Tricky to despam the spammer who takes two comments to a blog entry, pulls them apart and resubmits a new entry with the beginning of one and the end of another. Of course the weird link to some obtuse site still gives it away.
I’ve noticed this a fair few times - NBC will say something is LIVE via an icon by their logo for a while until I notice that it is not in fact live as the result is on the BBC website. At that point the LIVE icon sheepishly vanishes for a while.
Looking up again though - it’s back. Apparently the BBC know that the US are going to sweep the beach volleyball - 23-21, 17-21, 15-4, but NBC are still on the first or second set. Either NBC are lying through their teeth, or I really need to start paying attention to stock market results on the BBC from now on.
An interesting difference in how the US and UK look at the medal table. As this example from CNN/SI shows (and NBC do the same, so I assume it’s a nationwide media thing), the US medal view values quantity and sorts the medal table by the total number of medals. The UK medal view, as this example from the BBC shows, values quality and multi-sorts the medals by Gold/Silver/Bronze.
So in the US, the US are beating China by 4 medals in a close-run race. GB are down in fifth place, with France and Belarus both appearing high (France in 6th, Belarus in 13th). In G/S/B UK land, we see the US a league behind China by 16 golds, GB are in third (winning the important(???) Ashes against Australia at the moment), France are found down in 11th and Belarus are in lowly 41st.
Removing my own national preference - it’s tricky to decide in the abstract which method is better. A bronze medal could either be a failed gold, in which case 19/22/22 is a terrible score for the US, or it could be a 4th place on paper managing a better performance (or an out of this world performance from an unknown).
It’s easier when comparing the nation’s though. Comparing GB vs France - 11/6/8 vs 4/9/12. The same number, but clearly a happier time this year for GB (so far anyway). China vs US - 35/13/13 vs 19/22/22. Seems hard to me to consider the US ahead on that stat.
In other news… Why GB I wondered? Looking at this Wikipedia page it appears that rather than having the UK and Ireland as two teams, the two teams are GB and Ireland and athletes from Northern Ireland can choose whom they wish to compete for. I wonder if they can go back and forth or if in deciding that they are stuck with that team.
UPDATE: Brain clicked in and I decided to check out the Olympics websitefor the definitive method of sorting. Appears to be G/S/B (with a rank-by-total ordering to the side):
However I’ve a sneaky suspicion that in Atlanta it was the other way around. ie) The host nation ‘owns’ the Olympic site.
To celebrate the return of the Internet to the house, I went ahead and released version 1.1 of my filterlist plugin for JIRA. It adds one new feature (though that resolves two issues) which allows you to configure whether the filterlist shows private filters, group-shared filters and/or global filters. I expect the main use case to be to turn off global filters on the front page due to people’s habit of spamming people with those.
Download from the links on the confluence page:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/Filter+List+Plugin
NBC showing 800m women’s freestyle. Halfway through. Shows the two leaders in the race being at the world record point. Then….
Let’s show Phelps finishing again because who cares about a couple of European’s winning a long distance swimming race (live), and then let’s go to an advert break. No wonder the focus is on short sprints in the US, NBC can’t handle anything that takes longer than 2 minutes of their precious advertising time.
