Ok, everyone knows that I hate the commercial TV stations here in Australia with a passion. The watermarks, the disrespect for programmes, the disrespect for their viewers. But this was a new level of disrespect.

So, there I was Sunday night watching Channel 7’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics Closing Ceremony. And my, what a slog that was. Boring as bat shit.

Anyway, there was rumour of a kung fu display to come, so I decided to hang out until the end. There was no display.

Instead, there was Jackie Chan, singing with another Hong Kong legend, Andy Lau. I’d been hanging out all through the Olympics for Jackie, and finally, there he was!

And what did our Channel 7 commentators say? They didn’t even recognise him! The most recognisable Chinese face in the Western world, a martial arts legend, a Hong Kong actor with close ties to Australia where he lived for a number of years, and the Channel 7 commentators had no idea! What chance did Andy Lau have – I mean, the commentators would have had to have watched a non-English speaking movie to have seen him before. What were the chances of that?

Obviously the camera man recognised him, as there were quite a few close ups on Jackie. But even that wasn’t clue enough for our brainiac commentators. They just talked about how everyone was so relaxed and having fun.

What? All asians look the same?

Holy crap. For god’s sake would the government just revoke the free-to-air licences and let some competent people start up some new and relevant TV networks?!

We have Leopard Server running in our small software company, with user’s machines backed up to the server via Time Machine, and other important data stored on the server such as our intranet pages. So it is vital that we make backups of this server. That’s the easy bit – we can use Time Machine on the server itself, saving to an external drive, so that all changes are saved each hour, and Time Machine can restore files when required.

However, it is also important that we have offsite backups – in case the building catches fire, or the backup hard drive dies. This is where a rotating set of external hard drives would come in useful.
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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.