Logistics

Logistics. The distance and difficulty of logistics. This would be the Achilles heel of Team Torino. We were challenged everyday of this assignment. Email is how messages, assignments and other vital CTV information was being relayed. The problem for us was our email and internet access was less than satisfactory. At our so called home at the Polytechnical Media Village, there was no internet service. There was at our workspace that was being provided at British Columbia House/ Canada Place. The difficulty there was the rooms were constantly being booked and we were constantally being moved from place to place. Sometimes as we were in the middle of an edit. That would mean we packed up and moved the deck and everything else to another room or desk. As of late we had been sharing a room with a spirited group of techno wizards. Yes they were friendly, but as you can imagine, the hubbub was less than favorable to the editing process. Add to the mix, fatigue and you can see this situation was just not going to work.
Finally after being moved for the umteenth time, I had enough. I pulled the plug. I decied to relocate to my room at Stalag 13 Polytechical Media Village.
Editing would be without interuption and I wouldn't have to move gear everytime someone felt like moving us.
What is cost us was our link to email, the life blood of the CTV Machine. ( well "life blood", might be just a bit of an overstatement, No on second thought, I'll stand by "life blood") This would mean for the rest of the games, CTV Vancouver, CTV National, CTV Resources information for us would only be accessable to us once a day.
The "BC House" was about 3 Km from the village. It took about 15 minutes to drive there in traffic. The feed area at the Crack house was about 2.5 Km from the Media Village, but 3.5 Km from the BC House. It was sort of a triangle on a map. Traffic was especially bad after 4 in the afternoon and particularly bad on Friday nights.
Here it was Friday, the 17th and we had just finished a marithon edit. It was 30 min before our feed window was to open, and I said "we're takin' everything, we're not coming back to edit at BC House"
We loaded everything into Alby's Fiat and set a course to the Crack House.
Traffic was very bad. it was after 9 and the window was going to open at 9:30. This would be tight.
We made it just as the window opened. A credit to Alby our driver. We fed the material and relocated the editing equipment to my room. It turns out that was a smart decission.
But it was at the cost of being dialed into the network. Communications from here on in were via cell phone, which didn't seem to work in certain parts of my room.

When we would get to check our email, would take a while to get caught up and respond. Often we were in such a hurry, I would not get a chance to log in.
Feed times especially Down Link coordination relied on email. It would cause some problems over the next week. Nothing we couldn't handle.