Category: Personal

Farewell from the CO President’s Club. See you in a week.

In the background of the Australian women’s gymnastics team performing on the balance beam a few minutes ago, there was a song that was playing. It’s from a movie that I’ve seen recently, but I can’t, for the life of me, remember what it was called. If I find it, I’ll post it.

Update: Now all I can recall is the theme to Bonanza.

Update: I just heard it tonight as the intro on Bravo to the women’s archery match between Greece and the USA. I still have no idea what the song is called.

I had set a goal for today, to tidy up a few items around the office and leave by 5. I would be home around 5:30, whip up something for dinner, clean, do laundry, finish packing by around 10 and relax to watch the Olympics. That was the goal.

Reality, though, has a funny way of intruding. Those items around the office never got tidy up. Instead, I spent the morning developing time estimates for work on applications I know nothing about. The leaving at 5 instead turned in to 7:30 as I spent the evening working with someone on a project that honestly did need the time investment. As for the last bit, it’s 11:15 PM and I’m still doing laundry while the Olympics drone on in the background.

Damn, reality bites sometimes.

I’ve introduced a few new pieces of functionality to the site this evening. The user account functions are now available, so you can add and edit your account used for posting comments. I have also put together an RSS feed for the site. Every update I post will now generate an updated RSS feed file, which will likewise updated in your RSS aggregator automatically. Use the RSS icon at the bottom left to subscribe.

Update: It’s all working! Great, off to watch some heavily biased Olympic coverage. To be fair, the coverage of the China-Cuba Women’s Volleyball match this morning on Bravo was fantastic. If only the primetime announcers were as good.

My voyeuristic side takes over when watching the medal ceremonies during the Olympics. I’m always fascinated by watching the tears of joy that are so common, and I constantly hunt for signs of the gold medalists singing along to the national anthems. The raw, unedited display of humanity this shows is such a wonderful contrast from the generally scripted and timid responses people usually show.

I’ve been absorbing all the Olympics coverage I’m home for, and it’s time for me to give out my applause and my irritations. First, I must applaud NBC for showing coverage almost around the clock and across a range of events, even if some of the most interesting, such as water polo or dressage, are not receiving any primetime play. What irritates me, however, is the nearly complete lack of context for the games. The coverage, particularly the primetime coverage, shows almost no coverage of non-American athletes. And when there is coverage of non-American athletes, the commentators can’t stop talking about Americans. Last time I checked, there were 201 other countries in the Olympics, and in the medal standings the Chinese had 10 gold medals to the US’s 6. What have the Chinese won in? I couldn’t tell you, NBC isn’t telling us.

I’ve been asked by a few people what happened to the web site. Well, I had been home for about two days from my trip in early June when my hosting provider decided to turn the site off. I’d changed e-mail address a few months earlier, and had never updated the account on file. Meanwhile, I’d been planning both a redesign and to finish moving the site to my new hosting provider where I’d been consolidating all my sites.

Long story short, they had completely removed my site, triggering a battle to have them release my domain name. Once that was done, it was a matter of building the new site and configuring the runtime environment. All that’s (nearly) complete now, so you’re free to enjoy the new look.

Wow, so after an extended hiatus, the new site is nearly back up and running. You may not have seen this message yet, as I still have to work out the Apache-Tomcat integration issues on my server. But, the new site is up and running finally!

If you’re looking for the pictures, they’ll be back as soon as I finish building the new photo album functionality.