Schenck Forest
January 9, 2000
Ruth Bromer & Joseph Huberman

The other thing we tested was a computer system for use in the Raven Rock "A" meet in April.  We set up a portable with an external battery and inverter as a power source, so the internal battery would just be a backup.  It worked without problem for 5 hours, and I've been continuing to use the battery at home for another two hours and it is still going strong.  I think we will be able to count on one battery per computer, at least for a full day.  If the hardware were the only problem then life would be simple, but unfortunately we have to use software as well.  The software we are testing is OEvent.  It doesn't do things just the way I would like, but it does quite a lot of things.  I'm trying to appreciate what it can do and see how we can make that work for us in April.  It has very good importing and exporting capabilities, so I am hopeful.  The only real problem we had was that in prefaced all our start times with 12: which we had to undo manually.  We don't know why, but we need to work out the bugs before April.  The report at the bottom of this page came directly from the program as an html file.  You can visit the website of the author from the link at the bottom of the report.  One final note, the times us a semicolon as a separator because I chose it rather than the colon so I wouldn't have to capitalize the semicolon whenever I typed a time in.

We were quite worried about the event when the rain started on Saturday evening.  We had already set most of the controls, and pretty much figured that not too many people would show up.  Our rain plans were to use the controls that were already out there for a Score type event.

Ruth Bromer and Jamie Whitney went out at 10 am, just as the sun was peeking out from behind the clouds, and decided to set the rest of the controls and have the event as it was planned.  The clouds didn't let the sun out for very long, but the rain held off until about 2 pm, and didn't get serious until 3 pm, after most people were back.  Jamie, Joseph and Al Geiger worked on starts and results with the computer and got the results posted in record time (6:00 pm that evening).

Jamie and Ruth picked up most of the controls in the steady rain, and we will get the last few when the weather clears on Tuesday.

Results of 1. stage
WHITE
YELLOW
ORANGE
BROWN
GREEN

WHITE 2.1 m/6 c

YELLOW 2.8 m/9 c

ORANGE 3.3 m/9 c

BROWN 3.6 m/8 c

GREEN 4.1 m/10 c