Another downloading Question

[tom kalies]

most of the hotels have wireless internet connections, they charge around $10 for 24 hrs. when I was there in sept I would purchase the service every 3 days.
I'm going out again the first week of Feb. I was going to stay at the Orleans because they had free wireless, but now they charge $12/day..
Hope this helps.

Tom k

[kahunab]

Hi Ted,
Just got back from Las Vegas. I had a very successful trip and wanted to share a couple of things . I found 2 solutions to my problem. It appears that my worries were not necessary. First of all the business center at Bally’s did have a connection for laptops and one could hook up and download races. They are open from 6:00 am to 7:00 pm. The drawback there is that they charge $1 a minute. One can also hook up via cable in the room (service is very unreliable). The charge there is $12 per day. I also found that in my room I could get a wireless signal from Cheetah Wireless Technologies (Supposedly available all along the strip). They have multiple plans but for $20 I could get 4 days of service. That worked the best.

I did discover when I downloaded in the business center the first day a problem or maybe a misunderstanding on my part. I wanted to get out of there without paying for unnecessary minutes so I shut down my computer. But there was no way to turn on the conversion part of the program by itself. So I had to download again and it skipped downloading all the files and then began the conversion. Is there any way to use the list of tracks and do the conversion separately?

Thanks again, Ted

[Ted Craven]

Originally Posted by kahunab

I did discover when I downloaded in the business center the first day a problem or maybe a misunderstanding on my part. I wanted to get out of there without paying for unnecessary minutes so I shut down my computer. But there was no way to turn on the conversion part of the program by itself. So I had to download again and it skipped downloading all the files and then began the conversion. Is there any way to use the list of tracks and do the conversion separately?

Dick,

I need to add some Data Center options to permit you to display cards which have been previously downloaded, not just those which are available to download from the TrackMaster server. That way, you could run the Download Task only, shut down, then run the Convert Task only (e.g. when you're offline). Right now, as you point out, you can't do the latter because you can't display a list of cards to Convert without first connecting to the Internet. You also might want to do this if, say, you are an Unlimited user downloading everything, but only actually working your core tracks, but later wanting to study a card which for some reason you hadn't previously converted.

I'll get on that. Glad you had a fine trip to LV!

Ted

[Buzz]

Ted,

I would like to suggest...

How about doing your magic and have an option that will control the Data Center and the Windows Task scheduler.

The user sets the scheduler for 4am, and at 4am the Data Center goes online and downloads all the preselected PP's, converts them to the Database, ... print reports, turn on the coffee pot etc.?

Or alternatively, for continuity sake you may want to use a freeware Task scheduler (Freebyte Task Scheduler) so everyone has the same software and you need slay all the bugs only once!

Http://www.freebyte.com

Buzz

[Ted Craven]

Buzz,

Good idea!

RDSS has used the Windows Task Scheduler to do just this since the beginning (i.e. run RDSS unattended each day at 4am and download PPs), but with the lapse of the old Download PP module, I did not (yet) update the Scheduler to work with the new Data Center module. I'll see if I can get it working again for the next update.

Making coffee might take a little longer (but with a USB coffee pot, I'm sure we could work on something )

Ted