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Upset Gamesmaker heckles David Cameron about the poor in London before being escorted out of the UDAC building. Cameron retorts that politics should be ‘left out’! So why was Cameron there if it was not to gain political points for his road show?
I certainly trust the heckler will still be a Gamesmaker after today. I would not like to think that free speech suffers at the hands of LOCOG. Certainly the shocked faces of his fellow volunteers do not bode well.
McDonald’s have released their menu for their outlets on the Olympic Park. Four outlets in all apparently.
Well this Gamesmaker will not be eating any of this crap free or not! Carrying their colour red is as near I get to their ‘outlets’.
I know I’ve written on this before, then it is dear to my heart. Martine Wright, who lost both legs in the 7/7 London Bombings has definitely been named for the Paralympics Volley ball team for London2012. That has to be the most wonderful recovery story ever and I’m so pleased for her.
The only sad thing is that LOCOG charged the British taxpayers (via the London Mayor) who invited all victims and families of the 7/7 events to the Games for free. It now turns out LOCOG want the money to do so! Shameful stuff LOCOG. Rethink that one!
Not my words, but it so sums up the plight of our lesser known sporting heroes (or heroines if you prefer). Whatever! Anyway these girls are really dedicated to their Olympic Handball challenge.
Handball? What’s that I hear you ask. Well I knew nothing about it till recently either. Now I’m being based at the Handball Arena (more correctly: The Copper Box) as a Gamesmaker I’ m learning fast and understanding how difficult it is to get the ball rolling (pun intended). This is definitely a should read.
I for one will be cheering them on from the sidelines throughout the day. In any case I like baked beans too!
Well as a Gamesmaker I feel positively jealous! How come Team GB get rubber ducks when all I get is a pink Swatch?
Warned they will leave the ‘Kitting Out’ do with large suitcases and bags full of kit and goodies, the GB team came away with a few extras too. Turns out the duck has a message regarding doping on it. Good thing too. I still want one!
What a backdrop too! All we got was a drafty, chilly, dark and dank old warehouse in deepest West Ham.
Rant over….
It’s a bad start to the day when the news is of LOCOG charging for the ‘free’ tickets for survivors and the families of the victims of the July 7th bombings in 2005. OK so they are not charging the people themselves, but they are charging the taxpayer £221,000 according to the Mail report.
It seems a callous act to HD to even think of getting money back for the free tickets that the London mayor had promised them.
‘The GLA offered tickets to the families of the 52 people killed in the attacks and to 91 others who sustained ‘serious injuries’. This was particularly poignant because the attacks on July 7, 2005, happened the day after the capital won its bid to host the Games…’
As a taxpayer, I am happy to foot this bill. If you have read from the start of HD’s journey you will know that the London bombings were the reason why he is a GAMESMAKER today. If I and 70000 others can do this for nothing (and may I add a lot of additional traveling costs as well) then an organization as big as LOCOG could forget their ticket receipts on this occasion. Shame on LOCOG’s men in suits and their innate greed!!!
So there’s no money but that has not stopped the Women’s Volleyball team being ready to compete at London2012. Not to be outdone by lack of official funds:
‘This year, the whole squad is spending the summer living at the South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue training centre in Sheffield…’
Well HD reckons that might be any woman’s wish come true, then HD cannot be unGamesmaker-like and be sexist about this. Can I?
LOCOG and their lead systems integrator, ATOS will spearhead the final testing of systems across 17 venues this week. This also includes a simulated disaster recovery event to ensure that systems are ready and able to recover within hours from any disaster.
This reminds HD of when I was working in the city of London during the 9/11 events in New York and elsewhere. It’s not something one tends to forget in a hurry when one sees live on the overhead monitor, planes crashing into office towers!
I had arrived late that morning not being an early bird, only to find everyone glued to the screens around the office. At that point no-one knew exactly what had happened in New York. Grabbing the mandatory coffee and sitting down to also watch the events unfold within ten minutes the second plane hit the other tower in front of our eyes. Everyone was mesmerized and it then started to dawn that something major had began to emerge. The next thing I noticed was that some of the data feeds to my Reuters terminal had stopped showing up as usual, but just then I never related the two events, not then anyway.
It was quite a few minutes later that the enormity of the terrorist attacks on New York started to sink in around the office. Within about one hour we had some sort of handle on what was happening, but there was little guidance from senior management. Being responsible for our disaster recovery centre as well as all the market data systems, I just got on with finding out what the effects on user data were and whether we needed to take actions regarding disaster recovery.
Within two hours I was at the recovery centre organising the possibility of gearing them up for action. It turned out that it was not necessary since eventually senior management gave the word for trading to cease and for all staff to leave the premises. I went back to the main office to find a few of my colleagues gathering tapes and all sorts of data up to take home with them. Just in case!
We left the offices at about 4pm, much later than the rest of the staff, and the talk by then was that maybe over 10,000 persons may have perished in the twin towers as they collapsed that afternoon(GMT). It was much later, probably days when I realized I had been sitting in an office on the ground floor of 33 Old Broad Street, adjacent to Tower42(formerly the NatWest Tower) and then still the tallest occupied tower block in the city of London. It would have been the equivalent to the Twin Towers of The World Trade Centre in New York, now just piles of rubble and mountains of dust particles. Had the terrorist chose London as their target Tower42 would have surely been on their radar for attack, but none of that sunk in at the time.
In the aftermath of events I learned that just one system had been affected, a system operated by Thomsons. It had operated out of one of the Twin Towers. Unfortunately its disaster recovery system was in the second tower and obviously it also failed that afternoon!
However, more importantly, we were learning that almost 3000 persons had lost their lives that day and that our experiences were insignificant in comparison to those of New York.
This is why I am reminded while ATOS and the other lead suppliers go through their disaster recovery exercise this week, that no matter how much you train and exercise events can overtake you very rapidly. LOCOG technical people say that if the technology works around all the venues then they and us technology volunteers of course, will just merge into the background of a truely great Games. That’s my wish and my goal in my small way through participation as a Gamesmaker and to make that a fact. I wish ATOS, etc. well this week in their final tests before the Games commence.
HD 22/05/2012
Astonishingly, Jessica Ennis Olympic hopeful jumped only nine hurdles at the Manchester Street games this weekend. Not that she missed one, just that they only put out nine hurdles instead of the mandatory 10! Now if Gamesmakers did that at London2012……and how come the four runners did not know it?
Looking bright for London2012 as Tonia Couch and Sarah Barrow get the gold at the European Championships in Eindhoven, Netherlands. HD knows more about Eindhoven than Synchonised Diving, but always admires a winner! Watch out Tom Daley!