June 29, 2016
I've been making notes over the past few months about things that have come up in some of my races that I thought would be good to share so we can all benefit. Let me know if you have any questions or comments on any of these:
What to do when you have no Time of Day
Have you ever forgotten to get a T.O.D. on a Time Machine or 800 box at the start of your race? I have. If it happens, don't panic. What you can do is reset the time on the 800 boxes to the running time of the race, and then just leave the Time of Day section in SimpleClient blank. If you do this, I recommend that you reset the boxes to the current time of day after the race is over. If you don't, when you turn them on at the next race the date is likely to be wrong and that could mess you up if you don't notice it.
Odd start times
At a race last Spring I had a bunch of my start times reading in the 53 minute range, when in reality it only took a minute or so to clear the line. I still don't know where those times came from, but I didn't notice them at the time so of course those individuals had really good net times that messed up the results. So from that point on I always take a close look at my start times. First, sort them all by pressing Ctrl-T. (Times don't download in exact time order, so the Ctrl-T will put them in order.) Then check the top and the bottom of the list for irregularities. If you see any weird times, just delete them.
Dumping Time Machine select times can sometimes mess up your results
I've had this happen to me a few times lately. A Time Machine's base unit or multilanes settings were not set to 4 for a chip race but were on 1 for a manual race instead. When the times were dumped near the end of the race, all the push button times in there dumped into my main TIME event without my knowledge. The race was still going on with people finishing, so those times were given to the next people to finish and suddenly I had a lot more times than finishers, so it was all messed up. Should this ever happen to you, the easiest way to fix it is to just delete all the times from your TIME event and bring them back in again through SimpleClient. Just remember that if you made any manual changes those will have to be redone.
Fix your addsub after the last finisher
I forget to do this all the time. When the race is over, go back into the ADDSUB listing file and bump over the PLUS or MINUS line to deactivate it. Then go into the actual TIME event and do an @add or @sub to make the changes directly there. The reason for doing this is that your net times do not reflect any addsub while the gun times do, so sometimes people will end up with gun times faster than net times, which makes no sense.
Also remember to do the addsub, or at least check it, even on non-certified races. Checking to make sure that the time of your first finisher in the computer at least closely matches what you have on a Time Machine can prevent some big errors from creeping into the results. If the time is only off by a fraction of a second you don't need to do any addsub, but if more than a second or so, it's probably worth doing, even on a non-certified course.
Try to use the shortest possible cables
When wiring your gators try and use the shortest possible cables. The shorter the cable the more reliable the signal. So, for example, if you are putting down a line of five gators, don't just use a full long set and the longest cable in the short set. Use the full short set and the shortest cable in the long set instead.
Be careful when loading finish times by sneakernet
If you need to load your finish times by flash drive because ethernet or GPRS wouldn't work for some reason, be aware that each time you load a new file it overwrites what is already in there. That means that if you have made any manual changes, such as deleting a person, they will reappear.
Rather than delete bogie times...
If a spectator or other bogus time gets into your results, deleting the time and bib might not be the best way to handle it, as they might just pop up again later. Better is to go into their record in the database (did you know you can hit Ctrl-E from within your results when their number is highlighted and you'll jump right to their record?) and put DQ in the DQ field. Assuming you have a DQ field and all your results files are set up to exclude anyone with a DQ greater than blank, this will prevent that person from appearing in any of your results printouts, or the iresults, and you won't have to think about it again.