GILROY
– Two weeks before this year’s Garlic Festival, volunteer
adviser and IBM research employee Steve Welch decided to try an
experiment.
GILROY – Two weeks before this year’s Garlic Festival, volunteer adviser and IBM research employee Steve Welch decided to try an experiment.
With a couple of digital video cameras and some transmitters, he and the folks at South Valley Internet sent the culinary and pyrotechnic action at the Fest’s famous Gourmet Alley around the world, live.
Via the Internet cameras, anyone around the globe could watch the pyro chefs and the festival crowds from a computer screen by logging onto http://live.gilroygarlicfestival.com.
It’s a new way to promote the festival, Welch said.
“One of the big attractions is, people like to see the flame-ups and the cooking in Gourmet Alley,” Welch said.
All weekend, two cameras hung over the crowds gathered to watch the cooking. One pointed at the chefs, one at the passersby.
The cameras’ signals went via cable to a dish antenna, hooked to a lamppost above the Alley. From there, the signal was bounced to several other antennas before being beamed to the world.
On Friday, the fest’s quietest day, the Web site got about 1,600 hits, according to Welch. Saturday’s and Sunday’s numbers weren’t available as of press time.
The view didn’t end when each day’s activities ended, either. During the day, the camera took and stored a still photograph every 10 seconds. At night, the Web site cycled through those images to show late viewers what happened during the day.
The system didn’t work perfectly, Welch admitted. The motion picture on the computer screen had a tendency to freeze, which he attributed to too many Web hits for the cable’s bandwidth to handle at once. Also, the connection died when Pacific Gas & Electric cut power to a rural area and a generator was required to get it working again.
Despite the bugs, however, it more or less worked, to the particular delight of the chefs themselves.
“A lot of these pyro chefs are calling their friends back east and telling them what times they’re going to be lighting the dish up,” Welch said.
Welch, who lives in Gilroy, has been a festival volunteer since 1989. He worked parking for 11 years and finally made it inside the gates last year.
On Sunday, he got a treat. The pyro chefs let him behind the stoves to perform a flame-up. He made sure to let his friends at a Net company in North Carolina know in advance. He expected them to be glued to their monitors, watching him “light the dish,” live.
