My second baja.
There are those people around us that have a different life than we do... but if we are lucky we can be part of their world once in a while. I have family and friends that do some pretty cool stuff. They do stuff like work on car races, run trucks off road, they build cool rigs to drive just because they can. Kind of like how I do stuff with computers that makes me happy.
So when I found out that round two of baja was going on I was excited. I had a feeling that I might have a niche in it... not like I get to go to Mexico, more like I can once again fully support all our team members down there with some crazy cool communications.
They had gps trackers this time... something we didn't have in 2007, not sure how we even knew what was going on but we did it nonetheless. I was able to see with some degree of certainty where the race trucks and chase trucks were and be able to send them in a direction that made sense if one were serious about finding a truck to fix and get racing again.
I over planned, I made charts and set up contact lists, bookmarked the 3 or 4 sites I would use to collect data. Had to buy a new router the day before, our network went down for a couple hours and I could take no chances that it went down during the race.
I was a tad worried at one point I realized that last time I was reactive... I would just forward a text message to the rest of the group and that was it. Um.. this time I realized less than 24 hours before it started that I was to be proactive this time. I was to track to the best of my abilities all vehicles involved and get that data to what turned out to be about 18 phones.
So that being said: I had a blast. It was so much fun to be part of a motor sports event that is considered one of the toughest races there is.... and just some regular old folks from the mid-willamette valley along with some from southern California took care of business and with very little sleep did the best they could to accomplish this task.
I am proud to call them friends and family.
~master geek mitchell
