Tour of California: Day 2

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

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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.