Michigan

Thursday again. I'm in Ypsilanti Michigan. That's pronounced yip' suh lan ti. It's about 8 miles outside of Ann Arbor - all of which is about a half hour west of Detroit. Michigan is a much nicer place than I had pictured in my mind, but I want to go home and so nothing much is great here.


Luckily while on these jobs, I'm hanging with guys that have worked these places before so they know all the good restaurants and such. We've eaten at downtown Ann Arbor a couple of times. I had Indian food one night and then we ate a local micro brewery another night. Last night we ate at a place that's voted top 10 burger in the U.S. by GQ magazine. It was good indeed. After dinner we walked around the small 'town' that we were in. There's a "Hudson" museum there that has many of the Hudson cars on display including the Hudson Hawk. Pretty cool. None of the guys I'm working with had ever heard of 'three on the tree" (referring to the 3 speed cars with the shifter on the column). None of them had ever seen a car with either that or with 'push button' transmission. Made me feel pretty old.

We walked by a haunted mansion and several of us took photos. Jason's photo had a person looking out the window. It was pretty spookey.href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDZH5sTRnn2Tn82o7_YOYtMyEYaNu8DaZj9KDKtvs4JjmmqSZ9zJRBKukGJYJVSNb4ewZXbMBlCSK7rEKlacxHYUS25Bl29ejwi6VpJc-tyqm-oix7vhXHo9VeqJf0e90-uBAx/s1600-h/DSC00045.JPG">
I get to go home on monday (as long as it doesn't rain sunday). Can't wait - I've been home for one day out of the last month.

Jan got a new job and will have a couple of weeks off with me. Should be fun

One Long and Tiring Week

The military is always on schedule - even when it rains. For the last 2 weeks, we've been either cancelled or delayed due to rain, but the military will do it's flyover on time. Last week we had no flyover on the actual race day - because they flew over exactly on time the day before. This week, they flew over - on time - but 3 hours before the actual National Anthem - because of the rain delay.


I'm now sitting in the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania airport waiting on my plane. It was an incredibly long week in Pocono. Since Nascar Cup racing switched over to TNT broadcasting from Fox for the following 6 weeks we had to make all of our gadgets and services talk to all of theirs. This is no small feat. In fact, in Daytona (during the first race of the year), we allow for 3 weeks for everything to get all worked out. In this case, we allowed only the normal amount of time between races.

As can be imagined, it didn't go smoothly and we all had to put in some long days to make it happen. For the most part, the viewer at home wouldn't notice the difference, but there was much scrambling behind the scenes to make it happen. Hopefully, this coming week's race will be smoother.

The broadcast booth for TNT


For my part, I've been running the 3D application for the last 3 weeks (now called Raceview with TNT). It continues to be a mixed blessing. It's really cool to be on the development team of a new product like this, but the funding for development of hte program has been cut off, so we're working with a 'not quite finished' application that I compare to digging a deep hole with a spoon - you can do it - but there are cetainly easier ways.

During this week's show, I made air 3 or 4 times. I made a segment from last year's race for the pregame show. I didn't see the segment on air, but was told it came out well. During the race delay, the director had me 'fly' around the entire track. This is not an easy thing to do on air. It's not that hard to mess it up, but the director had the idea at the last minute and just 'called' for it, so I did it and it came out well. I also did a replay of a wreck that I'm sure looked a little bad to the viewer. The director called for the replay (which I had built during the commercial) and so I started "rolling' it. He then told the TD (technical director ) to "dissolve" to 3D and the TD didn't. He kept callingfor it and by the time the TD disssolved to 3D, the clip was half over and so I restarted it. The restart showed up on live TV, for which the director really got mad at the TD, but told us (me) we did a good job.

With the rain delay of 3 hours, we had to break down all of our equipment in the dark with headlamps on. This track in Pocono is ancient and hasn't been upgraded to keep up with the modern times. It has NO lights whatsoever and it is located in the middle of the woods. There is nothing but forest around and so when it gets dark - it really gets dark. We all are hoping we didn't leave some thousand dollar piece of equipment laying out in the woods.
We usually work in teams of 2 when heading out into the field. Here is a photo of Clyde 'registering' camera 5. We alternate back and forth between the 2 of us as to who climbs the tower and regges the camera.


This coming week is a race in Michigan. I don't know much about it - except that I get to go home next monday. I can't wait for that!!

4 races in a row and I have only been home for 1 day in the last 3 weeks.

Rain Delay (again!!)

So, we're currently 2 and 1/2 hours into a rain delay. I hope we get the race in - these extra work days get old when you're on the road for 3 weeks in a row. Add to that the fact that we've had a challenging week here at Pocono and worked some very long days and nobody wants this race to be held over til tomorrow.

While I'm waiting, I'm updating the blog with a cool Will Ferrell video that many of you may have seen. It's really cool:

Short update

I can't believe it's friday already. It's been a long and busy week. We worked hard all day on monday and still drove the 3+ hours to Pocono after breaking down the equipment after the race.

We're staying at a resort in the Pocono Mountains in NE Pennsylvania. This race is a changeover race where we're changing from FOX for Nextel Cup races - to Turner Broadcasting for the next 6 weeks. Then we'll change to ESPN. Freaky how it works.

Changing the truck compound over is a real job and we've had a real challenge all week to make it happen. It's friday afternoon and we're still not there - but we're very close.

I'm staying in a "villa" in the resort. It's basically a condo that was built sometime in the early 80's (I guess). It's got 2 bedrooms downstairs with a whirlpool tub and sauna. Upstairs is a living room complete with gas log fireplace and full kitchen. A back deck overlooks the golf course. The drawback is that there's no internet connection except for 'dial-up' and so I don't spend any time in the evenings/mornings updating the blog. I expect to have time in the next couple of days.

From here it will be onto the Michigan race which is about 90 minutes west of Detroit. From there I'll go back home (the first time in 3 weeks).