The Games are done! What!

We have been putting in long hours to try to complete our work before the Athletes arrive. With all this work, it has been difficult, many days, to get up out of bed. It was during our lowest point on Tuesday afternoon when Maurizio (our VTCM-venue telecom manager) announced that the Games were over! (What! I have been working so hard I didn't even see anybody compete!) I can't tell you how happy that made me feel! Never one to let anybody feel good for too long, Maurizio then dropped a stack of drawings (artwork, as my best buddy Jeff calls it) onto our table. (In defense of Jeff, our drawings are coloured with blue for IP phones and computer, green for Games computers, pink for analog phones, faxes etc. and yellow for HDTVs) Let the Paralympics begin! For those of you that watched "Cool Runnings," I clearly saw this scene played out. "Sanka, ye dead?" "Ya mon!"

I haven't had a chance to go skiing since the first attempt with the head cam on January 2/10. It's just as well though since we have had another 10 days straight of rain. The sun might have poked through for about two hours in all that time. Time to look up the "artwork" for an ark again! I borrowed a USB adapter for an SD card so that Christine can see there are easy runs on this mountain. One of these days I might be able to go to London Drugs to get that adapter. I know, back east we would go to Future Shop or Best Buy etc. In BC however, one does all their electronics shopping at London Drugs and all their drug shopping near the airport hotels in Richmond. :)

We have had another two weeks of rain and although "they" have tried to grade our access roads into the venue, both remain full of potholes. There are a choice of two roads into our venue for now. We have nicknamed them the road to "Beirut" and the road to "Kandahar" because they both seem to be bombed out. You either drink your coffees before you get to the venue or you wear them. With all that rain, many of the potholes join together, so I think the salmon are considering a new spawning ground. Although we have four wheel drive in our "Christmas Jeep," we still seem to bottom out in some of these deeper holes. Our Kabota "Gators" never make it out to those roads, but if they did we might get wet from the waves that bounce off the "shores" of the potholes.

In scouring our venue to route our cabling we were able to find some secret locations that only a few people would have had the chance to see. We were able to get some pictures from the top one of the apartment condo units. I also included a picture of a helicopter that was performing training maneuvers but I don't want anybody thinking that we were in trouble for climbing on the roof. I didn't see any red spots on Jeff and he said he didn't see any red spots on me! (Just a reference to laser targeting. Try to keep up people!) We were merely looking for a route for our cabling to go from one unit to another. I think the armed forces were in the same mood we were in after days and days of rain and cloud and they were merely buzzing our venue.

The good news is that it's now Saturday evening and we have also completed the cabling for the Paralympics. Hopefully, from here on in, there will be fewer hours involved although we still have some Panasonic HDTVs and Nortel 1130 phones to install.