Having the Olympics in Beijing can get confusing. For example, even though the opening ceremonies aren't being shown in the US until tonight, they have already happened. They started at 08/08/08 08:08:08PM Beijing time (GMT +8) which is 4AM this morning Pacific time (GMT -8.) It also happens to be 08:08:08AM on the east coast of the US. So many crazy 8's.
Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to cover the games. Here are the various ways to catch the action while you're not at the TV:
Click http://www.nbcolympics.com/video to jump right in and experience high-quality, interactive video using Silverlight. This could even be better than being in Beijing! Get amazing, crisp HD video quality on the web that’s always optimized for your connection using Silverlight’s new adaptive streaming capability, watch up to four live streams simultaneously in the same player, and get expert commentary (hot-linked so you can go back right to the exact moment that Michael Phelps touches the wall for gold) all within a rich Silverlight application running within the browser.
Beginning Friday and throughout the Games, the MSN homepage will prominently feature a dynamic Olympics module which will enable people to see results (or hide them if you don’t want any spoilers), get the latest news and see exclusive video coverage. Our partnership with NBC and the world-class editorial team in MSN will make MSN the best portal for up-to-the-minute Olympics coverage.
Get the latest medal counts by sport or by country, or find out about all 10,000 of the athletes competing in the 2008 Summer Games using the Live Search Olympics Instant Answer
Install the new MSN Toolbar that gives you one click access to the medal tally and many other highlights.
Beginning August 9th, Zune Marketplace will kick off a series of daily 2008 Olympic Games videos from NBC Sports, giving viewers special on-the-go access to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. For approximately 99 cents–$1.99 per episode (with post-Games content TBD), footage will include memorable highlights from the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, “best of” compilations, “best match” replays and a post-Games wrap-up feature. Users will be able to download each episode onto their Zune device for viewing whenever and wherever they go. Additionally, XBOX users will be able to purchase and download a daily wrap-up of the day’s events from NBC Sports, with a complete wrap-up at the end of the Games. And as you saw earlier today, from Windows Media Center, head for NBC Olympics On the Go service in the Online Media strip.
The power went out early yesterday morning at work. A rat crawled into the transformer and got a bit of a surprise. You can just see it's tail on the top right side. This rat shut down four buildings and wreaked havoc on our lab runs.
There were plenty of humorous emails that went around about this, but the best one I saw went like this.
"It certainly must have been a rodent of unusual size to cause such a massive outage."
"ROUSs? I don't think they exist."
"[Immediately an ROUS attacks him]"
One nice thing about living in the Seattle area is that we have a high concentration of geeks and that makes us interesting to many different types of service providers. FIOS is well on it's way to world domination (still not at my house unfortunately) but Comcast isn't rolling over. I'm currently running on a 16Mbps down 2Mbps up connection and I must say it's a nice improvement over the old 6/1 service. I particularly notice the upstream difference since I regularly remote desktop into my home machine from work.
Now the news has come out that Comcast will start offering 150Mbps down and 100Mbps up next year! While details are sparse, this must mean the spread of their DOCSIS 3.0 rollout. Luscious. I guess that means I'll need to upgrade all my networking gear to gigabit. I'll need a new cable modem too since my current one is only DOCSIS 2.0. These are small problems though. Imagine how sweet that will be!