The Little Things

We discovered last night that we were booked into a hotel in Redondo Beach, even though today's race finishes in Thousand Oaks. That's a 90-minute drive. So we took the initiative, grabbed rooms at a Best Western, and had a nice treat: Separate rooms, and we were at the hotel by 7 PM. The luxury...

Tour of California, Day 6

Did stage five today, and it went so smoothly that I have nothing fun to report. It was a great, great race. Video and photos worked perfectly, internet was great, and Santa Barbara is just beautiful. I do, however, have some great photos:


That's me on the right, then the editor of VeloNews using our Internet access (he gave me a cool vest) and then Tracy doing video.


And here are the stars of the day. That's George Hincapie of Discovery on the right, and Floyd Landis of Phonak on the left. Hincapie won today's sprint. Landis is the overall leader.

Tour of California Day 5: Captains, Chaos and Fun

After making the 3 hour trip from San Jose to San Luis Obispo last night, we stayed at the Madonna Inn. We were originally booked in the Oriental Fantasy suite, but Tracy wanted to stay in the Cave Man Room. We ended up in the Captain's Bridge, which must've been made for a really short captain, because the beds were 6 inches too short and the showerhead just about hit me between the shoulderblades.

We then got up at 7 and headed into town at 8 to set up. We got there and looked for the camera and satellite trucks.

Nothing. Nada.

Fighting panic and the urge to start laughing hysterically, we made some calls and discovered that yes, we had no power/internet/video yet. The trucks rolled in at 9 AM, and had us up and running at 9:50 sharp, which is just amazing. So all's well that ends well.

The race was great - 130 miles, and we had video of almost the whole thing...

The Geek Van

If you want a quick video tour of the Geek Van in all its gross glory, here you go:

http://feathers.portentinteractive.com/atoc_geekvan.mov

Patty, who's also in the video, is our play by play person - she calls in stuff to me and I add it to the site. She's also a bit of a celebrity, having finished the Tour De France Feminine 3 times...

TOC, Day 4: All Akamai, All the Time

So yesterday we had around 62,000 people on the Tour of California web site. Not bad. But as you can imagine the site bogged down a bit. We talked to Akamai last night about ways to fix the problem but didn't really get anywhere.

Last night Branden made some changes that really made the site run faster, which was great. Akamai still had issues though. I estimate we streamed live video to maybe 10-20,000 people in 2 hours. It's a rough day when you don't think that was enough...

Tour of California, Day 3

Victory!!!!!!

In San Jose today. We had quality internet access, power, the whole bit. The Geek Van was up and running with our two servers, two laptops and mini-network.

We started everything up, hooked up to the live video feed, and actually saw the test screen on the internet. I've never seen a more beautiful set of bars in my whole life.

We published dozens of race shots, video clips and the live stuff. My play by play went well too.

This was almost totally ruined by a teleconference later that night that caused me to miss a steak dinner and get stuck with crappy room service instead, but all in all today was a huge win.

Tour of California: Day 2

OK before we go too far let me get this out of my system:

crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap

OK, all good now. We got up to head to the stage 1 finish line in Santa Rosa (stage races start with the prologue, then stage 1). My pager goes off. Oh, look, our servers are all down. We check on our hosting company. They're down too. We call them. No answer. Call them again, still no answer. After an hour on hold someone finally tells us that they broke something.

Thanks guys. Brilliant. Great.

If you think webcasting without an internet connection is hard (see my previous post), try doing it without a web site.

I took three deep breaths, went someplace quiet and punched a palm tree, really hard. Then we came back and got things running again in time for the race start. Site's back up, so no harm done, right?

Oh, but wait, we still didn't have internet access.

We ended up using Santa Rosa's municipal wireless network, which runs at about 3kbps and doesn't allow e-mail, instant messaging or FTP. But we did get photos live, and eventually had video up on the site, so we all survived.

Then a good thing happened: Tracy and I are driving south, shell-shocked. We stop at the Golden Gate to pay our toll, and the toll collector says 'Hey, where is the Tour heading next?'. We were so out of it we didn't know what he meant for a second, but we figured it out. He saw the big Tour graphic on the Geek Van and wanted to know how the race was going.

This is why we're doing this project - it's a big-time cycling event, and people care about it. It's great to do a project like this.

Day 1: Prologue to Disaster?

Oh, today was fun. Started with us realizing that San Francisco in February is cold. Bloody cold. Cold like your fingers go numb.

Then the race started. No live video. OK, we can live with that - didn't expect to deliver live video to the internet on the first day anyway. A few minutes later, though, we had no internet. You ever try to do a webcast without internet access?

Joy.

Tracy was on the phone to the office calling in play-by-play while I tried to get photos live. The radios kept failing so the play by play calls we got sounded more like "Landis if monetery past" than "Landis is pedaling fast".

But, we've had beer. And now we're OK. And tomorrow will go better, right?

Tour of California, Day 1

First day at the TOC today. The race starts tomorrow with the prologue. Me and Tracy are here to deliver play by play, video and articles to the web site we built. Video and play by play will be real time, so this is all a little, uh, exciting.

Our day in SF started with the worst car rental experience ever, continued to a hotel with no rooms available, and then followed with a nice rainstorm.

But, the site's debugged, the video's working and I'm going to go have a beer...

Cheney, II

Quote from my dad:

"It wasnt Cheney's fault. He had faulty intelligence."

Straight Shooting

You know, in the end, Cheney mistaking a 6-foot-tall man for a quail isn't that much of a stretch. Let's have a look at some of the other times he's mistaken one thing for another:

• He mistook the Senate Floor for a New York subway
• He mistook hunting licenses for an optional donation
• He mistook the US Government for a Haliburton subsidiary
• He mistook the US Constitution for optional guidelines
• He mistook an Auschwitz memorial for an REI outlet sale
• He mistook Iraq for Iran