Eton Mess
An alterntive newsletter to the official press releases is now availalbe, hopfully every day. The Eton Mess is planned to be available every day.
An alterntive newsletter to the official press releases is now availalbe, hopfully every day. The Eton Mess is planned to be available every day.
The IT team continues to provide support for all manner of problems. The most common issue to date appears to be the inability to connect onto a printer - a Windows network with no nameserver can be temperamental at times. But we've sorted out the method for us first level support teams - try the IP and if that does not work, recyle the print server. And remember to put the IP range in the firewall ;-).
Outside of the general support, the biggest dram has been a switch blowing up. Problems with the generator and current resulted in a 72 connection switch smoking and burning. A replacement has now been cobbled together.
Next steps..we off to search for rogue access points.
After a few months' hiatus, I'm reviving this blog to cover a couple of new events. The first is the World Rowing Championships, which take place in August this year; the second is the World U23 Champiobships, taking place in Scotland in 2007. For the Eton event, I'm one of the volunteers, most likely working in the IT team (although thse things can always change). Over the next few months, there'll be some updates but not too much as I'm not involved inthe settingup. For the Scottish event, there'll be more background on setting up, as I'm the Team Leader for the Accreditation team.
There's a name change to the blog, to bad Latin with no grammar, but it makes sense to me. And it'll move a little away from beign a photoblog.
It's Thursday, the final day before competition starts. Last night, the daily wrap-up bought few problems, with just minor adjustments to be made. In the registration office we are expecting a fairly heavy day. Most of the GB and closer European competitors are expected to arrive, but everyone is now trained and comfortable so hopefully tyhings will proceed pretty easily.
The FISA commission and others are arriving as well. There's an odd discrepancy in arrival times for umpires. Whilst organising a car at short notice to pick them up fromthe airport is easy, getting them a hotel for the night if they arrive a day early is more problematic, but it's managed. As a last resort there are always spare rooms or couches.
The first morning has been relatively quiet. A steady stream of people over the last few hours presenting a few problems, mainly language. German, Spanish and French is not too common here, and everyone makes their best effort in English. Passports need to be checked and confirmed – a Master’s regatta is based on age. You have to be over 27 to complete, and the ages go right up tocould the 90s. I’m sure if you were over 100 you could race, but we get that rarely. Races are handicapped by age, with set time advantages to try and equalise races where there are mixed ages.
A large team from Brazil come in and cause a minor buzz. Lots of issues to solve with their entry and plenty of transport tickets to sell. It does not help that half way through this, we are informed that we have to cut the power and take the network down for 10 minutes – some last chance change to the electrical system that cut all power.
Second shift for all the entry volunteers and another round of explanations takes place. It’ll be at least another day before everyone has gone through it.
Meanwhile, a bright idea is had. They want to put a camera on the start and broadcast it to the spectators (who are mainly 1000 metres away). But there’s no hardwire connections between the router and the spectators. The solution – wireless. So I get to go shopping with someone’s else’s money for router/wireless hub. Tomorrow we see if we can put it together.
Good plans go all awry. To use the wireless you need to get to the pub before it closes (11pm for those not used to UK hours). And the office at the rowing course has connectivity, you just need to actually have time to use it!
So today, first day ‘working’ was a slow start and then a very heavy afternoon. I slept late, took it nice and easy and turned up at the offices around 11.30. It was pretty easy to find where I needed to be and the people I needed to see – they’d been working full time on this for weeks and months (I first got involved in January). Found the office and found my table – covered in boxes. That all need sorted. There are piles of boxes in the back of the portacabin – filled with people’s entries, sorted by country.
The challenge was putting things together. I had 2 piles – invoices and event tickets. Each invoice had to be checked, married up with event tickets if they had ordered them and then the whole lot filed in the relative country/club box. This regatta is huge, there are around 8500 entries from around 2500 people, so getting all of this together wasa huge task.
Production line started and every 15-30 minutes a new volunteer turned up. For most, this was their first day, for many this was their first regatta. So time had to be taken to explain the whole process every single time, and then slot them in somewhere in the small space we had to sort this lot out. About 90 minutes in, the office also opened to the competitors to register. We were running about 1 day late in the preparation of the entries, so some had to wait slightly longer than planned to get themselves organised. Four hours later we were nearly done, just a few problems to sort out and the volunteers started to drift away as our only early day for the next week finished.
As I type this now, it’s 8.30am, the sun is out, there’s no wind and the lock glistens like a mirror. The office is empty and there are only a few people around the site. Won't stay like this for long!