The opening ceremonies were ok. The fields and countryside in the round stadium reminded me of Settlers of Catan. Then I have to say I was a little disturbed by the fact that all the countryside was razed to make room for factories in the industrial revolution. I liked the Queen parachuting in with James Bond (mimicking one of the best openings from a Bond movie). I liked the 60s rock music and never expected to hear Pink Floyd at such an event. I also liked how the flame was brought to the stadium by motor boat along the Thames and how the olympic torch was assembled. Mr. Bean was kinda cute but it didn't do much for me.
Here are some gorgeous panorama shots. It must have sucked to have been seated behind the giant tree on a hill.
This morning I have both tuners going on the TiVo, one on NBC and one on MSNBC. I saw some of the biking road race and some table tennis and fencing (foil). I'm happy that so far I haven't seen a human interest story, maybe they're saving them for prime time. I'm a little annoyed that they've given us very little information about the sport, particularly fencing. The Guarding has some nice infographics that explains things. They have a lot more olympic graphics including flash-based interactive ones. I wish they had made an iPad app containing these.
The NBC apps seem ok but don't include info about how the sports work or are scored. The fact that London is 5 hours ahead of us means I'm a little nervous about looking at British news sites and apps for fear of spoilers. I find the NBC iPad is a bit slow and the medal count confuses me. Before noon on the first day the front page shows no medals for the US but if you go to the medal page it says China has 51 golds, 21 silvers and 28 bronze while the US has 36 gold, 38 silver and 36 bronze. Is this even possible? There's an official London 2012 Results app and that currently shows 3 of 302 medals awarded, which seems more reasonable. It also lets you set your time zone and preferred country, but a highlighted news article gave me a spoiler for a swimming event final. There's a Reuters London 2012 app which shows a stream of gorgeous pictures and some articles.
I'm also unimpressed with how NBC is showing the results. At the end of the road race they put up this graphic. Would it have killed them to list the athletes' countries? Or some of the out of medal winners? Or the times? Or even to have given it enough space so the medal icons don't have to overlap?
Apparently they're doing different things in different sports. In swimming they did more of what I expected.
And we've had the first athlete banned for doping. "An Albanian weightlifter was banned from the Olympics on Saturday for failing a drug test, the first athlete to be sanctioned for doping during the London Games, according to the International Olympic Committee. The athlete, Hysen Pulaku, tested positive for the substance stanozolol, a steroid, in two different urine samples, according to the IOC report."
2 comments:
I'm just excited that my daughters are actually INTERESTED in watching it. No Disney of Nick all weekend. Nat is addicted to the volleyball.
I'm not tivoing anything but enjoying having 4 or 5 stations to choose from on FIOS. Gave found something interesting all day. You are right, the human interest stories came on during PT specifically during men's gymnastics. But they were good.
I don't get the rules of team handball, but it looks REALLY easy to injure yourself playing it.
As for the apps, at least they work. Not much for content, but they don't crash.
Yeah. I even could have used a little longer on the PT human interest stuff I saw.
Agree on enjoying many FiOS stations. Though I'm mostly switching between NBC and MSNBC (and a little with NBCSN). I have little interest in basketball and soccer so I'm glad they have other channels dedicated to that, but early this morning the other channels were showing this too and the only thing else to watch was on NBC which was women's road cycling.
Now I'm watching women's rowing on the TV and men's badminton and sabre fencing on the iPad using the NBC Live Extra app. It works pretty well though it's hard to see what is actually on the various channels and it's annoying that whenever you change "channels" on the iPad you get a commercial. It's perhaps the most invasive time to show it. I wish there was some limit like two within two minutes so that you can browse to find something interesting.
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