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The Honolulu Advertsier reports that after two months and US$50,000 in review expenses, the Honolulu Marathon has posted the 9 December 2007 race results.

Only 1798 Honolulu Marathon runners received accurate times on race day because SAI’s electronic timing system failed. These Advertiser articles from 12 December and 14 December describe the early efforts to identify and resolve the issues, as denial turned to grudging acknowledgment of an unprecedented failure.

A total of 22839 finishers were recorded and confirmed. Organizers used video and image files recorded by third-party vendors, spending an average of four hours to analyze each minute of video.

So when Ryan Lamppa of Running USA, says “They didn’t have to do it, but to their credit, they did,” he’s missing the point. Accurate timing is a key success factor in road races. Every road race that uses electronic timing can report the overall and group winners within a few minutes of their finish. Some participants need their results to qualify for other races, including the Boston Marathon. After running or walking for several hours, most participants want their timing results.

Early in 2007, Honolulu Marathon organizers decided to replace the ChampionChip system that was used for seven years with a paper-based RFID system. Like the Great Aloha Run, the Honolulu Marathon had been renting plastic RFID tags and recording equipment. Dozens of volunteers stoop down and clip the chips from runners shoes after the finish line, so the marathon could get its deposit back.

I’ve been involved in distance running for over 30 years. As far as I know, Hawaii is the only place in the US that uses a comprehensive chip rental system in its races. I’ve got my own ChampionChip, but I’ve never been able to use it in this state because of this rental policy. I stopped running marathons in 2001, but I run shorter, slower races during the year. I’ve obscured the serial number on the top portion of the chip.

Here is a picture of a ChampionChip, courtesy of McBadger. The chip has been opened to reveal a small RFID transmitter. There’s no battery, because the transmitter grabs power when the runner passes over a charged timing mat.

Honolulu Marathon organizers chose SAI’s paper-based RFID system for the 2007 race to save money, time and manpower. Runners could keep their SAI paper tag after the race as a souvenir. No retrieval or rental fees were needed. Additional RFID readers could be deployed on the race course to record split times. A large-scale test of the new timing system before the race would have been a good idea, though.

Ingredients for failure

The Honolulu Marathon failed to test or implement the paper-based system properly, and were unprepared for thousands of finish line questions regarding the results. Some runners found the chip time posted on the bulletin boards in the finish area did not match their own stopwatches. Soon, the bad news spread throughout Kapiolani Park.

1. Poorly trained race volunteers told runners that the RFID tags could be folded or kept on their race number. Turns out the SAI paper tags were so fragile that even one fold may break the tag, and printed instructions were provided on the race number.
2. The tags must be detached from the race number or bib, and placed on the runner’s shoe, so that the RFID sensors on the road can find the tag signal. Many runners left the tags on their number. I wonder if the instructions were printed in English only, and not in Japanese?
3. The electric generators that powered the RFID timing system on the race course flooded and failed in heavy pre-dawn rain. The RFID readers deployed on the race course were not weather-proofed, according to FinalSprint.

Coach Joe English reported last December that other races did not encounter problems with SAI’s paper RFID tags, but the Houston Marathon canceled its 2008 SAI contract when Honolulu’s problems emerged. However, I’ve seen posts on some running web forums that indicate there were SAI-related timing issues in the 2007 Las Vegas and Philadelphia marathons.

Organizers are hoping that Japanese runners, who are a large part of the annual event, will participate in the 2008 race. ChampionChips will be used, and the Honolulu marathon may sue SAI to recover costs. Perhaps all they’ll worry about in the 2008 edition are Race directors usually have other things to worry about headphone bans and baby strollers on the course. But the 2007 Honolulu Marathon will go down in road racing history as a lesson in race mismanagement.

Hawaiian Telcom CEO Mike Ruley was dismissed yesterday. His replacement is Stephen Cooper, co-founder or Kroll Zolfo Cooper, a New York City-based interim management firm. Cooper is best known as the Enron’s CEO during the company’s bankruptcy. Today’s Star-Bulletin article has a brief biography of Cooper. Kevin Nystrom, a senior director at KZC, will join HawTel as COO.

While Cooper stated in today’s Honolulu Advertiser that HawTel is not a “distressed company”, it’s now clear that the Carlyle Group is unhappy with their acquisition’s performance. HawTel has lost thousands of subscribers to mobile carriers and Time Warner Oceanic’s VoIP services, leading to US$137 million in financial losses since 2006. I mentioned some of the operational issues on my old blog on 16 November 2006, and last week BusinessWeek discussed how market forces have affected the US telecom industry overall.

The Advertiser noted that Ruley put his Kahala home on the market in early January, which is a possible indication that changes were coming at HawTel. The company has eliminated over 100 management positions since October 2007.

As the semester moves along, the assignments get longer. I avoid printing the assignments whenever possible. It makes little sense, as I would have to scan each graded hard copy before returning the assignment to my online students.

It’s easy for me to grade an assignment in TurnItIn.com’s GradeMark feature, if the document is under 10 pages in length.

Longer documents take more time to load in my GradeMark editing window, depending upon my bandwidth and TurnItIn.com’s server load.

Fortunately, I have attached an LCD monitor to my office desk, by using an after-market monitor arm that can pivot and rotate the panel. The extra monitor is connected to the video out port on my MacBook Pro.

When I am grading a long paper, I open the GradeMark window in the top monitor.

I open a read-only copy of the paper in Word or Acrobat, depending upon the file format that the student submitted. I display that document on the MacBook Pro’s display.

This lets me read the original document while I’m marking it up in GradeMark.

Unfortunately, GradeMark does not have a bookmark feature. That’s a problem when I’m grading a long document.

Sometimes I need to look at a different section of the document while I’m writing a comment. This section might be a reference list or an appendix. I’ll use the bottom read-only window to display that section, so I don’t lose my place in GradeMark.

If you’ve been following this blog, you probably know that in most of the US and Canada, Daylight Savings Time goes into effect this Sunday, March 11. The Associated Press reports that IT managers and staffers are still working to patch hardware and software.

Meanwhile, according to CRN, computer and technology resellers are lambasting Microsoft for the software company’s sluggish development and release cycles for DST patches. Sun also announced that certain versions of Java may not handle time correctly in the Hawaiian, Pacific and Eastern time zones.

I received an e-mail today from MSN Direct about the DST settings for my watch. Yes, I wear a Microsoft watch. Among other features, the watch will display multiple US time zones, and it will set the correct time automatically. MSN is sending out a patch this weekend to fix the DST issue, using the service’s FM radio system.
Here are my other DST posts in this blog:

• March 5: Microsoft and Daylight Savings time
• February 13: Daylight Savings 2007 - this time it’s a mess
• February 5: Will computers know that daylight savings time starts early this year?

On February 5 and February 13, I wrote about the changes to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the US and Canada, and how these changes required software patches.

Phil Wainewright writes that last week, Microsoft finished releasing its official patches for DST. According to Mary Jo Foley, a noted IT journalist who has followed Microsoft for years, MS just released the DST patches for Microsoft Dynamics. That product is Microsoft’s entry into the customer relationship management (CRM) field, an industry dominated by smaller vendors like Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

Of course, these vendors have patched their web-based on-demand software already, as their programs don’t require a corporate server installation like Microsoft Dynamics does.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes notes that while the DST changes aren’t as bad as Y2K, the conversion will give IT departments headaches for the next few weeks. Managers and technicians are discovering that Microsoft’s patches must be applied in a specific order, or they won’t work correctly.

In the past, Microsoft’s patches have been easier to apply. For most users, Microsoft Update or Windows Update, the built-in patch management systems in Windows, would handle the patching process for Microsoft products.

This time, DST patch management is a colossal mess and Microsoft has dropped the ball. For example, next Monday morning, mainland users who patched their copy of Outlook before their IT staff patched the company’s Exchange server will find their Outlook appointments could be one hour off. It depends on how the user connects to the Exchange server.

While the state of Hawaii does not observe Daylight Savings Time, plenty of companies and employees in the state do business with the mainland. Unpatched versions of Outlook and Exchange may report that conference calls start an hour early or late, for example. Mainland call centers that handle Hawaii-based customers may have similar issues.

Margie Semilof noted that , Shavlik Technology and BigFix customers received their list of approved patches last month, as each company completed their respective tests of the available software patches. Eric Schultze, Shavlik’s chief security architect, said that keeping up with the changing inventory of patches has been a challenge for the firm. Both companies build their own patches for older versions of Windows, including Windows NT 4.0.

Of course, none of these patches address time and clock functions in hardware. Some PDAs and cell phones will need patches, for example. Clocks and watches that synchronize to atomic clocks on the mainland may be one hour off for the four-week period between March 11 and the traditional start of DST, the second Sunday of April or April 8.

In the meantime, some IT administrators will be hoping that the Easter Bunny is carrying software patches in his basket this spring.