My Greek Olympics: Six months to go...

DAOA:

I was going out to the DAOA center, which was the Olympic committee's organizational headquarters. It was out on the green metro line to Kifisia and almost to Halandri. We would get off at Neo Ionia and walk the half mile to the place. It was a pain to go out there, but I would have to meet with people and the committee had offices there. It had guards and gates, but like most of Greece, no one really cared who went in, just flash a badge and walk in. I would go and hangout at our office and talk to whom ever was around. Coast Guard Stavroula would be there sometimes and the Army and Police guys, maybe a fire person.

They had a large cafeteria that everyone ate at and we would go over for coffee once in a while. It was always crowded and people out front smoking constantly. Ron had an office there and I would stop and see him, some other SAIC shitheads would be there and I was always running into some fool who just arrived.

DAOA also was where the Intel people were and they had a special floor for their use.  It was a "secret" command center and it was restricted so getting in was actually hard. We had a server room and computers to deal with. I had to install software and maintain the server. This is where one of the computers was hacked or should I say allowed to be infiltrated by our government friends. We knew the CIA want to have access, but one day we found out that the system had an entry from an outside system. It appeared someone downloaded the entire database. The server’s hard drive was copied basically and all the data on it was taken. But since the Greeks never used the system, it only had the basic data set. I hardly ever went to this command center and I was glade, it was not part of my responsibility.

Collateral Damage:

As IET prep continued, I had to deal with Fene interference once again. We listed in the contract that CATS provides a means of assessing collateral damage from explosives. It wasn't a requirement, but when I wrote the description for CATS I wrote what was in the documentation for explaining the output. So when the shit heads put the contract in DOORS, it spit out a whole bunch of requirements that weren't requirements at all.

How it worked was the program DOORS would read the contract and extract parts that were a requirement, like ‘You will supply 20 computer’ becomes ‘requirement 1.1 – 20 computers. But the software was turning every thing into a requirement, things like the work ‘it’ became a requirement. So this caused requirement statements that could never be met to be added to the list which had to be tested for acceptance. How can you show that the system meets the requirement ‘it’??? One of these statements was collateral damage from the description in one of the sub-systems.

The description was something like this; ‘we will give you a tool to simulated explosions’. It shows damage from the blast and effects on people. The effects show damage over many types of possible damage from the blast. Collateral damage is damage that is not intentional, so if a window breaks that is collateral damage. The software shows the damage but it is not listed as collateral damage. But DOORS said we had to test for this requirement and show that it is met in the system. The committee didn’t seem to care but we had to address the issue.

So I had a talk with the Jesus and Vampire about it and I thought we had worked it out. Then Fene steps in and says that CATS doesn't show any collateral damage at all. This of course spins everyone out of control and we have to spend the next week dealing with this stupid issue. I even had to dig up the NATO terminology to prove my point along with telecoms with people in the defense department.

So I argued that this requirement of collateral damage was part of the output that CATS and provides a display of collateral damage in that it shows areas of potential damage from a blast. Finally after about 10 meetings and one hundred emails, talks with the committee and so on, I was able to have the 'requirement' removed and the issue was put to bed. This was a total waste of time and I think most finally realized Fene was a shit head.

Cameras and Hotels:

For the CDS system to work as planned, we had to have a lot of data on where things had been installed. One component was all the video cameras installed at the hotels. I was to be given the data by Siemens, but they screwed it up and I had to organize a survey of the all the hotels that would be used to host the Olympic families. This entailed sending people with diagrams to the hotels and mark where to cameras where located.

It was a little tricky to have the hotels let us come in and see where everything was mounted. Also the people who did the survey were mostly FIFO and they were stupid as hell. It really wasn't that complicated work, but it turned into a big mess. Half the info was worthless and I resorted to using images or diagrams that I got from DAOA.

IET3 run up:

IET3 was planned for the end of February and much was needed still. This is the time in which Fene made his presence known. Dumb shit came and tried to be a hero (in his mind) and did some really stupid things. He didn't know how to act and what to say, so he went to meetings and did his usual of promising all kinds of stuff and of course couldn't deliver. Also he force SAIC to buy a set of computers because of his stupid comments and cost the company two hundred thousand dollars. I could have laughed, but he was causing me all kinds of problems.



A set of servers and storage disks at the MOC



IET3 was going to fail and nothing was working properly, but the decision to go a head was made and the system would be shown as is. Of course it wasn't going to work and I felt as though it would be another fuck up. It would be the same thing, a demo and scenario run by Greek staff. This was the first time the Greeks would use the system and test how they do. The government was nervous and the people in charge didn’t want to use the system and fail so they kept saying they needed to use their old system and way of doing things. We were training people but no one had ever used the system and no one seemed to really care. The standard operating procedure was to use people, paper, and pencils. Lots of yelling and walking paper back and forth between desks, we were given them computers to take this away and track and store what was going on. In some cases the people we were training never used a computer, so this test would be a challenge.

When we planned the system, we expected to have it up and running six months before the games, but we were six months from the start and there was nothing in place working yet and the people were hardly trained. The IET was to be in February but it was really going to happen in April. That was how messed up the project was and the schedule. The final IET was to be at the end of May but we figured the way things were going the project would not be done till July, the contract ended in June.

Dinner with Tryphon:

In this time period, I was hanging around with Tryphon and Rick a lot. Tryphon invited me out to dinner, so I took the train to Piraeus and waited for Tryphon. He was getting off work and stopped at the train station on his way home. We went to Perama, which is a town to the northwest of Athens and near the ship yards. Not a very nice looking area, but like a working class area in other parts of town. We went to a small place in a small square, the restaurant had no inside seating, only tables outside on the sidewalk.

We got a table and soon a waitress came over, Tryphon started to order, there was no menu, just a note pad with what they had. Tryphon ordered almost half the menu. Soon wine arrives and some small plates and bread. In about five minutes the food starts to arrive, salads and cold items, them the cooked stuff. They had what Tryphon called "illegal" squid, small squid the size of your thumb nail, deep fried, they were the best I ever had, and we ordered more of those.

Then fried spicy shrimp and octopus, fried fish, grilled fish, crab, more salads, dips and on and on. The BBQ octopus tentacle was served with a shot of Raki, which you lit on fire. A Saganaki shrimp, with feta and tomato sauce was good, but the spicy shrimp was the best. They were dusted with flour after soaked is Raki and red pepper, then fried crisp. They were messy, but really good.

The crab was cooked in a green spicy sauce that was a little spicy. It was hard to eat because it was hot and messy, but it was good. The little fried fish were good as always and so was the grilled small fish. I don't know what they were, but they were silver and small. They would bring an octopus tentacle that had been grilled and Tryphon would cut it up and then pour vinegar on it, it was tasty.

This was one of the best dinners I ever had while I was there. I went back a few more time with Rick and David and I could eat there every night. The price was nothing, about 50 Euro for both, if would have been 50 dollars for just one plate here. The location was not that great, but the food more than made up for it.

Out with Silvia, George, Roula and Rick:

One night, I was going to go to a bouzouki with Rick, George, Silvia and Roula. George wanted to go and we decided that we would go to a place in Plaka on the hill. Roula knew a place and we met at the Metropol around 10 pm. We walked up the hill and none of the places were very lively,

George complained about the lack of music so we left. So we walked down to Psiri and found a place to go into, it was very crowded and there weren't many tables. George complained so we went out and found a different place. The music was going and the place was packed. We got a table in the back, but the music was still very loud. George complained about the noise and wined about the table and that the music was amplified. He wanted to go some where else, so we went out again and looked for a different place.

Rick was pissed off and Silvia didn't understand what the problem was. After we walked a bit we found another place. The music wasn't as good and the place was not that great. George still bitched, so we went out and said what you want to do. George said we should go back to Plaka, so we walked back and up the hill. The George says, "I am tired and I am going home". What a shit, he leaves and we decide to just go in one of the places in Plaka. The problem is they are very touristy and not as traditional or fake traditional. We end the night early and I go home, pissed at George for being such a whiner.

I started to go out on my own and walk the area. I didn't have much to do and David, Vic and Jay were out doing their own stuff. I would walk around Lykabettus or walk up Philoppapou hill, across from the Acropolis. I would just go and look out over the city or walk and look at shops. Maybe I would ride out to the port or just hang at the annex. If I could I would call Alex or Stavroula, but they were busy with work or their lives and I just would have no one to talk to. It was boring and I just didn't want to deal with all the shit at work all the time. The project had turned into one big mess and it wasn't ever getting better.

Mobile Command:

In March I had to deal with getting the mobile command posts operating. At first I was just going to install software and test it, but I soon got tied up in the satellite connection for the video and data transfer. I was working with Ron and dickhead on getting the sat set up. We had to install encoders and decoders for the signal, one on the buses and the other at the command centers. They went in OK, but configuring and getting the satellite connection to work was a bitch. We spent about two weeks dealing with all this, then finally we had it working and the video was OK, but the data transfer was way slow. We had to come up with a way to replicate the servers with only a part of the whole data set, this would make it faster, I don't know why I had to deal with it.

The four Fire Mobile Command buses 

Inside a mobile Command bus.

The biggest problem was that the buses were way out of town, near the airport actually. We had to take a taxi on most days and that meant we had to try to explain to the driver where we needed to go. Ron would always just give the name of the bus company, Evo-bus. I would try to tell them to go towards the airport and we would then tell them where to go, a lot of pointing and such, if we had a car I would have driven myself. Once there, it was really had to get a taxi to pick us up, in some cases, one of the Greek guys would give us a ride in far enough to get the Metro. The place was in a town called Koropi and was on the landing path of the airport.

The buses had been designed to be a mobile command post, but the requirements said they needed to house the people, which mean beds, toilet, food and water. This was in addition to the conference room and work areas. They tried to put too much in a small place, but that is what the contract called for and that is what they built. Vic and David came out once to see the system setup since ETeam was being installed. Vic thought they were good buses, but they were designed to do too much.



The Police bus.



The buses were divided into two sections, a front conference room with projector and table and chairs. The chairs were attached to the floor so they wouldn't move and it made it hard to get around the table and to sit. The back was the 4 work stations with two computers. A bathroom and a double bunk area in the way back. The generators were under the bus and they had a mast for lights and a mast for the video camera. With all of us in there it was crowded and I didn't know how it would operate when fully staffed.