Cascade Striders Track Meet Network Set-up

So the Cascade Striders are hosting their track meet on Saturday, May 31 at Samammish High school and as a parent of one of the kids who practices and competes from that team, I have been enlisted to help host the meet. As a spectator, I have watched how the other teams host track meets this year (and last year) and I am always extremely disappointed. The meets are disorganized. There are not enough volunteers in the field events. The heats take forever to start. The athletes, coaches, and spectators wait impatiently as the meet coordinators lazily arrange for the next event or wait for some unknown reason. The meet is always hopelessly behind schedule by the second or third event.

Among the reasons for these failings is the lack of communication among the meet coordinators and hosts. They hand-write results, heat lineups, timings, then need to "run" (they usually walk slowly) these results to the different stations. So this year the Cascade Striders are trying to bring the organization of a track meet into the 21st century. We purchased a 6-license pack of Hy-Tek's "Meet Manager" software and arranged to borrow a bunch of laptops from parents. I set up a wireless network and we arranged for a blackberry to be used as a modem attached to one of the laptops to give it public Internet access.

The announcers in the booth can either WAP the results down from the Internet on a cell phone to announce them or access a text file exported by "Meet Manager" to read the results. The registration, awards, and administrative laptops in the concession booth and admin building keep track of who paid, who is registered, who gets which medal, etc. The start/finish machines interface via meet manager to the electronic start / finish equipment.

What have you done for me lately?

There is some discussion today on a mailing list to which I subscribe regarding the question raised at the bottom of this blog entry. I would like to see some of the petro dollars going to good use.

Wonderful Weekend Weather

We went wading on the lake shore at Idylwood park where we built an awesome sand castle, complete with moat, draw bridge, and outer perimeter wall.









We had the best weather all weekend. Track practice was warm and sunny. We cooked and ate Bar-B-Q in the back yard every night.

Lag B'Omer

Trioxane and some sticks were all we needed to get the bonfire roaring!

Breaking: Fat People cause Global Warming!

This is the best journalism to come out of the LA Times in many years:

"...obese people are disproportionately responsible for high food prices and greenhouse gas emissions because they consume 18% more food energy due to their greater body mass -- and require increased quantities of fuel to transport themselves and the food they eat"

Who would a thunk it?

We need a global tax on body mass index (BMI) to buy up charcoal and bury it in the Mariana trench.

Balmer talks about Yahoo, Work / Life Balance, His Heritage

The original Hebrew version of the article is much longer and has more depth than this abridged English version. "...float like a butterfly, boom, boom, boom, sting like a bee."

Microsoft Language Translation on the web

We (Microsoft) finally have a decent, competitive translator up on the web:

http://www.windowslivetranslator.com/

Check it out! 检查它! ¡Compruébelo hacia fuera! فحصت هو خارجا! Vérifiez-le !

Photos of "Wings of Eagles" Track Meet 5/10/08

I am also putting videos on youtube.

Eitana likes trees

Eitana has become more intense recently, constantly busy, initiating "projects" (mostly crafts) and pushing forward with ideas. A few days ago she took out crayons and paper and drew a series of trees that she hung up on the walls of her room. She asked me to photograph one of them.

Then she folded up paper to make a trunk, folded up more paper to make branches, taped them all together, and made a cool tree. She didn't like the first one so she made a second one. She was quite proud of her idea and the result of her work and asked me, again, to photograph the sculpture.

Encode Videos for phone

I was trying to get DrDivx settings tweaked to encode videos for my phone and I started looking online for the optimal settings when I found a French program called "Pocket divx Encoder." It does exactly what I want and it is very fast. You just point it at the video and it creates a divx encoded version optimized for the smartphone (or other hand-held device). Cool.