as good as a hard line, but as good as the best SKYPE calls. And I had SUCH fun calling Kumar from the ATT call center in Islamabad, and Vijay from the Hawai'i Telcom call center in Bombay, and telling them to cancel my service, effective immediately.

Ooma says for a one-time charge of $40 you can "port" your current number to the Telo. I found out that's true, but there's a catch, if your house is in Hawaii. Evidently Hawaii has so few phone subscribers that there is a substantial surcharge to use ANY 808 number. The charge, shockingly, is $20 a month in perpetuity. What kind of scam is THAT? It's not Ooma's fault. It's just another case of the paradise tax that's attached to pretty much everything in the State of Hawai'i.

I decided having an 808 number really has no value to me, so I got an (801) 337- number (Huntsville, Utah) because (A) 801 numbers are free (B) Utah has been my 2nd home for the past few years, and (C) I plan to buy a pied a terre in Huntsville in the near future, anyway. Why Huntsville? Because Huntsville, fellow powder skiing junkies, is the town in which the mighty, mighty ski resort of Snowbasin is located. Snowbasin is my "home" resort. I also consider Kitzbühel to be my home resort, too. I'm a card-carrying member of the Kitzbüheler Ski Club. But it would be silly for me to have an Austrian (+43) home telephone number.

Utah has The Greatest Snow On Earth. Says so right on the license plates.


It turns out there is a small recurring monthly cost for using the Telo. You have to pay local 911 taxes according to your location as determined by your ZIP code. In Kula, the taxes run about $3 a month.

See You In Veracruz in 4 Years

I'm outa here.

Special thanks for Joe and Dustin from Spruce Meadows for helping me out here.

The next Central American & Carribean Games is in Veracruz, Mexico, in 2014.

Schedule Change!!

Since San Juan's daily mid-afternoon deluges (along with their accompanying lightning and thunder show) have wreaked havoc on the jumping classes, the Ground Jury has rescheduled Friday's Individual Championship from late afternoon to the morning. First round is @9:30, 2nd @ 11. The field is down to 24 competitors.

Therefore, if my plans for shipping the equipment out do not hit any major snafus, I should be able to fly out of here Saturday instead of Sunday.

Normally, shipping stuff out (some via Air Freight, some via Fed Ex) is only a matter of finding the air freight terminal, driving over there at a reasonable hour, and plunking the stuff down. However, in San Juan, things are a little different. Many businesses are closed Fri-Sat-Sun. Even more common is being closed Sat-Sun-Mon.

This country doesn't seem to take work too seriously.

Sometimes It's Not Oppressively Hot : When It's Pouring

There are occasional moments in Puerto Rico, in July, when the weather is not deathly hot and suffocating. Unfortunately, those moments are when it's raining buckets.

The site got a direct lightning hit yesterday.



There's about 4"-6" of water on the jumping surface at this point.


The Ground Jury watches in amazement. It was less like a rain storm, and more like a spigot in the sky. Thunder, lightning, raining too hard to see or hear much.

Joe is Brazilian, so he's apparently impervious to heat. I have heard not one complaint about the weather from him.