User:Darin

My wife and I entered our first TRC gimmick rallye in August, 2001. Actually, I drove, a friend navigated, and my wife was a passenger. But since then, we've been a two-person team (she navigates and I drive), and we've been involved somehow with almost every TRC gimmick rallye—if not as rallyists, then as rallyemasters, precheckers, and/or CP workers. I've also taught classroom gimmick rallye schools.

I was TRC's president from 2005–2007. Teresa Stefanisko is taking over starting in 2008.

Favorite Missed Gimmicks

Of the gimmicks that we've missed, here are some of our favorites:

• In Get Smart (August 2008), we were told to use a cipher that mapped shapes to letters. Along the route, we encountered a yellow caution sign that depicted a unique street configuration and recommended a speed of 15. The cipher converted the shape of the street configuration to a letter, and the sign became a valid "Q 15" coursemarker.
• On one leg of The Amazing Rallye III (July 2008), we were told when RIs came into effect and went out of effect. We were also told that the exception to that was RI 1, which came into effect after the start traverse. Thus, RI 1 never went out of effect, and we were able to execute it again later in the rallye.
• In Three Strikes and You're Out (April 2008), we received a CP slip that told us to delete a specific sentence from our GIs. However, the sentence that appeared in our GIs was not quite the same as the one we were told to delete. Thus, we could not delete anything.
• In 24 (February 2008), a U was defined as a turn of about 180°. At one point in the rallye, the digit 1 no longer existed, changing the definition of U to a turn of about 80°. A close second was removing every other letter from the "Lynn Way" street sign. Since the abbreviations for Lane and Way did not exist on the "Ln Wy" sign, Lynn Way was unnamed, and therefore no longer a valid road.
• In Courting Disaster (September 2007), just before we entered the CP, a higher-precedence instruction preempted RI 20. After asking us which RI we were working on, the CP personnel gave us a CP slip that told us to CRI 21. However, the definition of CRI only brought RI 21 into effect; it did not delete or take out of effect RI 20. Later, after executing RI 21, we had an opportunity to execute RI 20.
• In Volcano (July 2002), there was a CP just past an intersection that was covered by a lava flow to a depth of 10 cm. While we could not drive through the intersection to reach the CP, we could park our vehicle and walk to the CP on the sidewalk (which was protected from the shallow lava flow by a curb that was higher than 4 inches).

Other Interests

My wife and I also enjoy riding our ViewPoint tandem bicycle, organic gardening, and playing board and card games like The Settlers of Catan, TransAmerica, Lost Cities, The Big Idea, Quiddler, and Spy Game. I also enjoy geocaching, and am a member of Geocachers of the Bay Area.

In 1998, I accepted an invitation to join the Web Design Group, which was founded to promote the creation of creative, informative, browser-independent, and resolution-independent web sites that are accessible to all users worldwide.

I am a software release engineer for a local dot-com company.