NASCAR Pit Crew Challenge

Just got back from the NASCAR Pit Crew Challenge in Charlotte. Really, really cool event. Tons of pressure to get it perfect, because the show is very tightly coreographed, and so much is happening simultaneously, it would be difficult and time-consuming to go to manual backup. We got it perfect, but I was not without sleepless nights.

The show was live on SPEED for two hours. TV graphics in HD 720P. My AKISPORT CGs performed admirably, the graphics really looked crisp. I designed a cool lower-third animation which blasted the two clocks and two NASCAR door numbers onto the graphic with lightning bolts, and it got on the air a couple of dozen times, which was something I wanted out of the deal.


Had a nice dinner with my friend Trampass and his wife at my favorite Soul Food restaurant, Mert's Heart and Soul.

Check out this photofinish. Almost a dead heat. The two teams weren't actually running against each other, they were running against the clock, in a qualifying round.




Time for car 24: 23.846
Time for car 39: 23.855

Margin of victory: 0.009 (Nine one-thousandths of a second)

39 was later assessed a penalty for this push, so they were docked 3 seconds (for a loose lug nut). So ultimately, it wasn't this close.

The cars are moving very slowly (they are being pushed by the crews, not driven), and the event in indoors in Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, so JimmyBob (operating the Lynx) had to back the speed of the Lynx camera way down, since the lighting isn't that great. The frame rate we were using here was well under 1000 fps, although my Lynx Pro 5000 camera, under ideal lighting, is good for 5,000 fps. Calculating out the various factors, but without having a speed trap or RADAR to know exactly how fast the cars were going at the finish, my figures tell me the margin of victory here was about 1/2 cm.

It's a good thing JimmyBob sighted in the Lynx carefully.



And it's a good thing we replaced all the clown-nose switches just before the event. A redesign of the pit wall enabled the crews to use the clown-nose as a vaulting point. Even though the clown-noses are solid steel, I worry.



The calm before the storm.



Think these guys aren't taking this seriously? Given the financial trouble the teams are experiencing, and the subsequent mergers & consolidations, 1/10 second more or less in this competition may very well be the difference between keeping your job and hitting the bricks.



Very possibly, there's nobody who takes it more seriously than Yours Truly. Sitting with two NASCAR officials.



But then again, perhaps Tony Stewart aka "Smoke" takes it more seriously than I do. Here he's looking at the clocks on the Daktronics displays, trying to figure out exactly what happened. By the way, Smoke won the All-Star Race two days later up at the track.



Floor coordinators Anne Stamper and Michael Verlatti from JHE Productions are taking it pretty seriously, too.


The Skunkware timing team talks things over. The blurry figure in front of the gas cans is Jay Howard, principal of JHE Productions, and the brains behind this entire concept & event.



Locked & loaded in our aloha crew shirts, waiting for the Preliminary Round, which is held before the doors open as a TV rehearsal.



Preparing for Media Day.


Keyboards & laptops, anybody? Actually, we used less equipment in 2009 than in 2008, since the AKISPORT GS2 CGs each do the work of three of the old Matrox CG machines.

Getting Andryroo-san ready over in the TV Graphics department.




Special thanks to Mike Walker Photography for these most excellent pikkies: http://www.walkerphotography.ca/

Daniel Albrecht Finally Leaves Hospital - At The End of April

link

Jeebus! Swiss Super-Kombined World Champion Daniel Albrecht finally left the hospital THIS WEEK, after being severely injured in a crash during the Hannenkamm-Rennen in Kitzbühel in January.

I saw it from the zeitmessungraum in the KSC Zielhaus (about 200m away), and it wasn't pretty. Almost identical to Scott Macartney's crash the year before.

The thing the strikes me about Albrecht's crash is that while Macartney is a very good ski racer, the American has a history of bad crashes on sections involving big air; Albrecht, on the other hand, is a GREAT skier, a World Champion, a perennial threat to win any speed race on the World Cup.

Both guys simply made a mistake. It happens.

Both crashes have made our RADAR TV graphic speedo famous across the ski world, as YouTube has had millions of hits on the various videos. Our RADAR data will also be used in analyses of the crash by various safety committees.


Abrecht peaked out at 138.2 KmH coming into the Zielkompression. Weather, visibility, and course prep were perfect. Note our little speedbug above the clock.


He had plenty of time to react if he felt he was off-balance going into the Zielsprung.

Goes into the jump clean.

Gets lift up under his chest and starts to come apart in the air.

At this point, he's got to know he's in serious trouble.

As with American Chad Fleischer's almost-identical crash about ten years ago, Albrecht's skis vaporized into cloth from the force of the hit.

He slid a good 200 meters on his face before coming to a stop.




The Austrian on-mountain rescue team was on Albrecht in around 10-15 seconds.

This chopper, which is HQd year-round on a pad across the street from the Kitzbühelerhorn gondola (across the valley from the Streif racecourse), normally is on 24-hr reserve to help out with road car accidents. During the HKR, it is relocated to a pad less than 300m from the finish line, with a pilot in the hot seat at all times.


After watching these rescue guys in action for three HKRs now, I am more in awe of them than I am of the athletes who actually ski in the race. They are extraordinarily skilled at a very tough and dangerous job.

Adios NAB

NAB is the most exhausting thing I've done since I stopped going to the US Open. Last week I was skiing HARD in 15" of fresh powder, all day, hiking up at 8,000 feet, and after two days of that, I felt great. Today, after three days of NAB, I am completely wasted and I can barely move.



The zoo.



Tomas at work in the HEGO CZECH (AKISPORT) booth.



Is Jesper asleep?



One of the highlights of the trip was Eric H from PSSI Satellite Systems stopping by the HEGO booth. Eric is not only a very cool guy, he was the man responsible for putting together our satellite vLAN (ethernet via satellite) at the Tour of California Time Trial intermediate in Solvang, which worked like a champ right out of the box.

Another Sighting of the Rare Alpine Skunk

Snowbasin, UT, April 16 (three days before Snowbasin will close for the season). 15" of fresh. Those tracks are right smack in the middle of the Wildflower DH course. Notice the utter absence of any other tracks.

Apparently the Rare Alpine Skunk has a nose for untracked freshies.

Powder Mountain, UT, on April 17, was just as good.

You KNOW It's Early When.....

Having a house in Hawai'i does have its challenges. For example.....it takes at least 5 hours to fly anywhere. Eight hours to Dallas. And during the summer months, since Hawai'i does not observe Daylight Savings Time (one of the few examples of smart Hawai'ian government), the entire State is yet an additional hour behind the mainland.

So you grow accustomed to....


Arriving in Dallas so early, the Admirals Club isn't even open yet.


Concourse "D" at the largest, busiest airport in the world is so deserted that you could stage a full-scale US Gridiron game, with 19 of your closest friends (in full pads), and nobody would even notice.

SET...BLUE....THIRTY FOUR......BLUE...THIRTY FOUR......HUT....HUT.....HUT



But hey, at this hour there's no problem finding an open chair to await the opening of the Admirals Club.......

More People Who Hate FIS: All Snowboarders

link (New York Times)

FIS, the most corrupt, incompetent, and contemptible sports governing body I've ever encountered, continues to win friends and influence people in their unique way.

The first few paragraphs of the above-linked NYT article, penned by Mark Higgins:

STRATTON, Vt. — In a sport known for individuality, top professional snowboarders can at least agree on their outrage about a skiing sanctioning body overseeing Olympic qualifying for their sport.

“F.I.S. puts on some of the worst snowboarding events ever,” Mason Aguirre said last week about the International Skiing Federation, known by its French initials.

Kevin Pearce said it was unfortunate “that a ski-driven group is in charge of snowboarding.”

Travis Rice went so far as to say he hated F.I.S.

Jay Freeman Takes on the Apple Monolith

From The Wall Street Journal, March 9:

Jay Freeman, who created Cycorder and is behind the Cydia Store, says he decided to open the store so developers like himself have a way to make money from their efforts. Mr. Freeman, a 27-year-old computer science doctoral student in Santa Barbara, Calif., says he intends to charge developers no more than the commission Apple does for his site's billing services.

A big hurdle the Cydia Store and others face is that the applications they offer typically only work on iPhones that have been modified, or "jailbroken," to allow users to download unauthorized programs.

Apple maintains that jailbreaking an iPhone violates copyright laws. Mr. Freeman says software he created to modify the iPhone has been installed on about 1.7 million iPhones.

link

I know this guy. Vaguely. He was an advisor to my nephew in the Computer Science Department at Cal Santa Barbara. I wish him luck in taking on the Apple monolith.

Talk about David vs Goliath.

Quite a bit more crazy and quixotic than me and Ted poking our sticks in the eye of Swiss Timing. I mean, we do The Hahnenkamm, at Kitzbühel, under Rolex sponsorship. And we make a modest profit doing it. THAT's about as significant a victory over Swiss Timing as one could accomplish in sport without funding it ourselves.

Of course, Jay is a better programmer than I am, so who knows what he's capable of.

SONY's Stupid Piece of Shit That Doesn't Do What The Goddam Thing It's Fucking Supposed To....

My conehead bro Miguel sent me a link to possibly the funniest thing I've seen all year.

But it's only February.

Miscellaneous Geek Stuff

Some miscellaneous geek stuff for my two main conehead brethren, MilesW from Kula and Miguel from Toronto.


A better shot of the antenna arrays at the top of 3G's crane.



By sheer coincidence, the above two pictures fit together almost perfectly.


3G Wireless' operations trailer (not the porta-potty).





This is one of my PCs running Adobe's TourTracker mapping / profile application. John Carter, the executive producer, runs the app.



TV World. We have plenty of space in Escondido. In crowded downtown areas, the two mobile production studios are parked so close, the stairways overlap.

The open door is the Audio Suite. Production is the 2nd door, my home for the past 9 days. Notice the double-wide expando trailer.



Front monitor wall in the Production room. If you look carefully, you can see the Skunkware logo displayed on the GPS Preview monitor, just to the right of the rightmost PROGRAM (big) monitor. Immediately to the right of GPS is the preview for my AKI PAINT virtual telestrator system.


Not just eye candy. These two brainy beauties are the graphics department. Ally (left) and Michelle.


Jack, the Director.