Cascade Striders Track Meet Network did not work

The great plans we had for applying technology did not work very well. It took 90 minutes to get the printers to work. The HP jet-direct card was invisible on the network. The wireless network broke down during registration. We needed to move all six machines and three printers into the finish-line tent. Next year I shall have three wireless routers strung out around the field with a repeater in the middle cranked up to 250 mW. Next year I shall make sure all the laptops have pre-installed printer drivers and pre-configured ports for the jetDirect and other print-servers. Next year we shall test under more extreme conditions and simulate network outages to accelerate recovery. Next year we may attach the WAN port of one of the routers to the public Internet, instead of using a coach's phone as a modem. Next year we shall keep the .mdb master Access database on a very fast flash drive so that the Microsoft Access transactions can flow faster.

Meet Manager does have some cool features. The fact the Microsoft Access can handle fifteen transactions per second from eight separate machines on a high-latency network is cool. Meet Manager enabled us to upload all results to the public Internet in two clicks. All results can be posted in real time. And using a phone in the announcer's booth to read the results from the public Internet did indeed work. The photo finish stuff enabled us to resolve a tie (going down to the thousandths of a second from the photo finish). And meet manager's interface to the electronic finish line stuff was flawless.