The 8-Way Speed Draw, by request:

1. Plane
2. Box
3. Kite
4. Wedge
5. Wedge
6. Kite
7. Box
8. Plane
9. Box

This morning is my first opportunity to actually see some AE jumps...

Anyone out there remember the video hum problems we had in Perris, Turkey and other places? The symptom is an annoying horizontal banding that creeps across the screen. The cause is a difference in ground voltage on the equipment at the two ends of the video cable. The solution, normally, is to use a device called a "Hum eliminator" or (as we call it) a "Humbucker". Well, we had the same problem here, during setup. The operator of the Braun "DZTV Truck" whipped out a couple of humbuckers, but they didn't work, so his solution was to disconnect the ground in the fishbowl, which is fine as long as you don't have to touch the equipment the video is connected to, which in this case is the scoring processor which sets on the floor by itself. Well, his solution eliminated the hum alright, but all the computer equipment kneebones are connected to those video thighbones, and Ethernet cards do Not Like it when various ends of various Ethernet cables are not on the same ground. So we've gone through three different laptops in the CF judging room, where all manner of networking has been notworking. Sometimes all the equipment has to be powered off completely and rebooted before it will work.

Freestyle Male results are now completed and posted through round 3.

1030
The rain in Spain falls mainly on ... oh, never mind, I'd get shot.

The team pages for Artistic Events are done, but they won't have photos for a while yet.

1200
All the AE team photos are now up except for a few Freefly teams (352, 353, 354). We'll get those up as soon as they're willing to stand in front of our camera for a few seconds. AE results have also been refreshed; Freestyle is one Funkflyz score short of complete through 4 rounds, Skysurf is still at 2 rounds, and Freefly round 3 is being judged. Yes, I know about the incorrect rank numbers in some of the AE results pages, I'm working on that; the rain is causing sorting problems and things are not grounded properly and I missed breakfast and the sun got in my eyes and the homework ate my dog ...

Lots of talk here about judging procedures. In FS, judging was very efficient, and if there was any controversy, I didn't hear of it. Tomorrow morning the FS judges who are still here are going to experiment with judging procedures that allow the judges to communicate in some way, to some degree, to come up with a way to prevent "absolute" busts from slipping through the cracks. I still can't figure out what was wrong with the procedure that was in place several years ago: if a judge sees an absolute bust in the jump but doesn't see it in the collated results after all judges confirm (it's visible in the judge's LCD panel), the judge would simply raise his or her hand and say "Hey! There was a dropped grip in a subgroup on the first Ritz - Icepick!" And the judges would look at it again, and if there was unanimous agreement that it was an absolute bust, it would be changed to that. What was wrong with this, and why they did away with it, I don't know. But it doesn't make sense to me to alter software and write code to complicate something with Yet More Automation that can be done very simply by the human element.

In the AE judging, the talk is about efficiency. After watching a skydive, the AE judges talk, mumble, hem, haw, confirm their scores, grumble, massage, watch the jump again, debate rules interpretations, hem & haw some more, reconfirm their scores, ad nauseam. Okay, fine, I can live with a degree of all that, but here's the part that really throws me for a loop: if there are individual judge scores that are significantly different than the other judges' ("significantly" being totally arbitrary here), the event judge will ask those judge(s) to change their score(s) to be more in line with the others. What is the point of doing this, when the high and low scores in each criteria are thrown out by the collating algorithm when calculating the score? They spend all that time getting Judge X to lower his "out-of-bounds" Difficulty score of 9.8 to 8.6 and Judge Y to raise her "out-of-bounds" score (in the same move) of 3.7 to 4.2, and guess what, they're still the high and low scores for the move and get ignored anyway, so what's the point?! The AE judging procedure already takes too much time, way more than is necessary, and this just slows it down even more.

1259
Rain. Freefly results through round 4 are now posted.

1300
Rain. Lunch.

1430
Rain. We're sitting in here watching 3-D skydives, drinking coffee and criticizing the government. Oh, and organizing the shipment of my new custom John Ray guitar from Granada, since I can't make it down there to pick it up in person (*sniff*).

All judging is caught up ...

1630
Cold. Rain. Weather holds. Videos. Laundry. Errands. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

1645
Signing off.  C/ya tomorrow!

 
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