Referee Travel Map
I modified the referee locator tool to be something more visual and (hopefully, eventually) useful. Now, it will visually display average price data for a location. Here is how it works:

You load up the page. It detects the closest airport to your location and executes a search to find the cheapest Destination airports. These are the average round-trip ticket prices (measured by purchase date 2-4 weeks from flight date) to get from your airport to the marker on the map. I picked this as the default, because I feel its easier to grasp this way. Click on the Radio Button, changing it from “Origin” to “Destination”, it’ll show you the reverse — how much it costs round trip, on average, to get from the marker airport to your airport.

You can enter in almost anything (city name, airport code, etc) into the search box in order to obtain new results. It will automatically find the closest (and/or cheapest, if multiple airports are present) airport and use it. The price range slider will hide/show results based on the slider’s positioning. The Departure/Arrival dates are used to modify the dates for which the price data is obtained.

If there are questions, feel free to add a comment here or contact us via other means.

Fencing WebStream
It is what it seems to be. A big aggregator for news, blog posts, videos, photos, tweets, podcasts, etc.. Hopefully it would be a good way for someone to discover new fencing media. More content is being added daily.

Note: This page is going to be constantly changed and revised.

Atlanta Map

So, lets begin with an overview of the city. Below is a Google map of the place, with many things marked. If you click here, you’ll be able to see the full-sized map as well as the map key. The pins are color coordinated, so be sure to take a look at the full-sized map for more info. There are a lot of things not marked on the map, but I wanted to point out more interesting locations and Atlanta-specific things.


View 2010 Summer Nationals in a larger map

Hotel Information

As you can see on the map, some of the THS hotels are close to the venue, and some are not. Below is time sensitive information

Last Updated 19 April 2010

The THS website shows that all of the close-by hotels are booked through their blocks. There are less than 20 rooms left for the hotels that require driving/taxi.

A kayak.com search shows that the closest hotel is a Hilton Garden Inn, about $250/night and 0.2 miles from the venue. There are a few $135/night hotels in the 0.5 mile range from the venue, and a few more in the $90-125 range that are 0.5 to 1 mile from the venue. Availability and price will likely vary based on the day, so to determine things with more accuracy, it would be best to initiate your own search.

First, as some people probably know already, I’ve been spending some time trying to help the FOC push out an online referee exam and learning system.  I ceded priority to this project, as it actually has big, positive implications for changing the refereeing system and processes.

Next, I’ve decided to put the journal on the backburner for now. Its a good idea whose time will come, but the best functionality that I have planned for it won’t happen until askFred gets certain functionality implemented, and that is an unknown.  So until that ball gets rolling, I’m pausing production.

In its place, I’m going to begin working soon on a referee-based utility.  It seems to me that there are a lot of problems finding and arranging referees, and I’m looking to help solve them.  I’m looking to build something to help hook refs with tournament organizers.  This includes smart estimation of travel costs, from tanks of gas to analyzing flight data to help optimize costs when searching for good referees.

In addition, on the side, I’m going to look into developing an open source, modular scoring machine.  The intent is to start with the bare-bones scoring box.  Being open source, you’d be able to buy all the parts and download the software on your own to build something for cheaper if you’re tech savvy enough, but if you aren’t, the goal is to try and price it below $100 for retail.  Software would be updatable with a USB cable and a computer, and the intent would be to develop other modules that you can hook into the base box to upgrade into a better product.

Thoughts?  Input?

Just wanted to keep people up to date with the process.  Expect more frequent blog posts about what I’m trying to do now that I have some free time to work on things.

I’m (slowly) building an online fencing journal applicaiton.  The point of it would to compliment and perhaps eventually replace the standard paper-based fencing journal.   The intent is to build something that will work as an analytic/statistics tool, as well as a lookup tool.

With respect to statistics and analytics, I feel that the biggest shortcoming with your standard journal is that you have to sit down and analyze the notes yourself to produce meaningful results.  Its fairly easy to do mental justifications about trends and therefore discard or twist the results of the analysis.  Instead, if you can plug in the raw facts into an application and have it spit out graphs, data and objective conclusions, it becomes easier to objectively critique your own fencing.

With respect to lookup, I don’t intend on building a big, universal fencer database.  That would be excessive, offputting, and a little intrusive, I believe.  The intent would be for someone to be able to search their own notes, information, and experiences against a specific fencer via a mobile application.  Just an easy way to access all of your past notes, do a search on a fencer you’re about to fence, and see the culmination of how they’ve fenced you in the past.  It would give you better insight into what you’ve done wrong, or what they’ve done right with respect to fencing you in the past.

Anyone have any thoughts/suggestions/etc.?

It works like this: it displays a random question. You pick and submit your answer, and it adds your answer in to the answer pool. Then, on the next page, the previous question is re-displayed with a count next to each answer showing how many people have picked that answer as the correct answer.

The test works like this because there is no official (public?) answer key to the referee test. So, there’s no “right” answer publicly available. The collaborative nature of the test is to try and point people in the right direction, as well as show which answers are most confusing.

The test itself is currently not designed to track which questions have been taken already. I’m definitely willing to take questions/comments/etc. and will improve the test based on input I receive. I think the top two requests so far are “right answers”, which may or may not be possible/reliable, and tracking for questions to ensure all are taken with minimal repeats.

So, in the spirit of that, I’m throwing up a simple, hopefully useful, Fencing Shoes product blog (click here to visit).

The purpose is short and sweet - I’m going to try and throw up a post about every popular shoe used for fencing, what people think about them, and where to buy them. The mini-blog in the upper right-hand corner is for special deals. For example, Adidas occasionally has 20% off sales, Amazon does shoe sales, and the individual vendors all have special deals that they throw around. I’m going to try and keep on top of those things and post them in that section. I don’t anticipate any deals to overlap, but if you subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog, you’ll see everything, overlap or not.

Enjoy

So, I’m kind of up in the air about what to mold the site into.  I have a plan, but I feel like I could make it happen no matter what, regardless of what else I do.  Anyone have any thoughts?