Discussion: Results

Thanks to everyone who came out for the race. It was exciting to see so many people on the starting line and we hope to see you again next year!

Results can be found on the NEOC website.

Hmm. At the finish line, I think I was listed as being in 33rd place, so removing Peter Grollman would move me up to 32nd. But my time was 2:43:59, the time ascribed to Matt Spencer in 34th. I think the times for Samantha and Lux got duplicated and shifted the times down by two places, but there's other mischief going on in the vicinity of Jeff Schapiro.

What did Peter do? Skip a control, Billygoat style?

Yep, there was a mistake in the copy/pasting on my part. I had Excel calculate all the finish times and then I copied them into my list of names, I was forgetting that we had some manually timed individuals, who did not show up in the epunching data sheet. A correct version will be posted soon.

Peter seems to have found a recreational course control instead of the second to last flag. The control was on a nearby cliff, so the mistake is understandable.

More oddities: My time was 3:17:26. I was ahead of Gary Gallagher, but Ken Walker (who appears 2 seconds ahead of me in the results) was nowhere in sight the whole day.

I would not have been present in an epunch log since I punched manually. (sigh)

A couple of pictures:

Boris 1st overall


Andis 1st Male Master

Carl 1st Junior

Henrik

Ernst

# 9

cavadura

That 4th pic looks a bit like Johnny F, but he's not in the results. Who is it?

I'd guess it's Henrik Wiklund, a Swedish runner. John had preregistered but he did not run.

Here are some links to the course maps.
Blue Hills East
Blue Hills West

These versions are a bit different from the ones we ran with. The blue on the posted BHE map makes a difference. It was a little unsettling to come to the big marsh and not find it on the map, and also a bit later to go by a pretty substantial pond and not be able to find it. Now I have a better idea of where I was when I was wandering with your dad halfway to 1. The posted one also is missing all the extra rocky ground that obscured the cliff at 18.

Very fine course, though. The long legs made for many route options. If I were running it again I would use different routes for 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11 and 12.

So the missing blue is, I believe, a kinko's error. The rocky ground and some other updates were made by Jeff, but didn't manage to find their way into the jpeg up there. There were updates on the east map made by Jeff as well that didn't make it to final printing. And all of this goes to show that more attention to detail is needed to get things just right in the end :) Jeff's updates, and the blue layer, make the East map a lot nicer, in my opinion.

Also, Splits are finally up for everyone. splits thanks to Ken and Valerie for their help with this!

JJ is in there twice and so it Jeff Schapiro. The faster of Jeff's two times accounts for the fact that he and 2 others made it to the mass start 5 minutes too late.

From Peter's scan of east it looks like just the marsh symbol was dropped, because the streams and marsh outlines (in blue, oddly enough) are all there. I presume kinkos is just printing from a .eps or a .pdf, so how they could drop one symbol (as opposed to a whole color) would be difficult indeed. Dropping a whole color would be hard too, unless they were out of blue toner. It looks like someone accidentally hid the marsh symbol in ocad before printing to eps/pdf.

Ah, the missing blue explains the lack of north lines as well. I have in the past seen maps that were missing a color (offset printed, where two sheets stuck together on one of the color passes and the bottom one didn't get any ink), and the problem was more obvious than this case, though in this case I was not comparing with a properly printed map. And it isn't all blue that's missing (the title was there, for example). I didn't realize until just now that it was a printing error, though I don't expect much in terms of quality when I'm dealing with Blue Hills East. Trying to blame it on Kinko's, huh?

Ahh yes. The north lines and ponds are also missing, but the blue text, streams, and marsh outlines are all there in blue. Maybe one of the two standard blue colors in OCAD was changed to white?

Here, I believe is the lo down on the map situation.
BH West, as posted, is the version which everyone ran on, including the stoney ground and cliffs I added on Saturday. You can see the stoney ground around the control, there was none on the previous version, but when printed, the black is blown all out of proportion, making stoney ground areas really stand out. I have noticed this problem for several years since we have been printing maps from PDF files. The black is too intense and the brown contours too light.
BH East was a victim of late night manipulating and too many files labeled "BHE". The file used for printing was a very old version which had been generated by a foreign mapper but never field checked. He had outlined areas such as fields and water to be later checked.
I have tried fill all of these, but sometimes I have missed some, but the version which Ross printed had not been gone over to fill in those areas.
The version which no one has seen, I generated Saturday afternoon which had lots of corrected fieldwork in the vicinity of # 3, it also had the reservoir marked as out of bounds, how many of you tried to cross that nice rough open area halfway to #1?. That version never made it to printer.
I think I had everyone start pretty close to the triangle, I was about 50m west of its center, but the marshes which were not shown just to the south of the start must have been maddening, I apologize to all.

Kinko's refused to print my eps files on Saturday night... I was very sad. Especially because I believe the eps files had the corrections properly included. Plus they're great scapegoats.

1. I do not advise printing OCAD -> EPS -> PDF -> output.
2. I likewise do not advise printing Condes (OCAD as "Canvas") -> output.

In my experience OCAD's point/line/area rendering engine is far superior to Acrobat's or to the one in Condes (where "superior" means "produces printed output that is more like what you expect"). Condes sometimes chokes on the finer-structured objects, messes up dash points and the like. Acrobat, in turn, tends to mess up line thicknesses, and the colors seem to go through some kind of processing that the output is not the same color as compared to printing directly from OCAD.

Coach's #9 is not the one I visited - perhaps a watered-down version of the actual? My #9 had proper height table (& chairs & AP terminal for latest updates:-). Internet postings are indeed available for scrutiny for better or worse.

But in some cases, I've gotten much better color results when I output Condes output to .pdf via CutePDF and print that versus printing directly from Condes. How is that possible?

For Kinko's printing, I use the Kinko's File Prep Tool (which may be obsolete and unsupported at this point, though I still have a CD) to make KDF files, and I've never had any problems with the output. One of the steps that it takes you through is an on-screen display of what it's going to print, as a sanity check.

SO, is it best to print directly from OCAD?
If you are at a printshop, would they load OCAD onto their computer (could be done from a USB memory stick) and print from there?
I should ask at Kinkos about the KDF tool program.

At our local FedEx/Kinkos you can bring your laptop and print directly to their printers, which is very convenient if you have a laptop...

From the kinkos website it looks like they can print .ps (.eps) directly. So just print to file (.eps) from OCAD and send them that. Just make sure they aren't converting it to another format before sending it to the printer's rendering engine. Always ask to see a test print. I doubt they would take the trouble (or risk) to install a customer's software, but printing direct from OCAD to hardware is usually the best. I'd say next best is print to .eps from OCAD and send the .eps directly to a good quality postscript printer.

I really did that. I exported directly to .eps and sent it to them. I would have asked for a test print but it was kind of late, what I did ask was for them to make sure it looked right, especially the yellow layer (since I've had trouble with the ski-slope not printing in the past). The overnight shift guy said he could only print pdfs and said that they looked right. clearly the onus is on me to check that they came out properly but the top one looked alright (Blue Hills West) and I was in a hurry :)

The PostScript produced by OCAD is correct, almost by definition. There should not be any loss of quality when this (.eps) file is printed on a PostScript printer, unless caused by the printer itself. But indeed there seems to be a loss/change when the PostScript is further converted into PDF and printed from Acrobat. This loss is most likely not at the PS -> PDF step (one is supposed to be an extension of the other), but I suspect it to be in Acrobat's rendering engine. If Acrobat is bypassed (newest printers render PDF directly), this issue should not occur.