Thank for the insight. I was pretty sure there was a reason he was so
crotchety;-) I hope everyone on team.net enjoys these exchanges of both
silly points of view entwined with good information that was too hard to get
before the web exploded as much as I do. (Boy, was that a long
sentence.)BTW-I have some freeware that maintains a database of autox
results, figures out pax, class results, computes end of year points, etc.
Steve (Please vote for me as Crotchetyest Man of the Season) Ashcraft
PS. I finally moved into the 90's with a 94 Miata about 4 months ago.
----- Original Message -----
From: Mari L Clements <mrndr2@juno.com>
To: <autox@autox.team.net>
Sent: Monday, September 27, 1999 9:30 PM
Subject: computers and timers
> Whew, I'm glad that the OTHER team.net subscriber in this house has
> gotten his share of controversy. There are a couple of things you should
> know about Eric Clements, just to put his comments in perspective.
>
> Until a year ago, we had a 386SX at home. I bought it when our oldest
> child was born, and Eric thought that if Matthew was still doing fine,
> there was no reason that a 12 MHz processor and 42 MB hard drive weren't
> doing fine as well.
>
> Then one of my best friend's (who happens to make a living being a
> computer geek) took pity on us and gave us a 486DX 66 last year. Eric
> thought it was wonderful. So...
>
> I nefariously bought him a racing game complete with pedals and steering
> wheel, knowing full well that it wouldn't run on our computer. THEN he
> decides to buy a Pentium 200 (which he got just recently and which wasn't
> in fact a Pentium 200, but a Pentium 166, and I keep telling him that he
> should say something about it, BUT it runs his computer game, so he's
> happy).
>
> In all fairness, he's also heard me complaining about the computers in my
> research lab which run tons of graphics software and have had major
> memory and hard drive problems.
>
> One more final comment: we've been to several autocrosses (in different
> regions) this year where computer based systems did fail, and could not
> be repaired in time for the event to continue under automatic timing. (I
> fully agree with Mark Andy that those were very likely human errors, not
> computer errors, but since I've never seen a region that didn't have
> people in the timing truck with the computers and there are only so many
> computer gurus to go around, it seems as if keeping things simple and
> having a back up plan is important.) In one of those events in
> particular, some truly spectacular times were recorded. Part of this may
> have been because timing and scoring was handled like this: the timing
> truck was pretty close to the start but WAY far away from the finish.
> One guy sitting in the timing truck with two stopwatches in his hand did
> all the timing. Two cars were on course at all times. I was posting the
> times, and had some pretty angry folks to deal with.
>
> mlc
> married to one of the world's only crotchety old 30 year olds...
> (remember the MR2 is the newest vehicle he's ever owned)
> '91 MR2 NA
>
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