Big Foot Orienteers

The NSW middle distance champs visited an area rarely orienteered on by non-Novacastrians, the minefields of Bluegum Regional Park and adjacent mining rehabillitation area.

The addition of new symbols like "subsidence crack" along with Denis Lyons usual detailed mapping provided a mental challenge.

Big Foot defended their top-grade title for the fifth successive year with a convincing win over one of Garingal's many teams.

A win in Division D was the second succesive win for this team and now captain Miles Ellis worries that it has been too much too soon for this group, as he wrestles with salary cap pressures.

After being briefed that there was an optional swim leg and some controls near the rehab centre we were off into the intricate builiding detail and open spaces of Callan Park.

The Feet faired quite well scoring wins in Division A and Division D over GO Annas and GO Geckos repsectively, thanks to consistency from the teams, although Division B suffered quite a bad loss to GO Frill Necks, with speed being the ultimate factor on the open ground in what turned out to be a long sprint.

A new web-site ohowdoi.com has been created for asking and answering questions about orienteering technology.

As every facet of organising an orienteering event now involves some use of technology, from mapping to results, many event organisers are stumped by a problem that has already been solved by someone else. The intention of the new site is to provide somewhere to go for those solutions.

Results co-ordinator for the 2012 Australian Champs, El Yonno "Jonathan" McComb says

The two Big Foot orienteering maps in Lane Cove, Burns Bay and Butchers Block have long been joined topologically. Now the opportunity to rename the "Burns Bay" map to "Murdering Bay" to make a gory pair has presented itself as local historian Bill McLaughlin revealed that the bay used to have that name.

Overall the Feet had a good day out taking out match wins in all three Divisions against the Westies. Division 1 was most consistant with some great individual performances, the standout being Patrick's time of a tick over 28 mins.

The rest of the Feet found it pretty tough going with most having stories of an error or two.

Amanda took out the 10 points in Division 2 utilizing techniques the Swedes learn in high school to relocate.

In Division 4 Cath had a great run and looks like moving up a Division for next Metroleague.

Results are online here including some splits data from the SI controls.

Thanks to everyone who came along to enjoy a beautiful day in the bush. I hope a few of you saw the big mob of emus near the cleared pine plantation - plenty of youngsters were in the mob, so maybe we'll be seeing a few more about.

Congratulations to the winners, Twisted Greg Barbour, the Bitte Andrew Power and the tasty Peter Newton.

The IOF's IT group announced its new data interchange standard yesterday, a week after Big Foot ran an event utilising the standard for all data interchange. Not that we were particularly fast - the credit goes to orienteering software authors who have been using the draft standard for some time.

The standard specifies the format that data should be shared between pieces of orienteering software (entry system, SportIdent system, results publication). If all the pieces conform to the same system, the orienteering admin should be easier. How did this work in practice ?

The DuO used Eventor for entries, startlist publication and (some) results publication and MeOS for SportIdent processing. Both systems use the new data standard and MeOS can talk directly to Eventor. (Eventor developer Mats Troeng did most of the heavy lifting on the new standard). Utilising that comes down to a whole load of click on this:

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