Running as Root

Sadly, the Olympics are once again over, leaving me with Olympic cravings until the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics roll around. In a couple of years I can look back on this post and remember the high and low points of the greatest Olympics to date. I'm sure I've left out a lot from both lists.

Worst Moments

Here's a brief list of what I found to be the worst moments in the Olympics.

• Taiwan – It's complete bullshit that Taiwan had to participate under a different name (Chinese Taipei), couldn't use their own flag and instead competed under the "Taiwanese Olympic Flag", and would not be allowed to play their national anthem in the event of winning a gold medal (which they didn't).
• Brazilian Soccer – In one of the early games against an over-matched opponent, one of the Brazilian soccer players scored a goal. Right after the ball rolled out of the goal another Brazilian player kicked the living shit out of the ball, sending it into the back of the net again. What a dick move.
• Underage Chinese Gymnasts – Screw innocent until proven guilty. Those female Chinese gymnasts are too young to compete. You can make the argument that the rule itself should be removed (I disagree), but until then it is a rule. I think the Chinese government is involved in falsifying documents in order to allow them to compete. I honestly hope the truth comes out and the Chinese are stripped of the team gold as well as the affected individual medals.
• Gymnastics Judging – An Olympics cannot seem to happen without there being several incidents of questionable judging in a gymnastic event. The worst this time was probably the women's vault finals and the women's uneven parallel bar finals. The vault was a blatant overscore for a vault with many faults, not the least of which was the attempted landing. The uneven bars was a low score that led to a poorly understood tie breaker. I'd prefer to see the days where athletes had to share medal positions in the event of a tie.
• Women's Softball at an End – Unless something happens, this is the last Olympics for Women's Softball. Ironically, the dominance of the American women is cited as the reason for dropping the event (as well as an incorrect association with baseball). It's ironic because the U.S. women failed to win the gold medal this time, losing to Japan (a team they beat in the semi-finals). It's not our fault that other countries oppress their women (more than we do). Are we advocating canceling any event in which a country is dominant? Kiss diving good-bye (China won 7 out of the total 8 diving gold medals available and only one Chinese diver failed to earn a medal of any color). But diving is nothing compared to women's table tennis. 35 or the 86 women competing in table tennis in Beijing were born, raised, and trained in China and for all of table tennis the figure is 55 out of 155. They're so dominant that no one else has any hope of winning unless they import a Chinese player. Cancel it!
• Fernando Gonzalez's Lack of Sportsmanship – Although the outcome of the match may not have been changed, James Blake's ball hit Fernando Gonzalez's racket and Gonzalez knew it in my opinion. He's just too much of a gutless pussy to admit it.
• Women's Fencing is Unwatchable – Despite the fact that the U.S. women swept the medals in individual sabre, I can't watch that crap. It looks like a school yard slap fight with tent poles. But, what makes it completely unwatchable is the banshee-like scream the competitors let out at the end of every point.
• Olympic Boxing Needs an Overhaul – Besides the looming controversy about attempted scoring manipulation by one or more countries, the scoring system and its execution are deeply flawed. The scoring in the Paddy Barnes versus Zou Shiming fight was outrageous. Body shots are never scored. The current score is readily available to each corner. This encourages late fight running by the leader who is assured a win if he can just stay out of scoring range. One of the things I have always liked about boxing is that it's one of the few sports in which you don't even know the score. Oh, and the rounds are too short. The rules of amateur boxing cheapen an already declining sport.
• Lisa Leslie Wearing All Her Medals from Past Olympics – Sure, she's very accomplished being the only athlete to win team gold in 4 Olympics, but wearing all your past medals to the current medal ceremony was tacky.
• Olympic Racewalking – The fact that NBC showed Olympic Racewalking not once but twice in late night coverage instead of showing other events with more mass appeal is moronic. Archery didn't appear once in televised coverage. Even though racewalking has been an official event since the 1908 Olympics, the "sport" is ridiculous. It should be dropped from the roster. At the very least, show something better than an hour and twenty minutes of hip wiggling mall walkers.
• Microsoft Ruined Online Coverage of the Olympics – I couldn't/wouldn't view any of the online coverage (which sucked anyway because there was no audio commentary) because, inexplicably, someone cut a deal with Microsoft so that viewing required Silverlight. As much as I appreciate someone trying to cram their, arguably beta, technology down my throat I would have liked a more widely adopted, relatively platform independent, working browser-based video playback option. Is something suddenly wrong with Flash? Way to drastically cut your online viewership numbers. I hope whatever check Microsoft cut for them was a big one.

Best Moments

There were so many great moments. Here are some that really stuck out for me.

• Opening Ceremony – Despite a terrible accident during rehearsals and other inevitable controversies, it was easily the best opening ceremony in history. The whole thing was amazing. The 897 human powered movable type blocks routine was jaw-dropping.
• Women's Soccer U.S. versus Norway – Two early misplays by the U.S. led to two goals for Norway within the first four minutes of the game. They were the only goals scored in the game, but I enjoyed the fact that nothing is certain. The heavily favored U.S. team screwed up and Norway beautifully capitalized on it. Good stuff.
• Michael Phelps – Some people grew tired of it, but I never did. I watched every heat, every race. I thought the men's 4×100 freestyle relay was the most exciting Olympic moment I had ever seen. That is until I saw the men's 100m butterfly a couple of nights later. For me those are the two most amazing races in Olympic history, swimming or otherwise. I wish they would stretch out the swimming competitions to allow swimmers the possibility of competing in even more events. As it stands, the required turnaround time between heats and events makes it next to impossible even though a swimmer may be a competitive threat in numerous events. This picture of Phelps with a mustache is another favorite of mine.
• Mark Spitz – It's related to Phelps, but I think it deserves a separate mention. The interview Spitz gave with Phelps on NBC was very satisfying. Spitz was incredibly gracious and well spoken. It's very refreshing to see someone whose amazing record has fallen be so incredibly respectful of the next guy, especially after hearing so many cry babies claiming they were better in their time. Let someone else sing your praises. Spitz did it right.
• Dara Torres – She's a great story in general (competing at that level at 41 years old is awe inspiring), but I was even more impressed when she worked to delay the start of a qualifying heat so the Swedish swimmer could finish changing out of her ripped suit. Nice sportsmanship. I wish she had won a gold, but she was still amazing to watch.
• Usain Bolt – Dominance in sports is sometimes extremely entertaining. Watching Usain Bolt prematurely celebrate in the 100m dash and still set a world record was awesome. I don't fault him for showboating. He's young (he turned 22 during the games) and is at the top of his sport. At least he got serious in the 200m when he again broke the world record with a head wind. It was also good to see him and Asafa Powell dancing in the finish area after again breaking a world record in the 4x100m relay. It's too bad the Americans are such butterfingers at baton passing (both the women and men were disqualified in the heats for dropped batons), but they honestly didn't stand a chance anyway.
• Volleyball – All of the volleyball was outstanding. Men's and women's beach and indoor were extremely entertaining to watch. Lloyd Ball and Logan Tom emerged as two of my favorite players for the indoor men's and women's teams respectively. It's a terrible shame that the men's indoor team had to labor under such tragedy.
• India vs Spain Men's Table Tennis Singles – The Sharath Kamal Achanta (India) versus Alfredo Carneros (Spain) match happened in round 1 and wasn't for a medal. What made the match interesting is that the two train together and had the misfortune of meeting in the first round. The two were as friendly as possible given the circumstances, giving each other plenty of time, warning one another when their play surface or paddle became damp with sweat, and apologizing profusely for net or edge balls. At the end of the match it was even hard to tell that Achanta had won because he refused to celebrate in front of his training partner whose Olympics had just ended.

Thoughts on the "China Problem"

China's fucked up, there's no doubt about it. No one likes their human rights abuses, the number of people forced from their homes to make the Olympics happen, their record on the environment, their totalitarian government, and a plethora of other problems and issues the country faces. Should we have boycotted the Olympics? I don't think so. Once they were given the Olympics it wouldn't be fair the the athletes to support a boycott. You could make the argument that they shouldn't have been given the Olympics in the first place, but I would still have to disagree. Even though every success economic or otherwise only makes the current government look better I think that cutting off China from the world isn't the answer. They've proven their ability and willingness to remain isolationists for centuries. I like to think engaging them culturally and economically can help open them up and hopefully turn many of their current problems around. If it happens it'll happen slowly. Only time will tell, but I don't think boycotting the Olympics would make the difference.

Looking Ahead to Vancouver

The next big Olympics will be in Vancouver in 2010. I'm hoping there's no talk of a boycott because of Canada's well documented maple syrup abuses. I'm giddy with excitement that those winter games will kickoff on February 12th, 2010. That means it's only a year and a half away rather than a full two years. Plus, since they're in North America, I'm toying with the idea of attending. Unfortunately, that would mean giving up my 24×7 television coverage. Would being there live make up for the loss? I'll have to think about it.

I'm pretty disappointed with the online listing of NBC's television coverage of the Olympics. It's not a particularly useful format. I poked around a little and found some crappy reformat attempts and even thought briefly of reformatting it myself. Before committing to actual work I decided to look at Google Calendar to see if anyone had thrown together a public calendar of the televised events. Lo and behold there a metric crapload of calendars over there. I'd link to them here but you need to have a (free) account to see them. Here's a small example (that won't make any sense after the Olympics are over):

Plus, having it as a calendar on Google will allow me to search it and, if I copy an event to one of my own calendars, even send SMS reminders of events. Woot! It would have been a nice feature if I could copy the whole calendar to make it editable by me instead of having to copy appointment by appointment. With a bulk copy I might have gone through and deleted anything I wasn't interested in ahead of time (that would be none of them–it's the Olympics, chump). It would also have simplified the multi-step process of creating an SMS reminder. Oh well. It's still very useful.

As I mentioned in another post, I'm giving Twitter a retry. I must say I'm enjoying it a lot more now that I'm not trying to treat it like other mediums of communication both in terms of what I follow and in how I use it to communicate. I'm definitely more willing to tweet things that don't warrant a blog post or an email.

A great example of this is when I was able to find out that a former co-worker had left their previous job. While that might be email or blog worthy, most people wouldn't bother putting that kind of information out there, but he tweeted it. As such, I didn't have to wait for that information to make it through the traditional grapevine. For once, I even knew about the news before some of the other people I know.

While I'm using it to keep in more constant contact with friends and former co-workers, some people are using it for a lot more. This post as a few recommendations for using Twitter that I found interesting. I'm not sold on a few of them, such as event updates. I realize that quite a few events are using Twitter to update attendees on things. This just seems like an alternative to email lists and RSS feeds. Does Twitter have better penetration than email or RSS? Is it just that I have more noise in my RSS reader? Won't Twitter suffer from that eventually? I don't know. It just seems like using an alternative form of communication just for the novelty of it.

Another use I've seen is people soliciting feedback or getting votes on an issue via Twitter. I think that's a great use, but I don't think I'll ever have enough followers to do it effectively. There's a big difference between asking your 1-10k followers for feedback and asking 20 people. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I should tweet the question (and get feedback from 1 or 2 people).

The idea of using Twitter to create and track ToDo lists intrigues me, but again, I just can't get my mind around the advantages. While Remember the Milk seems interesting I haven't gotten off my ass long enough to try it. I hear good things though.

Foamee is another one that I like. You can let someone know that you owe them a drink for something. I haven't used it yet. Maybe I'm too stingy with my kudos. Maybe I'm just an asshole. Who could say? Is my reluctance to use these and many, many other services that integrate with Twitter another example of me being too set in my ways to "get it"? Maybe in another few months I'll be writing posts about how I've come around to using them.

I switched jobs recently and although the current company used to do daily stand up status meetings ala Scrum/XP/Agile/Wagilefall, they had stopped at some point. As near as I can tell, they stopped because they couldn't keep the meetings short and on track. I expressed to my manager(s) that I thought it'd be great to start doing them again and lo and behold we had one on Monday.

Of course, the first issue that came up was the notion of the correct time. Inevitably when you try to start a meeting "on time" you get bogged down with the fact that no one thinks they're late because their clock says they're not. In the past I've used web based atomic clocks, but I'm now convinced that anyone planning to start meetings on time has to invest in a digital clock that synchronizes with the official time. I further suspect that anyone thinking that the people they work with are too mature to have this "argument" is probably wrong. We also haven't settled on the "punishment" for being late. I'm a big fan of cash fines though.

Bitstrips now has real RSS feeds. I've made a Feedburner feed for Flat Organization that points to the Bitstrips feed for the comic, if anyone is interested.

At the same time, I've added a feeds page to this blog with nearly all of my available RSS feeds, including a new super feed (made with Yahoo! Pipes) with everything in it to save people the trouble of subscribing to everything individually.

Part of this weekend was spent catching up on the movie queue. All movies but one were a disappointment.

Sweeny Todd

I'm not a big fan of musicals and I'm thinking I may not be much of a Tim Burton fan, at least not any more. I'm finding his quirky visual style tiresome lately. Maybe it's just overexposure. I realize this crapfest is based on a hit Broadway musical, but it blows in spite of (or maybe because of) this. I think the average stretch in the movie without a song is roughly 3 minutes. To make it worse, the songs aren't at all memorable. The story is predictable and the characters uninteresting. Yawn.

Underdog

I never expect much from what I consider to be kid movies and I'm typically not disappointed. Underdog is peppered with jokes that fall flat to the adult crowd. I'm guessing kids find this shit funny, but I really have no idea. Jason Lee voices Underdog and I can't help but hear Earl Hickey. Patrick Warburton reprises his role as Putty, Kronk, or Agent Tee. Take your pick: it's the same voice every time.

Margo at the Wedding

A pointless romp about quirky characters I really couldn't give a shit about. Nicole Kidman and Jack Black in the same movie? Pinch me. At least you get a flash of Jennifer Jason Leigh's boobies. Save yourself the agony of watching the movie and just find them on the internet.

Across the Universe

Is there anything better than hearing second rate actors/singers deliver butchered renditions of your favorite Beatles' songs amidst a plot about the draft, musicians seeking fame, and a love story between two young American Idol rejects? Yay. The movie reminded me just how many Beatles songs I actually like when they're not being twisted into soulless shadows of themselves by failed karaoke singers.

Dan in Real Life

Dan in Real Life was the only good movie of the bunch. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Steve Carell continues to impress me by not being pigeon holed into roles similar to his insanely good character from The Office. There's something really honest feeling about his delivery and mannerisms in this movie. It was quite satisfying and I recommend it highly. He plays an advice columnist that is a widower and father of three daughters. The movie is centered around a yearly family reunion. I won't spoil your enjoyment with any more information than that.

Let's try out what is (hopefully) a better way of embedding Bitstrips' comics:

There I was, minding my own business and eating lunch at my desk. I was talking to the other programmer when we were interrupted by a loud "boom" and some low level screaming / eeking. The CFO was just shredding some stuff in our HR person's office. I'm not sure why, but the shredder is located in her office. Anyway, that boom was apparently the bin flying out of the shredder somewhat explosively. The eeking was the CFO's reaction to the flames shooting out of the top of the shredder (which burnt the hair off of one of his arms).

The office is now filled with the smell of burnt hair and plastic. The plug for the shredder also shot out of the wall during all of this. As nearly as we can piece together, the shredder may have been jammed and the CFO was reaching to turn it off when it exploded. Our best guess is maybe the motor fried and ignited just the right mixture of paper dust and oxygen. The CFO is fine, though somewhat rattled.

Here's some of the aftermath:

I'm upgrading my blog software and changing a few things up. If things stop working, rest assured it's only a temporary problem brought on by my tinkering.

Even though the embedded BitStrips stuff doesn't show up properly in the feed (click through you lazy bastard), here's my latest attempt at humor: