2012 Olympics: Things that are bugging the crap out of me

First: NBC needs to wake up and smell the 21st century. Either embrace the new technology and roll your coverage accordingly or at the very least… don’t spoil your own tape delay news. I hope by the time Brazil rolls around the rights holder will be a bit more with the technology. If you want some amusement then tune into #NBCfail twitter streams for a running skewering of their mangling of the games.

Second: The exclusion of a third or more participants from a given country in the gymnastic all round individual events is absurd. Jordyn Wieber and several other competitors are being excluded from a competition not because they failed to qualify in the top 24, but because they are on teams that had more than 2 competitors qualify in the top 24 scores. In the case of Wieber it is most noticeable because on her ‘off day’ during the qualifiers she ‘only’ had the 4th highest score in the competition. So in the competition ostensibly about crowning the best all round female gymnast, the 4th overall qualifier at the games (and others who had one of the top 24 scores) will not be in the field due to this asinine two competitors per country limit. This is a tragic example of the IOC loosing sight of the true spirit of athletic competition. As a former Athlete I for one will stand up and say I would never want a slot I hadn’t earned and I don’t know that I played with anyone who would. At its heart the Olympics represent a fairly simple concept… at least I thought they did. That concept is to get the best athletes from all over the world together to compete to find out who is the best. Its a shame that in one of the most iconic events of one of the most iconic international sports, the best of the best will not be who takes the floor.

Third: The announcers covering the Phelps story and the Wieber story I think need a serious reality check. Phelps ‘stumbles’ in a competition to finish 4th and its not… hey the guys had a long and amazing career but the reality is he just isn’t going to dominate the way he used to. Its super man just lost his cape and oh the tragedy and he has no competitive fire any more. But I have to admit I can understand the tones of those stories far far FAR more than I can the one regarding Wieber being excluded from the all round competition in gymnastics. Listening to the commentators the past couple of days you would think she completely fell apart during qualifying and deserved to be excluded from the all round competition, not that she had the 4th highest score of ALL the competitors in the world that made it to the olympics.

Lastly and just for fun… Kobe’s comments about this ‘Dream Team’ vs the original just has to bring a smile to your face. Man if only you could arrange for those two teams to meet (or any similar kind of generational matchup like that) wouldn’t it be awesome? My take? The original team beats the snot out of them, and I think 10/10 times. Not because they are superior individually… but because they understood how to play as a team and perhaps more importantly ALL of them were consistent focused players ALL of the time for the vast majority of their careers. For them there was never any question about how they would play at the Olympics. Much has been made of the fact this current group is actually taking it seriously… The fact that it was a realistic possibility they wouldn’t is why they would be crushed by that original group.

Google Nexus Tablet and Android Jelly Bean

So the last few years have seen me go almost entirely Mac. It started innocently enough when I got one of the 1st generation unibody MacBook Pros where I naively believed I was just going to screw with OS X long enough to get a feel for it before loading up a boot camp windows install to get some actual work done. Needless to say that didn’t happen. One of these days I think I am going to sit down and write out exactly what it is about the Mac OS that has captured me so.

However the recent announcement from google about a $200 tablet they are selling direct to the public along with their latest Android system sparked my attention enough to plunk some money down for a pre-order. I have a couple of things I think I will use it for… namely a potential GPS/Music system for my car since there just is not a decent mounting solution for an iPad due to its size. But honestly I got it because I had the money available at the time to satisfy my curiosity… and this is the first android device that has made me curious enough to plunk some money down. Why is that?

Conceptually I like Android far more than I like iOS. However it has been seriously hampered in the market place by carriers that insist on skinning the interface and then refusing to push out updates as google improves the OS. Additionally google had a fundamental problem with the display just not being terribly responsive compared to iOS devices which is extremely frustrating on a touch based device. So the fact Google is directly selling the device means it will get updates when they are released… and one of the major accomplishments of Jelly Bean is to make the display/interface as smooth as ‘butter’. This along with a lot of the interesting things they are doing with maps (offline google maps AT LAST) and searching (google now) intrigues me enough that I want to check this device out.

Stay tuned for one of my long winded hands on thoughts articles once this new piece of Mountain View goodness lands on my doorstep.