totient: (Default)
Things still to do for this rally:

  • Mail the police letters
  • Send out reminder email
  • Buy file folder labels, preferably in some cool color
  • Buy one more "1st" dongle for trophies
  • Integrate changes from proofreader
  • Print and assemble packets
  • Pick up equipment

I'm probably forgetting something. And I completely fail to understand how anyone ever put on a rally without a computer.
totient: (Default)
I scheduled a road rally on the day before my deadline to have the Arisia books closed.

I knew about the deadline in plenty of time. I could have scheduled the road rally for a different weekend. Earlier, later, it would all have been fine.

Too late to change the rally. I wonder what will happen when I'm late with the books.
totient: (Default)
Definitely doing the mileages this Sunday. Departing Somerville at 10am, returning between 5pm and 6pm. If anyone here is available and can drive stick, I'd love you have you drive, so I can do the novice precheck at the same time.
totient: (Default)
I'm looking for someone to perform the "Novice Pre-Check" of an upcoming rally. This consists of driving the 100-mile course while I read you the instructions and take note of where you get lost. If we do it tomorrow morning, we could then proceed to the 55-mile Rally Against Leukemia in the afternoon and compete as a team there (though we'd have to compete in the experienced class). Let me know in a comment here if you're interested.

100 miles

Aug. 18th, 2004 06:10 pm
totient: (Default)
On September 18, the Touring Club of New England will present the 51st running of the Annual Grand rally, starting in Milford, MA and ending in Mendon at the Mendon Twin drive-in movie theatre.

I went out a couple of weeks ago with [livejournal.com profile] hotpoint in his spiffy new Civic Si and we laid out about half the rally, and also smacked his car into a rock and had a pretty long day exploring roads to figure out some of where the rest of the rally would go. Last weekend I went out and did the rest of it, which went much more smoothly since we'd done the prep work already.

I'd been shooting for a total length of 100 miles and a first car finish at 5 PM. After putting all the bits together in the computer and doing the preliminary mileages and timing, it looks like I've got 99.3 miles and first car finish at 4:59.61. There's still some work to do -- mileaging and checking -- and I'll have to drive the course two more times before it's finished. But it's coming along nicely.
totient: (Default)

  • Running a two event weekend is more than twice as much work for the event chair as running a single event.
  • Rallies have minds of their own; it's hard to have a concept in mind and make the roads fit it. Because of this, the rally course should really be finished and ready to precheck six months ahead of time, so that the sanction application, flyer, and description in promotional materials can accurately reflect the nature of the rally.
  • Putting the rally together is the easy part. Doing good PR for the rally is the hard part. Three hard parts: flyer and press-release distribution, Internet-based promotion, and personal glad-handing and cajoling. I did about half as much of the first and a tenth as much of the other two as I should have.
  • Have lots of things going on at the awards ceremony. I had a (very neat) map of the course and displays of the trophies and prizes set up by the time the first car got there. Photos of the course, controls, and (if applicable) traps would also have been good. Having visually interesting prizes is also a good idea. This gives people something to talk about while waiting for scoring, so they won't get antsy.
  • Along those same lines, certain kinds of side prizes can be given out before scoring is complete. For instance, a prize for the earliest arrival at a quickie control can be awarded based on the control log, so giving it out can be done while the scorecards are still being worked on by the scorers. And one car had a negative leg time, so I really wish I'd given a prize for that.
  • Consider the safety of oncoming civilian traffic when locating controls. I had two controls that should have been located elsewhere based on this criterion.
  • Use of online aerial photography archives can in fact replace fieldwork. 8m images (which are easy to find, even if Mapquest did take them off their site) will give you a feel for how scenic a road is. 1m images are available for free from USGS and are, just barely, good enough to tell if a road is passable or not. 10cm would allow checkpoint placement; if such a product were available for $50/year flat, I would probably buy it.
  • Novice schools should introduce one new concept with which the novices are not already familiar, and which they can apply over the course of the day. TA generation from logs was a good example. Speed factors would also have been a good example.
totient: (Default)
Every time I put on a rally it's a little easier. Partly it's because I'm getting better at it, more familiar with the roads, more able to tell from a map which roads to even bother exploring, more able to recognize a good checkpoint location as I drive past it. But partly it's because each time I extend my automation a bit more. Today, for instance, I'm sending out letters to each of the police chiefs. I've got all their contact info in a database, and template letters to use. No more looking up information on who to notify. And I have a scanned-in signature (the legible one, not the legal one) from when I did the Arisia program book ad mailing, so I don't have to sign the things either. I love it when computers can learn things for me.
totient: (Default)
Next month's TCNE rally -- the last of the series -- is coming together. I went out and did some fun exploration with my mother (who's visiting East Coast family this week). We found a couple of great roads but concluded that they wouldn't fit into the concepts I have in mind for this rally; I have now convinced myself that there is no further need to find new roads, and so I have set the route and done all the map work. I know the roads well enough to write preliminary route instructions. But I still need to drive the route twice to finalize and check the route instructions, and then hand it off to Fred for the pre-check.

This particular rally is being a lot of fun for me, as it's a format I haven't put on before, and I have also managed to pull off a trick that has been tried before without success, namely a complete absence of speed changes. Woo! Nearly the entire rally is on roads posted at 30 MPH, and the few places that aren't are brief enough that I can put in a pause or a short transit to keep them legal.
totient: (Default)
For the first time in months, my basement is empty of rally equipment.

It's not only the physical equipment which has passed beyond my stewardship, at least for a short while. The next rally in the monthly series will be run by Fred Mapplebeck, who as TCNE equipment chair and general poobah-associate is also checking the batteries on the clocks and making some sense of the big box of paperwork. The equipment for the separate championship series (of which Essex Ramble was a part) is on its way to Connecticut for a rally in August, to be put on by a higher mucky-muck than myself.

As my desk gradually reappears from underneath its pile of paperwork, so I find my psyche decompressing as a class of distractions are removed. But both the physical and metaphorical desktops still have quite a lot of accumulated contents to be dealt with before I load them up again.

a reminder

Jun. 20th, 2003 10:02 am
totient: (Default)
Yes, there is a third Friday rally tonight.
totient: (Default)
... and now that I have figured out what plan B is, I am much happier.

Trophies have been picked up and they are good.
Checkpoint crew instructions have been written (these are hard).
I have enough workers not to be completely hosed, though I could still use as many as three more.

Tonight, I drive to Danvers to catalog the fast-food options for competitors lunching before the start. Then I draw the maps of the start and break areas (hard, but fun). Then I start printing, collating, and stuffing envelopes (tedious). I don't expect to finish stuffing envelopes before going to sleep tonight, but hopefully I'll get far enough to make sure I haven't forgotten anything critical.

If all goes well, I might even get to be social for a few minutes tomorrow night.

Wish me luck...

ack!

Jun. 10th, 2003 03:05 pm
totient: (Default)
Only four days to go for Essex, and I'm drastically short on checkpoint workers! I need a total of eight or so, but have solid commitments from only three, plus vague handwaving from a fourth.

No experience necessary; the folks I do have can show you the ropes and it's not particularly difficult.

Please drop me a line if you can make it...
totient: (Default)
I have a naming scheme for the two production models of rally computer I plan to debut sometime this summer: p1 for the one with a Palm connector, and s1 for the one with a Sony connector. Development work, however, has been happening on a prototype that has a connector for my Handera 330.

Saturday I went out and remileaged my rally. One of the instructions has a speed change that could occur at two different points within the same intersection, and I remember deciding on one early in the planning stages. But I couldn't remember which point I'd decided on. So I took down the mileages for both, and figured I'd decide over again and use that one.

Comparing those mileages to the ones I took the first time, though, I found that the repeatability on my computer was quite excellent -- although they are only 50 feet apart I can easily tell which execution point I had chosen the first time around. And in general the standard deviation of the wobble in my mileage measurement is about two feet. Vastly better than GPS, even leaving aside the sample rate problem that GPS has.

So I think perhaps I should name the prototype model h0. After all, the Hubble constant expressed in seconds is a pretty tiny number.

lemonade

May. 19th, 2003 12:27 am
totient: (Default)
I like to stop at lemonade stands when I'm laying out rallies. Today there were two. The one in Rowley was 50c and the proprietrix seemed to be getting a fair amount of business. But I preferred the one I came across on a dinky side road in Georgetown: 25c for less lemonade but much more enthusiasm, including a paper-snowflake "flyer" exhorting me to come back "next spring". I'm sure I will, as it's a pretty road, but who knows if it'll be the right weekend for the lemonade stand.
totient: (Default)
So the next Third Friday Night Rally is coming up this Friday, the 16th. Come on out! Feel free to show up without a partner and we'll either find you one or put you to work. Or if you're not up for driving around on dirt roads in the dark, you can pair up with me in the lead car or [livejournal.com profile] candle_light in the control car or keep registration after she and I have to leave the start. There's no need to preregister, though a head's up is nice.
totient: (Default)
Changed out three of the winter tires for summer tires last night. The event that prompted this was having changed the other one earlier in the day when I got a flat laying out the Mayflower rally. I've changed enough tires that I don't really consider it a pain in the ass any more. But I've got to figure out a way to keep paper towels in the car to clean up afterwards. Last time I tried they came out of the bag I had them in and unrolled all over the trunk. Maybe folded dispenser towels in a small dispenser would work better. I'll have to check out the restaurant supply store and see what I can find.

In other news, Mayflower will be 10% (!) unpaved. That's the most unpaved I've ever put on a rally; the previous couple of Friday Nighters were about 2%, and Essex has historically been around 3% (though this year it's up to 5%). Although there are a surprising number of unpaved roads in eastern Massachusetts, most of them are pretty short. But I picked up a bunch of very nice gravel just over the border in New Hampshire. Now I just need to tweak the route up there and back so that it completes in a reasonable amount of time.

six cars

Apr. 19th, 2003 01:58 pm
totient: (Default)
Six cars at the rally last night. This is part of the series I'm putting on, but I didn't have to be in charge of this particular rally. Much. I did have to console the rallymaster when he thought we wouldn't get any competitors, and convince him to put it on anyway even though he was convinced the workers would outnumber the competitors. As it was there were twelve people competing and three working, double the number of competitors as last month and the same number of workers.

I'm glad I convinced Doug to press on -- it was a great course, scenic and difficult without being hard enough to get the novices hopelessly lost. Enough cars to feel like a real rally, but not so many that the checkpoint workers had to wait around wondering if or when the last car would ever show up. Good camaraderie at the dinner at the end, quick scoring, all in all a good size for this kind of rally. Though I do hope for more at May's rally.

Will and I were joking before the rally, when the fourth car had shown up but we didn't know about cars 5 and 6 yet, that at this rate of exponential progression we'd have a couple of dozen cars by year's end. Now we could get there with an arithmetic progression.

Results are up, points are updated, trophies are given out (though receiving one you bought yourself isn't quite the same). I have to collect one more address to send the results out to. But it's pretty much time to move on to next month's rally.
totient: (Default)
The date of the Topsfield Strawberry Festival has finally been announced: June 14, from 10 to 3. I had thought I might be able to avoid it by moving Essex a week later than last year, but I'm once again conflicting. I found some good new roads in Topsfield which I'd planned to use towards the beginning of the rally, which runs from noon to 6. I guess I'll just have to move those roads to the late afternoon instead.

I had sort of been thinking of doing that anyway, to solve some unrelated scheduling issues with the break locations, so this isn't all bad. Just another example of it not paying to do too much work on the rally too far ahead of time.

catalogs

Mar. 31st, 2003 01:37 am
totient: (Default)
I maintain a catalog of unpaved through roads in Essex County, MA. There aren't very many of them, and for a while I thought I had them all. Starting with a thorough list compiled from 1970s USGS maps, I've made a bunch of trips to verify roads, typically resulting in about a 10% return. The rest have been paved, gated, built on, plowed under, or allowed to deteriorate to hiking trails.

But I hadn't counted an another variable in the lifespan of an unpaved road, which is that although new roads are all paved, sometimes a disused paved road can deteriorate to the point where resurfacing it with gravel is more economical than repaving it. There aren't a lot of those kinds of roads, because it's generally even more economical to just shut the road entirely. But there are a few, and they account for nearly half the mileage of unpaved roads in my catalog.

Every time I go out scouting new roads for a rally there is a chance that I'll find a road like this. This weekend I found two, with a total length of almost two miles. And I can use them both on Essex. Wahoo!

divisional!

Mar. 8th, 2003 12:47 am
totient: (Default)
Essex Ramble is going to be a Divisional this year!

Every year the New England Region of the SCCA picks two rallies to be part of the Northeast Division series. There are a lot of rallies to choose from, and usually a rally is a divisional for two years in a row, so we only get one new one per year. I expected this might eventually happen and have been running Essex so that it would conform to the additional requirements of a divisional rally, just in case. But usually it takes years, and this will be just the third Essex Ramble.

Last year, Fred (the guy who makes these decisions) went over the Essex route to make sure everything was OK. The route instructions for Essex are more than averagely complicated, and in one particular bit he commented "boy, I'm glad I'm not competing in this rally". Oof. So I've been making an effort to make things a little simpler, without making them too easy for the advanced crews.

Fred and I went over the route for the rally I'm doing in two weeks tonight. It's the first of the less fussy style rallies I've run, but I think I've managed to make it less fussy without making it boring. Apparently Fred thinks so too, since it was after the precheck that he suggested making Essex a divisional.

Go me!

In other news, the roads for the March Madness rally still, how shall I put it, make for some spirited driving. Full of snowy, icy goodness. Come on out and see!

Profile

totient: (Default)
phi

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  123 45
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 25th, 2025 11:07 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios