Gone Fishing

I'm sorry about not posting for so long, however I have been very busy. I managed to loose the file for last April in a computer crash. Even if this did not happen, I'm not too sure that I would have posted it. The quality was absolutely horrific.

As it stands, I never recertified as an EMT-B, and never went back to the track to work. I was not asked to come back this year, and I hold no grudge against the track for that. I also took on more responsibility at my full-time job, which included more weekend work which precluded me from working at the track. I have many good memories of working there, all of which will last me a lifetime.

Good times have to end at some point, and this was no exception. I just wish it didn't have to end so soon.

I'm not too sure about how I want to go about covering the material that I need to cover in a short amount of time, but I'm sure that it won't be pretty.

At the moment, I've got my hands full and I'm feeling like I've bit off more than I can chew in a number of different ways. As it stands, I haven't even been able to find, or just as important, make time to review the one recording I made back in April. Things haven't been working out quite right in several different ways, and I'm not big on covering the details. This doesn't mean that I won't cover them at some point, but now is not the right time to discuss the issues.

The items I can cover have very little to do with the track, other than how they affect my ability to work on an irregular basis. The O.T. that I've been dealing with at my 0ther job hasn't gone away, and I'm not seeing that changing anytime soon. In other areas, my EMT-B license expired, which was mainly my fault, but the death of my youngest brother prevented me from making a couple of necessary phone calls to try to get a time extension on my license to get up to speed on my continuing education hours.

With as much as I have going on, I regret having to say that the odds of another podcast coming out this year are just short of zero. I'm at the point of physical and mental exhaustion, and working at the track the last two weeks of this month would not be a wise decision on my behalf. Rather, I may consider putting in one day over those two weeks just for fun, as I truly need the time off from both jobs.

I will do my best to update this pending the outcome of a couple of decisions and discussions that need to take place in the coming days.

More to come

I've had a few good days at the track for the past two weeks, but haven't had much time to write or record anything. I do have some recorded race material that isn't really the best, but I may throw it out there after I listen to the entire file and do whatever editing I need to do.

I will also be writing some new material to cover the past two weekends.

After the past couple weeks of only having five days off out of over thirty, I've decided to take some time off from the track, as there have been some developments at my other job that require my full attention. The earliest that I expect to return to the track for work is July. This could change, but I need the time off.

I should have something up in the next week or so from last week.

Good times at the track

I'm back again with another update from the track. Apparently, this past week has been the week of wreckage at the track. That one Ferrari that I have a picture of in a previous post was totaled yesterday. That sucks, as it was a pretty cool car. I wasn't around to see it happen, but heard about it. It's also been a week of some pretty good incidents that provided some humor, and some good lessons learned.

Today's weather was much better than last Sunday's weather-about 10-15°F warmer, sunny, and almost cloudless the entire day. There was a slight breeze that at times would make the temperature seem to drop by about 5-10°F, but overall it was a wonderful day with temps in the 50's almost the entire time.

With those details out of the way, things went pretty well overall, with some hilarious incidents, and some that could have been much worse and therefore are noteworthy.

Things did get off to a slow start today, but given that it's only the very beginning of April, I'm not surprised, as it was like this last year.

As with last week, I found myself doing some training today, on the same turn as last week. That's not much of an issue, as I needed to get that experience. There were still plenty of trainees, so something's didn't go as smoothly as they could have, but that's expected, as I wasn't the best at it when I started.

They are improving, some faster than others, but the improvement is still there.

There were some run of the mill cars out there in the form of some Audi's, Z3's, Corvette's, etc. There were quite a few Lotus Elise's out there, and for some reason, they were the worst offenders of the blend line early on. It seemed that the Corvette guys were the best about it. Regardless, a disproportionate amount of my calls to control were for this violation. I had a couple, to the tune of five, yellow flag conditions, and a whole bunch of two wheels off drivers left.

Some were just ridiculous off roading excursions. The most memorable was the Velocity Yellow 2006 Z06 Corvette-went off four wheels drivers left, as it looked and sounded like the driver went into the turn way too hot (fast), the car pushed to the outside of the track, the driver tried to correct, but to no avail and went about ten feet off of the course. A gray Lotus Elise outdid the Corvette by quite a bit. The operator of that Elise got very out of shape and went off track after the apex of the turn by about twenty to twenty-five feet. Both cars returned to track under the protection of a yellow flag.

Quite possibly the largest incident of the day came at my corner station came very late in the day, with a Porsche going off drivers left and coming back on track while spinning. Track blockage was at about 50%, but the entire incident was covered under a waving yellow flag, so the other drivers had enough time to respond, and did so. That Porsche in question proceeded to light up his rear tires to reorient his vehicle in the proper direction. No debris was found on the racing surface, and the driver parked himself for the rest of the day for reasons unknown to me.

One entire incident report sheet was filled out, which covered all five reportable incidents faced. I know of no other corner station that has had to complete one of those in their entirety. That's the kind of day it was-about 90% pure boredom, 10% insanity.

I'm not expecting to have the time to record any podcast material while I'm training others. Today is one of those days that I wished I did remember to bring along my Axim to record-a lot of hilarious stuff got lost due to that. Like the end of the last session of the day. When it was requested to follow the last car around by informing control that the vehicle had left a corner station's area of responsibility, control got a whole bunch of people laughing.

Here's what happened:

"First car to acknowledge the checkered flag was the gray Mazda"

'What?"

(Momentary pause)

"The gray Lotus"

(Another pause)

"Are you sure about that?"

There were three people involved in that conversation, and I was not one of them. The "What?" came from somebody else at start/finish, and the "Are you sure about that?" came from one of the people on the crash rig. By that point, that gray Elise, the same one that did that off road excursion, was just clearing my station. I had to hand over the radio to my trainee to call it as clear of my station because I was laughing so hard. To be honest, it was so funny that I was crying. It's just not the same in writing as it would have been in audio form. I'm still kicking myself for not having recorded that.

That made my day, outside of a couple of other jokes that were being cracked at the same general time as that humorous incident. I didn't realize that I could actually have that much fun at work.

The podcast hasn't gone away by any stretch of the imagination, it's only on what I'm hoping will be a very short leave of absence.

First day of my season

A pretty long day at the track is the best way to describe it-sleet and rain, sun, plenty of wind, off-roading excursions, fuel system failures, and some wreckage. All this while I trained several new people while fulfilling my own job responsibilities.

A group had rented the southern portion of the facility, and needless to say, it provided for a very exciting day. Of course, all of the "good stuff"-i.e., all the stuff people like to see in auto racing, managed to happen under my watch, some at different points on the circuit. I'll cut to the chase-people want wreckage, I'll give them a rough description. A Carrera GT managed to get loose and hit a retaining wall and did some damage, but pretty much only to the car itself. What I have to say is that the owner got away lucky with the lack of damage that occurred to the vehicle. There were a few off-roading excursions of the two and four wheel types, usually of the orientated 180° from the intended direction of travel variation. Fortunately, they were only one car incidents with no real damage to the vehicle, only mud/clay and grass stuck to the car.

The toughest part for me was simply trying to complete all of the incident forms, which there were three or four incidents, minus the Carrera GT incident that was covered by the paperwork of another corner station, as they were the crew that witnessed and initially reported the incident. Why was this the toughest part of it all? I had to recall times and the circumstances surrounding the incidents and record them while training a multiple person team of newbies, as well as watching the track to provide an immediate response and guidance to the crew. That was a huge challenge, but I tried to make the most of it.

The weather has alwready been described, minus the cold. The fact that the sun started coming out from behind the clouds, and finally was able to stay that way for a while made the weather more bearable, especially since I had to change jackets due to my Carhartt being drenched by all of the precipitation. Once that rain and sleet stopped, even without the sun, it seemed to be much warmer and more tolerable.

Relatively, I'd say that I actually learned a lot about training and managing people, as well as how to multi-task in a way that was pretty productive for me, but still not terribly efficient, yet.

I didn't use too many of my flags-only green, blue (as well as furled blue), white, the emergency flag, the black flag, the yellow flag, and surface flag. I almost hit for the cycle, with the exception of using the red flag. The red flag is one of the flags that I don't like to pull out of my flag bag, but if I do, it stays furled until needed, as an unfurled flag is pretty cumbersome to store in the ways I have used to store them-a stand to hold the flags, and using the gaps between the armco and the I-beams connect to each other.

Since I'm obviously bouncing around from topic to topic, though all are relavant to the discussion at hand, I must make it clear that I'm only going on about one hour of pretty poor sleep, and the only thing that has brought me this far is my passion for the job, and the need to keep my sleep schedule relatively normal for a second shifter that just pulled a day of work based on the first shift format. I also must say that if it wasn't for the fact that I had other people around, I may not have made it through the day. That really helped me keep my focus on the job, although that lingered as an even larger challenge after roughly 2 p.m.

There were no audio files recorded today, and I'm glad I got to work extra early, as the pre-shift meeting didn't happen the way I thought it would. Don't worry, I'll be working on some pilot episodes this month that most likely will not see the light of day as a podcast, however, if there is enough acceptable material, at least acceptable enough to provide a few good clips for a several minute podcast, I just may release something as a teaser of sorts, just to keep all of you wanting more.

On a final note, I will only have Easter Sunday off from the track, so I should be able to come up with a few more posts trying to recreate how I saw the day as a whole, regardless of how long or short the posts may wind up being-it will depend on how the day plays out, and that variation, the feeling of not knowing what will happen until it does occur, is what I love most about my job.

The beginning of season two at the track

As I type this, I have a few items I'd like to cover here, mostly regarding the new rules I have to abide by at the track.

As it stood last year, there wasn't a "real" dress code. Now there is-and it involves wearing white, including the pants. This is for the safety of the corner workers such as myself-it increases visibility to the drivers and other workers.

In another "unlike last season" situation, I will actually have to do paperwork for anybody that gets out of line, pun intended, so that it gets documented for insurance/liability/holding people responsible for their actions.

Finally, there is a new set of rules regarding what time I have to be at work, and that I'm not happy about on the personal front-I'll be getting at most 2 hours of sleep prior to the start of the day. On the podcast front, I'll be quite happy with how this turns out. This whole business of having to be in an hour prior to the start of the day for a pre-shift meeting. I'll try to find a good way to record this, as the meetings should provide some extra insight as to what takes place behind the scenes at a track.

Be looking for some podcasts, however, they may be delayed in getting released, as I have not yet spent the money on a file hosting service.

The planning continues...Part 2

I was lucky enough to find a company through Aximsite.com that sells the OEM Dell batteries for my Axim. Although they didn't have the 2200 mAh battery in stock, they did have an 1100 mAh battery-the capacity of the battery that came with my Axim-in stock. The website that I ordered this battery from is Lionbattery.com, and they have very reasonable prices on Axim batteries-just a few dollars short of half of what Dell charges for the same batteries. It was too good to pass up, so I dropped the cash. I'm looking forward to getting this battery and seeing how it works out.

I will be going in to see the company doc today, and I expect to have all of my medical restrictions removed, so this might free up some time for the track, but I make no promises.


Brendan

The planning continues...

Lately, I've found myself in a pretty good position this year in regards to making a very concerted effort at publishing a very good podcast. The first one was an experiment, and I'm still debating on what to do and what not to do-time and experience, as well as feedback, will make it much better.

Audioblogger is something that I just got involved with here at Blogger, and may use that if needed. I will be testing it out in a couple of different environments to figure out if my current cell phone makes the grade. Also, I've upgraded my Axim, so now I have roughly one gig of space to record on, thanks to a good deal on a 2GB SD Card. That will allow me to store my music on the SD card (at least the stuff I want to listen to), and record on the CF Card. I'm also contemplating bringing a digital camera along to take a couple pics or some video...the largest problem here is that this is a very dynamic setting.

I know people want action-that's what will draw people to this. However, it's really dependent upon me recording at the right moment in time, which is a very unique issue. Most podcasters can pre-plan their shows, or just let things flow, and add to the show later on. That's not the case here-most of the podcasts out there are dynamic in their own right, in the sense that the podcaster(s) make it that way. I have a very limited input into what drivers do on the track, so they make it dynamic-they control what happens, and I just so happen to be recording it. I know about the subject, but they make it come alive, they make it interesting and entertaining. It's very difficult for me to find the right words to explain it, other than I'm only hoping that I'll be given something interesting to discuss. Sure, I don't have to be at the track to make a podcast, but that takes away some of the authenticity of the show. There are times that I will have to, though.

These next few podcasts ought to be interesting for me, as I need to get some other topics lined up-mainly behind the scenes stuff. I will also just record to record in the hopes that something will happen.

I might consider expanding this blog to include information on emergency response to certain types of wrecks, how it was handled, etc. I will also add some extra information on this topic as well should I find that there is enough interest in such a subject. Looking over my recent stats regarding terms used in a search engine, two of them have been about corner worker safety. I may find myself covering this topic from time to time, but don't expect anything on this topic for a few months.


Brendan

Gearing up for the upcoming season

In the time since I've been gone, issues have solved themselves, thankfully, and things have pretty much gone back to normal. Unfortunately, my prediction of missing time at the track in the Jan. 25th post that I deleted, for personal reasons has come true. This is not due to personal issues, but rather the issue is related to work-I've been informed that next month I will be building a pilot model of an upcoming product launch which will occur in December. I also must deal with an injured back-a pulled muscle. I'm not sure how or if this will impact my ability to work at the track, but I'll know better on the 24th.

The whole month of March just went out the window, and I'm guessing so will the month of April. I may get one day in April, but will try to make May and June better months.

I haven't been paying much attention to the news, except for business and some motorsports, and haven't watched TV in several weeks (probably since the last week of December), outside of the weekends, and even then, I maybe will watch about an hour of TV.

However, I have had time to check out a story about Jimmy Johnson's car being rigged to get a better qualifying run for the Daytona 500. Modifying the rear window to modify air flow to allow for a faster run is pretty pathetic, and shouldn't have occurred.

Outside of my short commentary on Daytona, I have no other auto racing issues that I feel the need to discuss.

Currently, I have learned that one of my co-workers at the track found out about this blog, and I was quite surprised, but he's given me his word that management won't find out about this blog, at least from him. I know that I can take him for his word, so I know the secret is probably safe for the time being, but I will be attempting to get a web address, site, and file hosting so I can have everything centrally located, and easy to obtain. Management apparently still needs more employees, preferably experienced, as my co-worker pointed out with a mention of an ad on a major sanctioning body's website. I'm still not sure if my job is secure, but I will find out when I call to get on the roster for April. Apparently, the money crisis that they said they were going through back in June was a bunch of crap, as they are adding employees. I find that to be absolutely hillarious.

I've got to find some other subjects to write about, as I don't wish that this blog become a very boring blog to visit and view. I think that a mix of articles, links, and podcast posts should do the trick of keeping things interesting and varied. I do have about 10 or so sites that I have bookmarked that I will be viewing and will possibly add some links if I feel that they are up to par.


Brendan

Advanced Flagging Conditions

This is the promised info on advanced flagging conditions-in other words, the conditions that I don't deal with-or deal with on a limited scale-at least for the time being.

While researching this information, I found several incorrect statements in my last flagging post, dated 9/17/05. I have made all of the corrections that I felt that needed to be made. Additions to what was written the will be made in this post.

By definition, these are normal flagging conditions in the SCCA, which is where I found this information-I felt obligated to give them credit, as they do deserve it. However, as I noted before, these types of conditions are out of the ordinary for me, and therefore, advanced. I will place a link to the site that I obtained this information from at the end of the article for those who wish to learn more.

There is one purpose for the white flag outside of what I described in my last post. This would be a standing white flag to inform drivers on the first lap for the first session of the day, so as to inform the drivers where the manned corner stations are. The order to display this flag for the condition described can only be issued by the operating steward-they are in direct contact with race control.

Under certain conditions, a double yellow flag may be used. The condition that would cause the operating steward to order the display of double yellow flags is an incident on track. In this situation, one yellow flag is standing, while the other yellow flag is waving. This can also be used for a full course yellow. This situation would be covered by two standing yellow flags. Where I work, these conditions will be covered by a single yellow flag, whether waving or standing.

There are some technicalities to yellow flags, and I've covered the basic info, as some of it is repetitive and should be common sense.

For a black flag all condition, the order must be given by the operating steward. As the name implies, it directs all vehicles to the track to report to the pits. The condition can be issued for a myriad of reasons.

One last flag that I deal with that isn't mentioned by the SCCA, and for good reason-they don't use it. It is used mainly by motorcycle groups. That flag would be known as the Emergency flag, or e-flag. It is a white flag with a red cross on it. It is used to notify drivers that there is at least one emergency vehicle on track. There is no mistaking what that flag means, and I think that I've only used this flag in conjunction with a yellow flag once, if memory serves me correctly.

That covers all of the flagging conditions that I know of, and if I learn of any more, I will update my posts to reflect this.

The link I said I would put here is a link to Cornerworker.net.

Brendan