The Mini® was the hottest of the 13 I previously had walked. The track was brutal. 

   I had hoped to "live-stream" yesterday’s Mini®. Even when I blogged at 6 a.m., I was fully confident we would do it.

   I was proud of the notion that we would "live-stream" the Mini®. Three weeks previously, on the advice of the techie who was working with us, I had acquired the specific gear he said would do the job. I had set a goal of Saturday, April 28, to do a run-through. He had not set up the equipment sufficiently to do the job. We re-set meetings during the week, but always there were other things on the calendars and he could not meet with us. On Friday afternoon, at 5, we sat down and I asked him if the equipment worked. He declared, with certainty, "I suppose so."

   We arrived downtown. I met him at the statute of Oliver Morton in front of the Statehouse. He wired me up. He turned on the gear and said I was good to go. I told him to meet Sarah at the finish live of the 5-K. He said his cell phone was in my pocket to facilitate the live-streaming. I told him to watch for her and wave his arms. Part of the plan was for him to monitor the live-streaming on his laptop and tell me if anything was wrong. 

   When I got to the crowd of 35,000 moving toward the start line, I realized I had no audio. We had been in a rush—at 6 a.m. I was at Wal-Mart to buy a back-up card 32-gig for the camera on my hat. Besides, he was hired to do the job of setting up the tech for the Mini®. Several people in the race complimented me on the idea of live-streaming. I thanked them, thinking at least their images were on line. I called Sarah and asked her to meet up with the tech person at the finish line. I thought perhaps he could meet me along the course and hand me a mike.

   Just past mile 4, a guy next to me said, "You camera’s beeping." I thought maybe it was the battery. After all, I had purchased that 32-gig card. That couldn’t be full. Plus I had purchased a back-up USB power-pack. The lights on it were a-glow.

   She cold not get hold of him. She called people and asked them to e-mail him with the message: call Mark. The funny thing was, I ran into him on the course, just past mile 9. He had what looked like a 35-millimeter camera. I asked him what he was doing. He said, "Shooting some B-roll." I held my breath and asked him if I was live-streaming He asked me to bend down so he could look at what I will call a transponder. He said, matter-of-factly, "Nope." I asked if the camera was on. He said, "It’s on, but you’re not filing anything. You must have filled up the memory card." I asked him how that was possible with a 32-gig card. He said he had set it on high-def. "High-def" and the manner in which it eats up memory have been bones of contention since we first began The Show. He switched out the 32-gig card for a four-gig card. I asked him to please give me the 32-gig card; that I would down-load it. I also asked him for the extra camera of ours that he had in his bag. Then he went on about shooting B-footage, I guess, with a 35-mm still camera. And here I’d had this nifty idea of live-streaming the race.    

   I would not have had a problem with someone saying "no thanks" to doing this project. That is fine. That is a person’s right. But for over a month I had been excited about the prospects of live-streaming the Mini®, purchased equipment to do just that, and had a techie—who apparently thought the project was worthy my paying him to do the work, but not worthy of his doing the job for which the pay had been extended–telling me it was possible and he could do it and it would be on.

   We live. We learn. 

   I will put on the website—one that will be re-designed back to what we had several weeks ago—the footage that was shot. I wanted to be the first person to live-stream the Mini®. I think several people got the idea yesterday and will do it next year. I felt sorry for Sarah, my wife, who did the 5-K and, afterward, walked around the IUPUI campus—putting in about four or five miles in the heat while carrying a cooler and a shoulder bag with her laptop—in search of the techie.

   I apologize to those who came to the website expecting to watch the Mini® live-streamed. I did all I could. I should have hired someone who took the matter seriously enough to do the job.