42 Day 2

Yet another 16 hour billable day. At least today on the way to the hotel we were able to get a bite to eat.

Early in the day we were told Patriot was out of LCD computer monitors and they needed to borrow some. I was very reluctant to do this since I don't want to run out and it is still early in the week. It was decided that the GBB would go out and get some for them. I also suggested that they look in the cases the items were shipped in, and they'd probably have monitors in them.

Met with folks from the international distribution to sort out their needs. It should be fairly simple, but I'm sure that there's something that we're missing. During the day, the crew was laying cable down to the house panels, and ran fiber cables into the house.

We were alerted to a problem with SportVision being so far away- a piece of their data just wouldn't make it to them. We were working on a fiber solution for them, but in the end a different space was found, and everyone was happy. It's not the best space in the world for them, but it's better than running all that cable.

I'm beginning to think that Phoenix is a black hole. Much like Frosty yesterday, the GBB was gone FOREVER today while out shopping. I really think it was 10 hours. He also didn't get everything that we needed, but hopefully he'll finish tomorrow.

We learned that the halftime show will be using our ENG camera in the morning. This was a surprise to us. It's not a big deal, but just a large oh by the way that we weren't expecting. Hopefully they'll be done with it in time so the batteries can recharge and it can be used for our show on Monday morning.

We worked on getting the 4th truck back up and on the router. Normally we have 5 trucks for NASCAR and only 3 for NFL. For this show, we're adding the 4th truck back in. The router connects with Ethernet for control and fiber to move the audio. The Ethernet for the primary controller came up right away. Once I added a comptuer switch in line to get a second feed, the back up controller also was showing on the network. The next hurdle was reference. Everything needs to be referenced to the same thing to prevent timing errors. After about an hour of troubleshooting, I found that someone had unplugged the reference DA. Once that was in, the reference errors went away, but it was still showing no fiber links. After moving some fiber cables around in the rack, everything eventually came up. I'm not sure who moved fibers in the back or why, but the good news is everything is up and working now.

While the above was going on, everyone else was busy working adding VIP's and monitors in Production and Tape Release. Later in the day, more VIP's were added in Tape and in the edit rooms. One of the ones in tape was done as a demo to see how it works, and it looks pretty damn good. It's not as good as the others, but good enough.

We ended up having a meeting about transmission, and of course, right after the meeting there was a smaller, private meeting where everything was changed to the "right way". After that second smaller meeting, we were given another piece of information, and that made the right way wrong.

We ended the day with a trip to Red Robin. We were very grateful to them for seating us at 10:55pm when they close at 11pm. It's always a good day when you cane end with a beer. Sunday's wakeup call, 6:00am.