webslave

...until the RFID system is used as proof you didn't do what you were meant to Bear in mind where the burden of proof lies.

Well, yeah, there is. There's a lot of industries with great safety cultures that also manage to pull in delays where it's safe to do so. In a large part a lot of it seems to center around a realistic look at procedures and how long they should take when done correctly, which is followed up by measurement against these benchmarks and investigation when there's a deviation. This is not a bad approach because variance in either direction is undesirable; if you have someone who is repeatedly coming out ahead of benchmarks then that warrants investigation as you may find they are not doing the job correctly, whereas if you have someone constantly under-performing then that's obviously also something you want to try and work on. The key to it is realistic benchmarks on what needs to be done, and how long it should take.

It sounds like you visit often.

Were one or both of these Sea World helicopters?

Perhaps you might not book a trip and travel up between them announcing the date and opening day; but if you were already booked to be up there and were weighing up your options between VRTP and DW (as so many do) I'd suggest the opening of a brand new themed area with multiple rides is likely to tip the scales toward VRTP. I don't think that's too hard to fathom.

Get them on the payroll and maybe they will all of a sudden too.

Meh, if you announce your opening weekend (setting customer expectations) without at least a week or two of ops (where you haven't given them an expectation) then you probably deserve what you get. It's foolhardy, and the park would only have done it if they'd painted themselves into a corner.

Where's your '?' gobos in the video? I must have missed them.

Very familiar with Intellabeams (and Trackspots, too). Hell, they still maintain at least one annual big gig that I know of. I'd have agreed with you, but I refer you to this clip which is what told me otherwise: But yeah, I can understand the mistake. (Skip to 1:45 for close-up)

Interestingly enough, I don't think those were gobos, and don't believe they rotated. I believe they were actually built into the floor of the set and emissive in their own right.

Wouldn't you be pleased if you'd brought Seven in for a puff piece on your new ride only for them to end the item showcasing Dreamworld's new announcement?

A few reasons; You need to allow time for the full extent of (and ongoing impact of) the injury to manifest itself. This can take at least a couple of months. You are likely to engage with the park either via counsel or directly to reach a settlement before having to go to the time and expense of going to court. The park will involve their insurer who will want to investigate, collect evidence and may wish to negotiate a settlement. You need to spend the time finding appropriate counsel, and then providing them with an appropriate summation and brief of evidence.

Completely shameless cash-grab. Ugh.

I can't imagine any of the centers that run stuff like league, etc would go for this. Edit: Jesus, bowling is done: https://brunswickbowling.com/bowling-centers/equipment-parts-supplies/center-environment/pinsetters/stringpin-pinsetter "Brunswick StringPin meets International Bowling Federation (IBF) specifications. This includes specifications related to kickback, kickback plates, pin deck, pins, gutter, and installation. The IBF announced in November 2021 that it has approved string pin technology for sport leagues and competitive tournament play worldwide. After careful study, the IBF concluded that string machines help proprietors address multiple business challenges, including keeping experienced maintenance technicians on staff, high equipment costs, and machine reliability concerns. The IBF also reported that bowling averages on string machines are very close to those bowled on freefall machines and that string machines do not give the bowler any significant scoring advantage."

Jesus, that's pretty dire. They'd only get away with that in tourist traps.

If you're talking about the four lanes inside the Timezone itself (as opposed to the purpose-built alley adjacent) then they are the same Highway 66 systems they had in the same spot (albeit rotated 90 degrees). They have always been pinspot-by-wire: https://www.qubicaamf.com/bowling-products/mini-bowling/highway-66 They are based on smaller balls, smaller pins, etc, and are targeted at young kids.

Don't be too upset; I'm a busy man so you'll still be able to maintain a monopoly on gatekeeping and crying every time someone criticizes VRTP.

Yeah, nah. Not so much. If you're talking domestic units then you expect to find them either; On the wrong input. Not turned on. Calibration miles out. Backlight burn-out. Poor (fine) image quality. What it doesn't change is what you're feeding them, and the vast majority of reports suggest bad sync, frozen image and low framerate; none of which are the issue of the display.

I dare say then that your experience may be right up there with "according to statistics I overheard in a dream last night". "Use Caution" is of no function unless the use of caution is a defined set of actions and/or criteria. How exactly do you think you would "cautiously" dispatch a roller coaster train with regard to wind influence? What additional precautions do you think would or should be taken? When engineering mechanical plant like this we tend not to use ambiguous and nebulous instructions such as "use caution" which put the onus back onto operators, particularly when there's no guidance for said operations on what that means. I think you need to keep in-mind that the ride is specified at empty because it's entirely foreseeable that there may be occasions where you would at the very least be dispatching a train with only one or two (potentially light) guests, not to mention that entirely routine practice of cycling the ride empty.

Generally in these types of setups the anemometer at the top of the lift hill is linked with the ride PLC and as such acts as an interlock which will prevent a dispatch if recorded winds exceed the design spec of the ride (which is based upon an empty train anyway). In fact, in most cases I've seen the PLC starts a one-shot 30-min timer if the wind speed goes above threshold and will prevent dispatch for the duration, with the timer resetting every time a new wind event is recorded. I'd be surprised if Rivals is any different, ergo it wouldn't even be possible for them to send a train if the wind was too strong.

Take Dreamworld and roller-coasters out of it for a second; if the Government today announced that money previously earmarked for a stand-alone Koala research facility had been re-allocated to helping restart Queensland's badly affected tourism industry post-Covid would you still have the low-tide brigade on social media bitching about it because "Koalas are cute"? I'd wager you would.

Pretty open-and-shut, really. Provided the park asked for a variation of the conditions on the money (and were granted it) their hands are clean. After all - if a Koala research center was of such primary importance would a theme park be your first port of call on who to give money to for it? If the Government had said no to the repurposing of money and then DW did it anyway, then fair enough - controversy. If DW hadn't asked in the first place and repurposed the money, then fair enough - controversy. This here ain't much of anything.

One of the things that turned us away from DW on our last visit is we knew we got access to a water park with the VRTP pass, whereas the WWW access was weekends only, and therefore was just going to mean bigger crowds which didn't interest us. We also felt the kids area has gotten a bit light-on, and one of our kids is really in to Paw Patrol.

My first thought was that it was actually quite a flex to find an IP with less relevance to kids today than Looney Tunes, but here we are.

Yeah, that can work, but you have to balance that against human nature. If you incentivize your people based on dispatches, then dispatches become the focus of their employment. You'd hope it wouldn't happen, but the sad reality is you then run the risk that other things can fall by the wayside in pursuit of dispatches; namely safety. The nightmare scenario for management is that an incident occurs that comes down to human error (or shortcuts) and it comes out that management has been paying staff to speed up dispatches. Don't get me wrong; there's ways of being able to do this, but it requires a lot more oversight to make sure you aren't putting the guests or the business at risk.