[RC] Tevis Webcast or "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" - TypeF \(Jackie Floyd\)
Well, now that I am home and had a few hours of
sleep and can think again, I just wanted to report in from my job at
the Tevis Webcast .
First, I want to thank Karen Chaton and her staff
Sue Benson, Tinker Hart, Merri Melde and Steve Hallmark for taking photos and
all that lovely video and getting it up so fast. They worked very hard to do a
very big job, and I really appreciate all the time taken to make it happen.
I think it adds a lot to the site. And Karen is STILL working on
it!
I'd also like to thank my laptop volunteers both
out in the field and in net control. At Michigan Bluff we had the Baldwin family
studiously entering in data. The Baldwins have helped for the past several
years. At Foresthill, Dawn Simas, Liz Carey and Steve Anderson sent in
information to Net Control and kept the leader board volunteers as up to date as
possible. While Dawn was born into the Tevis, working the webcast is one of the
things she hasn't volunteered for before. Back at Net Control, Pete Duisenberg
and my husband Jim Floyd typed in the majority of the radio'ed in information
from all the other vet checks. Carey Brock manned the stadium and kept the
leaderboard volunteer Mary updated and also handled "Where's My Rider" questions
for those waiting in the stands. Ralph Lucas headed up the 75 or so radio
operators stationed all over this ride. Without them, there would be nothing to
put on the webcast. Ralph has been working the Tevis radio command for YEARS. A
big thank you to Lindy Young who stepped up to the plate and designed the
database form that we used to enter the information into. without her, this
would have never flown. She wasn't even supposed to be there on Saturday, but
stayed into the wee hours of the morning, fixing things on the fly. Thanks,
LINDY! An extra thank you to Pete for sitting with Lindy and explaining some of
the things we didn't know before race day. He's worked data entry at Net Control
for several years now and knew the ropes.
If anyone is interested in how this whole ball of
wax gets rolled ... here it is. We started with a website laboriously built over
the past 10 years by past webmaster Richard. Unfortunately, we didn't have the
database he used and so we started from scratch. Lindy and I worked many hours
together to come up with something that would fill in the blanks of the web
pages. We ran dozens of tests on dummy information. Of course, we figured we had
crossed every "t" and dotted every "i", but at Pete said on The Day, there's no
way you can test it for real until you are entering real live data. We found
that to be entirely true!
So we did have a little down time for fixing things
that weren't going right. For instance, when we got past 9:59 in the morning,
anything with two digits became two hours later. 10:00 was now 12:00. Since
obviously, that would never fly, back to work we went. Then there were other
things like a power failer at foothill.net, our internet host for the Tevis
site. That took us down for awhile. Then there was the little fact that the
Satellite wireless setup we had would go off and on once in awhile, leaving us
there to just WAIT for it to come back on. It turned out to be our router and
once we figured that out, we were good to go for the rest of the
evening.
Now on to the real "How It Works" ... For all stops
except Michigan Bluff and Foresthill, information was radio'ed in to Net
Control, written on a timer sheet, handed to either Pete or Jim, they typed it
in and it was emailed to me. Michigan Bluff and Foresthill typed it into the
same form and it was emailed to me. This is the same system Richard had used in
the past and I know it seems weird to say they were emailing this stuff to me
when I'm setting right next to them, but it has to do with the next step... Then
I had to run it through a program Richard provided us with that converted the
email into something the database could read. Then we would import it into the
database through a series of keystrokes, export it back OUT into something my
web page programs could read, run the merges, and then FTP all the web pages
back up onto the server.
Timers at the vet checks were instructed to send in
a report every 20 horses or every 20 minutes, whichever came first. I was
instructed to put it up on the web every 30 minutes. So, you add 20 minutes, 10
minutes for the email or radio people get it to us, and the time it took me to
get it all into the database, and you have about 45 minutes to an hour behind
the race. All in all, we kept up with that, and towards the second half of the
race, we were managing to get changes up with only a 30-minute lag
time.
Considering it was the first time for me on the
job, the first time Lindy had every worked with a race(system) like this, and a
brand new database, I think we pulled it off quite well.
Lots of you have send it comments and suggestions
and I'm going to take them all into consideration for next year. One of the
biggest seems to be that people can't find the finish list. I left all of
Richard's pages alone as far as order, but for next year, will move the finish
line up to the front page, I think. The other little bobble we had was we could
never get the database to spit out a list of Top 20 by individual riders, vs.
Top 20 most recent times posted, so those out in the front were listed
several times because they were always the fastest times by a
long shot, in and out of various checkpoints.
Hopefully, we pulled it off well enough for all of
you at home to keep track.
