Pumpkin Patch

Sunday we had our annual visit to the pumpkin patch with our friends, the Urbans. We met Lysa and Mark on the day our children were born; Natasha was born one day after Brodie. Our tradition of going to the pumpkin patch with them dates back to 1999 when we propped our infants up against hay bales and pumpkins at their first Halloween.

Brodie, Nik and Natasha had a great time lifting pumpkins, driving the wheel- barrows, running in the hay bale maze, and watching the Rotary Club flinging pumpkins 250 feet through the air to a splattery death with their Trebuchet, a type of catulpult.

After, we went back to the Urbans' newly-built home and were honored to be the first dinner guests at Casa Urbana, their beautiful Spanish style hillside house with spectacular views of the ocean and the sunset.

Sea Cadet Promotion

Brodie had a fun weekend at Sea Cadets. On Saturday his unit trained at the Gun Club on base at Point Mugu and participated in some skeet shooting. Each cadet shot at 5 targets with a 28 gauge shot gun; Brodie hit 2 of 5, shattering one and chipping one.

On Sunday Brodie was promoted to LC2 and now gets to wear 2 stripes on his sleeve. He spent part of the weekend learning to command the lower-ranking cadets and training them in the basics of drilling and marching.

Slip 'n' Slide Sunday

It's Sunday, 10/10/10, and 85 degrees in Ventura. Good day to bring out the Slip 'n' Slide.

Mud Run

Brodie's Sea Cadet unit participated yesterday in the Salvation Army Dirt Dash, a 5-K run to raise money for Salvation Army children's camps. The run took place at their camp in the Malibu hills and combined cross-country running with an obstacle course. The last part of the course was a deep mud pit guarded by men with fire hoses. The only safe way through was to combat crawl; Those who stood were washed over with the hose.

After Brodie's race they had a kid's fun run for Nik, thankfully much shorter than 5 kilometers. The kids were then able to hose down and change into clean clothes for the rest of the day. There was a high ropes course to test the Cadets' courage, and a swimming pool for cooling off in the 90 degree heat.

Birthday Hike

On my birthday today my good friend Kevin called me up and invited me to go on a morning hike up to Two Trees, a local landmark here in Ventura. We had to hike past 2 "no trespassing" signs, climb under barbed wire and climb over a fence to get there, but it has the best view in Ventura. The half-mile hike has almost a 1,000 foot elevation gain, pretty much straight up hill.

Afterwards he treated me to a coffee downtown. A wonderful day already, and it's not even noon yet.

99 Luft balloons

Like the singing of the National Anthem before a sporting event, every day of taping began with Helge, our technical director, playing the 1980s song by German pop-rocker Nena. We all stand with our hands over our hearts for the intro to the song and then dance it out for a few brief moments before starting recording for the day. Notice the fist-bump between Dennis, our director, and Helge at the end.

That's a Wrap!

We just finished taping our final show for Zain Africa Challenge 2010.

There's still some maintanance work to be done to shut this all down, and I don't leave here until Thursday evening, but we got 15 shows in the can. Another great season, I hope.

Almost done!

It's 5 in the afternoon here in Kampala and we just finished taping our 4th show of the day, our 12th of 15. Tomorrow we tape the 2 semi-final matches and the final game and crown a new champion. I know you're all curious about which teams made it to the final 4, but I can't tell you until I've collected on the bets I will be placing on this competition in Vegas.

Yesterday, during taping we noticed that some of the questions were displayed oddly on television. We take great pains to make sure that everything looks perfect. Two years ago I built a small database to which we export the question material on screens I designed to display the text in the same font, the same size and in the same size box as on TV. After I re-import the formatted questions I will display them for TV with one more small modification. I do a complicated calculation to determine how many lines of text will display. This takes into account the font that I am using, its size and the length of the text. Then I use that information to add space to the top of the text so that it hangs centered vertically within the box on my screen. This has worked perfectly for the last 2 years, without a glitch.

This year we had a glitch. Maybe it's because we changed the font in which we display the questions to a font that doesn't properly report it's height and width to Windows. Maybe it's a glitch on the over-powered computer I use to run the show. Maybe the Ugandan spirits are haunting me. No, I think it's the font thing.

After spending 3 hours pouring through my code last night and found a place where if I made a small change it would fix those questions that were being improperly displayed, but then it messed up others that had displayed properly before my code change. After banging my head against this for several hours I finally came to the realization that an elegant solution might not be possible, so I designed an inelegant one. I created a form to display the data after my being vertically centered so that I could find those questions with display problems and fix them by editing the text to include a hard carriage-return at the end of each line.

In this business you get noticed for results, not style. I'm not happy with my kludgy fix, but it will save our director and producer a lot of work in the editing bay.

I'll be finished working tomorrow afternoon, but not on my way home yet. We will finish taping at around 4 PM on Tuesday, but my flight home doesn't leave until 6 PM on Thursday, so I'll have almost 2 fun-filled days hanging out here at the fabulous Imperial Royale Hotel, Kampala. There's not much to see within walking distance and I've been here enough times that I don't need to buy any more souvenirs, so I'll just hang around the hotel and watch TV. I hope there's a cricket match on . . .

Status Report

It's midday, Friday here in Kampala. We start taping shows tomorrow. This morning the control room has been very busy as we have been blocking camera shots, adjusting audio and lighting. Now we're taping the show intro, with our theme music and the host's entrance and introduction of teams. This pre-recorded intro will be used at the start of each of our 15 shows.

After lunch we will rehearse again a few times, and then we'll record a rehearsal game this afternoon. Also today we are conducting playoff games in 4 rooms simultaneously to pare the 32 teams that qualified to come here down to the 16 who will get to be on TV. They're using my software to conduct these games, too, so I'm also on-call to provide technical support all day long. So far I've run back and forth between the control room and the rooms where they're playing games about half a dozen times, but now the scorekeepers in all of the rooms seem to have found their rhythm.

I'm hoping that we're pretty well set up already. Once again, the main thing I'm waiting for is the questions for the games we will tape tomorrow. The question editors tell me that they're nearly done with the questions for the 4 games tomorrow, but I told them I need the 4 games for the next day, too.

Business as usual here at the Zain Africa Challenge.

When it rains, it pours

I was very nervous about my travel schedule this year, not because I would be flying on Ethiopian Airlines (well, not ONLY because of that,) but because I would be arriving only 3 1/2 days before we started taping the first show. In years past I have arrived 6 to 8 days before taping and it has always been a challenge to get all my stuff ready on time. I don't remember having much free time to sit around and goof off. I was worried that 3 1/2 days wouldn't be enough time, and with my travel delays I only have 2 1/2 days.

That being said, things have gone very smoothly so far. Yesterday on arriving at 4:30 in the afternoon I had only 3 1/2 hours to be ready for the practice run-throughs of the show with John Sibi-Okumu, the host of our show. The gods smiled on me and everything fell into place and I was ready with 15 minutes to spare.

But just when you think everything is going smoothly, the unexpected happens. 15 minutes ago I was sitting at my station in the control room working when I heard the pleasant sound of frying bacon. Bacon? No that's not the sound of frying bacon, it's the sound of falling water, and a lot of it! 20 feet away from me a torrent of water was pouring from the drop ceiling from 2 or 3 different places. Lucky for us it was falling onto the stacks of equipment cases stored at that end of the room and not the hundreds of thousands of dollars of computers and television recording equipment only a few meters away.

Pray for the best and plan for the worst. That's our motto.

My Italian Vacation

When we had last left off I was in hour 10 of my stranding in Rome, Italy.

After 7 hours waiting on the plane and then another 5 hours waiting in the airport we got word that they would be taking us to a hotel. We were led outside to a bus and taken to the lovely "Satellite Palace Hotel", not to be confused with the Palace Hotel where the Economy class passengers were taken. We Business class passengers were taken to a different hotel where we were able to check-in without any trouble and take a shower after 33 hours of travel. I had taken the precaution of packing a change of underwear, a fresh shirt and my pajamas in my carry-on bag, but I had to take a short walk in the heavy Rome rain to a supermarket to buy deodorant, a hair brush and a disposable razor. (Note to self: Add these items to my packing list for future travel.)

After having a light meal at the hotel's restaurant I went back up to my room and lay down for an hour or so. I went down to the lobby to see if there was any word yet from the airlines and was told that the mechanics had the new part and the plan was to fly out at around 10:30 that night. At this point it was about 6pm and we'd been at the hotel for about 2 hours. I asked the front desk where we were in Rome and he told me we were about a half hour's subway ride from the city center, but with the rain and the uncertainty about our plans I didn't want to risk a trip that far away. Instead, at his suggestion I walked about a half mile to the ocean shore. The rain had passed and although it was brisk in my light sweater it was a refreshing walk. I got back to the hotel at 7pm to find that a bus would be picking us up at 8:30pm to take us back to the airport to fly out at 10:30pm.

We got to the airport before 9pm but we had no idea where to go. Ours was not a scheduled flight, so it did not show on the departures board and no one at the airport knew anything about it. There was no one from Ethiopian Air to direct us, so we wandered around the ticketing area for around 30 minutes before we were finally given a gate for our flight.

At 10:45pm the crew arrived at the airport and went out to the aircraft. 45 minutes later, without any announcements they started a cattle-call boarding process. We had been given a plastic transfer pass when we got off the plane earlier that morning. Now each person had to surrender their pass and show their passport so that they could check the names, one-by-one against a printout of the passenger manifest. What a disaster.

On reaching the plane we took out seats and readied to finally continue our journey, but the pilot announced that after restarting the engines cold he would need to run them for 15 minutes before we could depart. That time having expired he finally called for the tractor to push us back from our parking place on the runway. We finally started our takeoff roll at 1:00am, almost 24 hours after we had landed.

We reached Addis Ababa some 5 1/2 hours later, most all of which I slept through courtesy of chemical science. Of course our flight to Entebbe was delayed an hour and a half, but finally, at 2:30pm local time we landed in Uganda. An uneventful 1 hour ride to our hotel finally ended my trip from hell at 4:30pm on Wednesday, some 58 hours after I had left my house in Ventura on Sunday evening. Monday and Tuesday disappeared into the neverness of the travelsphere as if they had never existed for me.

Bon Giorno, Roma

Nope. Not in Uganda yet.

The flight from Los Angeles to Washington, DC was VERY bumpy for the last half hour before landing as we flew through the same storm that landed a tornado up the street from us 4 days ago. Scariest flight I can remember!

After being delayed about 45 minutes, our Ethiopian airlines flight took off from Dulles. I had taken an Ambien sleeping pill as soon as I got on board and I was asleep before the plane even left the gate. Good thing, too. After take-off the plane had to fly yet again through that same storm and the turbulence was more than twice as bad as the flight into Dulles. Not that I knew about it, though, as I was sleeping soundly in a drug-induced coma. Apparently passengers were screaming and phoning loved ones to say final good-byes, but I slept through it all. Scariest flight I won't remember.

On landing in Rome, Italy for a 1 hour refueling stop the pilot announced that there was a bad pump on one of the engines and it would only take a short time to repair. 4 hours later they served us breakfast while the mechanics continued to work on the problem. Finally, after 7 hours on the tarmac they brought buses and told us to take all our carry-on bags and deplane. After 2 hours in the terminal waiting to hear what would happen they gave us meal vouchers for pizza. Now it's 12 noon here in Rome, 10 1/2 hours after landing and still no word. Our crew in Uganda says there's no faster way for us to get there, even if we have to stay over night here in Rome and take tomorrow's flights. Sigh.

It would be a relief if they would just tell us that were re-scheduled for tomorrow, as then we could go into Rome and see the city. I'll post more when I can.