the tindog coffeehouse

TVGuide.com seems to be the only rational voice regarding the recent scoring controversy in the women’s gymnastics competition.

On the uneven bars Chinese gymnast He Kexin tied with American gymnast Nastia Liukin, but the Chinese gymnast got the gold medal thanks to an obscure tie-breaking rule. The NBC announcers were naturally outraged.

But TVGuide’s Olympics blog puts it in perspective (emphasis mine):

A great night of performances in a variety of sports was tarnished Monday by some unattractive whining from the NBC gymnastics crew. The controversial tie-breaker in the women’s uneven bars certainly didn’t seem to make sense, but you have to wonder how much howling we would have heard if an American had come out top. China’s He Kexin and Nastia Liukin of the U.S. had identical scores, but a seemingly arbitrary formula gave the gold to He. NBC’s team — Al Trautwig, Elfie Schlegel and Tim Daggett — took great issue with this, and Trautwig even went so far as to question whether He felt she deserved the gold. Back in the studio, bellowing Bela Karolyi continued his ranting to Bob Costas, who did his best to remain impartial. I don’t remember anyone questioning Paul Hamm’s all-around victory four years ago, when a scoring error pushed his South Korean opponent back to silver.

The next event, the men’s vault, also involved a tie-breaker, one with a more clear-cut resolution — and no American athlete involved. The NBC team let that one go.

So just to recap: If there’s a scoring controversy that results in an American losing, then that’s wrong. If it results in an American winning or if no American is involved, then that’s OK.

Blender Magazine polled John McCain and Barack Obama to find out each of the candidate’s top 10 favorite songs.

McCain prefers ABBA (2 songs on the list, including “Dancing Queen” at #1) and Merle Haggard, while Obama lists Bruce Springsteen, The Fugees, and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” (a song about Obama himself) among his favorites. Both candidates seemed to agree on Frank Sinatra.

Taking the role of devil’s advocate, it would be easy to take a potshot at McCain here. ABBA? The Platters? Are his political views as old and out of touch as his taste in music?

But then there’s Obama’s list. I don’t know. For some reason, it just doesn’t seem very sincere. U2? Nina Simone? How very hip and cool and trendy. A hundred bucks says that some staffer answered this question for him after doing some market research to see what would appeal most to his base.

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I’ve really enjoyed watching the Olympics this year, especially the swimming events.  Watching Michael Phelps compete and win gold medal after gold medal is exciting, but it’s almost just expected that he’s going to win and that everyone else is competing for silver and bronze.

But the 2nd-biggest story to come out of Olympic swimming has got to be the sheer number of world records that have been shattered. I knew the new fancy Speedo LZR Racer suit that everyone is wearing had a lot to do with it, but mental_floss has some other reasons as well that aren’t obvious to non-athletic viewers like me.

The pool in Beijing, known as the “Water Cube,” is 3 meters deep, instead of the previous depth of 2 meters. This allows swimmers to dive deeper and continue their push off “dolphin kicks” for a longer period of time. Olympic medalist and commentator Rowdy Gaines says, “It’s just deep enough to where the waves dissipate (and) the turbulence dissipates down to the bottom.”

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According the ever-popular (and self-deprecating) blog Stuff White People Like, white people like Facebook:

Social Networking sites have been embraced by white people since their inception. Because these sites use profile pages, white people can more efficiently judge friends and future friends on their taste in film, books, music, and inspirational quotes. Advanced level white people, fearful of being judged on their tastes from last week, will often only list one or two ironic things as their favorites. For example under music they would simply list “P.M. Dawn” or under films they would choose only Armageddon. In both cases these ironic answers serve as protective shields from the harsh gaze of other white people.

(Be right back. Just have to make a few quick edits to my profile. Let’s see, that’s P-dot-M-dot-space…)

So I’m chugging along in my month-long experiment to measure my home Internet usage while simultaneously cursing the very thought of having a usage limit imposed by my ISP, and all of a sudden the question smacks me upside the head: What about cloud computing?

“Cloud computing” is one of those fancy Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?) buzzwords for software that runs from a web server on the Internet instead of your local computer. It extends beyond web-based email or even blogging. Google has a whole suite of web-based applications (Calendar, Google Docs, Picasa, etc.). Adobe has rolled out Acrobat.com as a web-based collaboration tool that integrates with their Acrobat products. They also have Photoshop Express, an online photo storage and editing portal. And Microsoft has their Office Live online application suite. Those are just a few examples.

And then there’s Midori, Microsoft’s experimental web-based platform that could possibly one day replace Windows.

Where do all these things fit in a world of metered Internet access?

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I’m only at the end of the 2nd day of my month-long metered bandwidth experiment, and I’ve already exceeded the 5 GB usage cap being imposed by New York ISP Frontier Communications (not my ISP, thankfully).

What pushed me over the limit? Well, on Friday I remotely connected to my computer for maybe about 30 minutes. I also downloaded audio podcasts using Juice, video podcasts using Miro, and did some general browsing. Today I downloaded some YouTube videos, downloaded a few trial programs, and uploaded the YouTube FLV videos to Media-Convert.com to convert them to a different format.

Combined, those activities over two days amounted to a total of 8 GB of total usage. And keep in mind that’s only activity from my computer, not including Christy’s or the girls’ computers or any other Internet-connected device we may have (such as the Wii).

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