In Australia, Channel 7 has broadcast rights for the Olympics. And the ads say this year is the first time the Olympics have been recorded in HD. Hooray!

And this is what we see on Channel 7 in HD.

Apart from the obvious fact that the 7 logo is almost totally opaque, they might as well have put the logo in the middle of the screen. I’d probably see more of the actual swimming action that way.

Then you have all the other info on screen, all in the 4:3 space. And this is the HD channel. There is this thing called widescreen - perhaps Channel 7 have heard of it?

I don’t just blame Channel 7. I blame the IOC. They should have mandated that the bid winner for broadcast rights had to put any on screen displays in 16:9 space, not 4:3, for any HD broadcast. And any station identifier should be made transparent, and placed in the outer part of the 16:9 space.

Here’s what we should have got:

Yeah, we wish.

Sure, Channel 7 invested a lot of money in getting the Olympics. It is cheaper for them to use the same graphics on screen for SD and HD broadcasts. In fact, it’s probably just an upscaled SD image on their HD channel. But Channel 7 could have used these Olympics to show the world what is possible with the technology. Start with proper use of widescreen. Move on to imaginative ways to tie into the internet. But nope - we got the basics.

And apparently the first week of the Olympics consists of just swimming.

After downloading a number of application from the App Store, I noticed that my iPhone has grown a mullet.

Here’s my first screen of icons:

Note Mail, Contacts, Phone, Notes, etc. And here is my second.

Mainly games and trivial things that I’ll probably delete by the end of the week.

So, see the mullet? It’s all “business up front, party in the back“.

You probably wish you hadn’t come back to my site after reading that, but thank you anyway.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, two American guys claim to have discovered Bigfoot. Unfortunately Bigfoot was dead, so they took some photos, and stuffed him in a freezer.

They aren’t  letting many people actually look at the body, but at a press conference they did show some photos.  One of these photos was of Bigfoot’s mouth.

Just check out those teeth - they look better than most humans. In fact, they look better than the discoverer’s teeth seen in the same photo.  How does Bigfoot, who we suppose is a wild creature without a toothbrush, keep his teeth in such great condition?

Most people feel the evidence for this Bigfoot find looks a little dodgy. Bigfoot looks like a costume stuck in a freezer. And the teeth are too perfect it seems for a wild animal.

But then, ask yourself this: if you were going to devise a Bigfoot hoax, wouldn’t you have made sure the teeth looked a little worn and dirty or decayed?  Just to add some realism?  Why didn’t these guys do that?  Maybe it is real after all!

But then, maybe they thought about that.  Maybe they figured that by making it look fake, people would think “that’s so fake, no one could be this incompetent at creating a hoax, so it must be real”. So their hoax looks more real by looking more fake.

Mind blowing I know. But it is similar to my now famous “Perfect Disguise for an Armed Robbery”¹. For those who haven’t heard this before (you need to pay more attention to me), it goes like this. You’re a criminal, about to perform a non-violent armed robbery. You are a generally clean shaven person, with dark hair. So, you go to great trouble to give yourself a very realistic looking red goatee and moustache. You then put on a very fake looking black beard and moustache, one that is so dodgy that the people you are robbing can see that you have a fake beard. In fact, they can clearly see you have a red moustache and goatee under the fake beard.

So, the victims of this crime report the robbery to the police and insist that the person who robbed them had a red goatee and moustache that they tried to cover up with a fake black beard. When the police come around to your door, you are clean shaven.  And obviously do not have and never had a red moustache and goatee.  Your neighbours also know you to never have had a red moustache and goatee. The case is thrown out of court.

The perfect crime.

So is this the perfect hoax?

¹ I do not condone armed robbery, or robbery in general. It’s a joke. Don’t send me hate mail.

Hang on a minute. Widescreen? Wasn’t the X-Files TV series created in 1993?

Channel Ten in Australia have started showing the X-Files TV series from the beginning. On their HD channel (Ten HD).

Great news if you like the series. But when you watch it, you may find something doesn’t quite feel right. Everyone seems to be a little too close, like they are encroaching in to your personal space. There seem to be a lot of extreme close-ups in the show and at times the stars have parts of their heads cut off.

So, what’s going on?

Well, Channel Ten, in their ultimate wisdom, have decided that people won’t watch the show in HD unless it is widescreen. So, they’ve taken the 4:3 show (the first few seasons were filmed in 4:3), and chopped off the tops and bottoms, stretching it out to give the appearance of a widescreen programme.

Here’s a clip from the episode last week:

And here’s that same scene from the original broadcast:

No wonder everything seems so close.

You’ll notice though that it isn’t fully widescreen - it looks like even Channel Ten staff noticed the clipping if they made it fully widescreen, so they cut it back just a little.

So why am I complaining? I’m offended when people mess with original content. And the point is that Channel Ten don’t get technology.

Widescreen TVs come with a button you can push to tell it to zoom a 4:3 programme to fit a widescreen TV, if that is what you want. So why force everyone to view a bastardised version of the programme when you can offer people choice?

But then it’s the same issue all the TV stations have with technology. I can work out what channel I’m on by pushing the “info” button on my remote - yet they continue to ruin the viewing experience by putting the station identifier on the screen and saying it helps people to know what station they are watching. That Ten HD watermark is huge!

It seems there isn’t a single network with any respect for TV programmes anymore. Revoke all their Free To Air licences!