oad Cycling – Mens – 5 Hours 29 Minutes

Ok… Boredom yesterday. YUK today. Our video recorder ran out of tape with the race and the medal ceremony – and it was in long play. We were happy it was ended… And none of us thought that it would be so bad. We all thought cycling would be fun and exciting… But after 5 1/2 hours.. HELP… We want to get out. We delayed setting up on one of the receive sites this morning due to lightning. This was SHOCKING :-).

The Manly Ferry was also off line this morning. We think that the bad weather dislodged some of the equipment. The manly ferry must have been fixed properly since Channel 7 just displayed an image from it on the TV, saying “The harbor bridge looks pretty good from the manly ferry”… It is good to have been a part of that.

Today some of the video camera helos had problems. One of them lost power a few times, and the other had a jammed iris near the end of the day, stuck so that no light got into the camera. The same problem was also happening earlier to one of the motorcycle cameras.

In the cycling they have pitt crews on the roads to get bikes fixed. They then run with the bikes pushing them off. We noticed some differences in the technique between races. During the mens race they put their hand on the back of the seat to push the bike, but during the women’s race they had their hands on the woman’s bottom as well as the seat… Of course all the mechanics we saw were men.

We found out that NBC’s helicopter was forbidden from flying again in the road cycling area after flying too low yesterday. Turns out that they were flying about 200 feet above the ground, which is about 75m. Checking out our logs we found that our helos got down to 300 feet above ground, a lot lower than the 500 absolute minimum… My boss promptly told the powers that be that we had been unable to get the data out, which was true for a period – but which we fixed.

My boss came to me today and said “We will have to get you to do a talk on all this [work that I have done] at Dayton [A huge Geek Fest in the USA]”. Sounds fun… Or should I say, sounds like more frequent flyer miles for me when they pay for me to come over. Also they are looking at selling some of the equipment to some company in Australia. They would then need someone to work on the GPS stuff as required. Looks like I could be busy in the next year [Craig Graham, please ignore the previous paragraph. I have no intention of getting a 2nd job part time. I am dedicated to Pacific Power. I will stay here until I retire]

One of the things that is an issue around the venues is the height of helicopters. One of the projects I am working on at the moment is getting the data on the height of the aircraft straight to the IBC… This is an economics question as well as a technical one – After all is it worth the $250 to rent a professional unit? Or can I borrow one?