In your opinion, is Schaler (surfline's brave SF surf reporter):
1) a long-time, grizzled dawn patroller who drives up and down the peninsula every morning with his entire quiver in the back of his van checking out the waves with his reliable high quality Swiss optic binoculars and putting his reports in to Surfline via his satellite phone before getting in a session after he's made all his reports, making a trek back to the best spot on the day.
2) a cubicle dweller at the Surfline headquarters in SoCal who looks at the buoy/wind data and peers at the webcams every morning before he starts in on his IT chores keeping the surfline webservers happy. These reports are made 500 miles away from the subjects. This particular Schaler is more profitable for Surfline when compared to surf reporting method #1 but the reports aren't nearly as accurate.
3) a college graduate desk dweller in Mumbai, India (100% of college graduates in that country are fluent in English, more than here) who peers at the webcams and analyzes the buoy/wind data once a day during the lateshift at a massive offshore tech help center where he/she literally rubs elbows with his/her colleagues in the crowded work environs. This version of Schaler makes $4/hour and crafts his/her report in a location 8300 miles away from the subject. This offshoring method is far more profitable for Surfline than either #1 or #2 but the reporting is not reliable, mainly because this version of Schaler has never been on a surfboard.
4) an artificial intelligence program written by some geek named Schaler who is qualified to do this because he has seen photos of waves on the Internet. This program, which runs every day at dawn on one of the Surfline servers, inputs the buoy data, the wind data, the digital webcam feed, runs the data through its algorithm and spits out the output which is usually a variation of: "jumbled up peaks with plenty of warble and bump along with the occasional rideable shoulder". This method of surf reporting is by far the most profitable. No salary or benefits for this cat, just a one time programming fee but the reliability of the reports is almost random.
You've all seen the reports. Who is Schaler?
