The Empty Seats

August 15, 2004

Ressell Beattie says of the Atlanta Olympics, "They lied to us horribly." He describes the early hype about the need to get tickets early. I don't know about Sydney but I know that the same kinds of deception were in evidence in Los Angeles in 1984.

I wonder if the seats won't be empty in the form of poor television ratings for the NBC record setting poor performance. Part of the problem, at least, seems to be NBC would rather cover those things that are easy to cover. This focus on what's easy treats us to hours of rowing coverage every day. Expanding coverage to more channels hasn't made the coverage any better. Instead the viewer is given more hours a day of the same thing that would be on a single channel. When it comes to events that are more difficult to cover, like equestrian eventing, viewers are limited to a few seconds of nationalistic coverage. Almost as much time was devoted to riders saying "hi mom" as it was to the total time spent actually showing the dressage portion of eventing.

RSS could have saved the day

August 15, 2004

Among the worthless stories on NBC tonight was a note about the failure (again) of the system that is to provide scores and results to the print media pool at the Olympics. We'll skip the question of where the bloggers are for the moment, but a quick look at the official website of the ATHENS 2004 Olympic Games shows RSS could have gone a long way to easing the problems. Wouldn't it be great to have a feed for each of the sports areas that are already on the schedule and result pages.

What should have happened is that there should have been an RSS system in place to offer results feeds to the print press and the world alike. Viewers at home could skip the repetitious hours of watching rowing crews navigate straight down the lane, or bypass the unbelievably bad coverage of the Russian men's gymnastics team (which only showed their mistakes) and could instead get what they are interested in. Oh, yes, we would have missed the description on CNBC about the server being a sink holding the scores and the drain is not big enough to get them out to the print media.

Is it defective?

August 14, 2004

Dave Winer's Thinkpad has developed a fracture. He wonders if it has to do with airport security and the beating it has taken. I've traveled with my laptop quite a bit and not had similar problems. My Thinkpad was terribly built and just felt flimsy but weighed a ton. Dave, I'd take it back for warranty service this shouldn't happen.

Not so impressive

August 13, 2004

Watching the opening ceremonies of the Athens Olympics. NBC's coverage is less than impressive. It seems that in Salt Lake we were treated to a lot more coverage and a lot fewer commercials. It might have been a very impressive presentation but we'll never know as NBC chose to cut away all too frequently. They are also not at all friendly to folks (like us) with a DVR... Many of the blocks are 7 hours in length, making it very difficult to catch the parts viewers are interested in. For example if you want to see a softball game tomorrow morning you're in for taping a 7-hour block. One can hope

Intelligence Officials: Iran Battling U.S. In Iraq

August 13, 2004

Rumor Control has some particularly disturbing news. According to senior intelligence sources Iran has made a strategic decision to confront American forces in Iraq. Iran, having been labeled by the Bush Administration as a part of the Axis of Evil is taking a page from the US playbook and instead of waiting for an inevitable conflict have begun helping the Shi'a forces in Iraq. There is also a suggestion that the US is behind murder charges against one time Pentagon ally Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi is now said to be working for the Iran

Raw numbers

August 12, 2004

In the "if it only meant anything" category comes the news that Bush garnered 15,000 supporters at a rally in Phoenix. Just days ago Kerry managed to get that many people to show up in Las Vegas, a city half the size. Both are states that Electoral Vote Predictor has a marginally favoring Bush. It actually means quite a bit but the election is still too far away.

Kerry's rally was impressive. His daughter Vanessa introduced the next president and he was joined on the stage by a long string of well-known local figures and his family.

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