NBC is recording 3600 hours of 2008 Beijing Olympics coverage, most recorded in HD and most only available online.

And I hate watching this stuff online.

Lets do a quick overview of the offerings. NBC is using 7 networks to display everything. Lets go down the list: Standard NBC (HD Version Available), USA (HD Simulcast on DirecTV), CNBC (HD Simulcast Available*), MSNBC (No HD), Oxygen (no HD), Telemundo (HD?), and *Universal HD (Simulcast of CNBC)

Now there is also NBC Olympics Soccer and NBC Olympics Basketball (both with HD simulcast) available on Time Warner and other select providers in some markets (not RCN Chicago or Time Warner Milwaukee)

But they have other networks that NBC/Universal owns outright that they could be broadcasting on. And both have HD simulcast versions.

Scifi and Bravo.

I mean, Scifi has no original programing running right now (you can only watch Battlestar Galactica/Stargate reruns so many times) and while Bravo does have its own core audience, I think you can pre-empt it for the Olympics.

The worst part of it all is that CNBC/CNBC HD/Universal HD seems to be almost exclusively boxing. I hate boxing.

A few months ago I was deciding between an LCD and Plasma HDTV. I finally settled on a 50″ Samsung Plasma.

It cost me just under $2k, but I had been saving up for it for quite some time and since I moved apartments I was finally in a place where I had enough room for one it was a good time to buy.

Now, having a HDTV is one thing, but finding enough HD content to view on it is another. And finding HD content has gotten a lot easier.. but finding GOOD HD content is difficult.

Thank god for my HD DVR.

I set my DVR to record the Olympics Opening Ceremony in HD.

Oh my.

The contrast, color… everything… is just perfect on this TV.

Oh, and the opening ceremony is pretty cool too.

I cannot get ahold of 1800RINGRCN and sometimes the # of my sales rep at RCN (who is the nicest guy) from my cell phone, but a call from say Skype will go through fine. And it is inconsistent, as in I can sometime my calls go through and others do not.

I am having speed issues here in Chicago on their network. I am paying for 10mbit but right now I can only get 4mbit. Upstream is fine. It is hit-or-miss most days, which is getting really annoying.

Now that I have a bunch of time on my hands I am going to do something I should have done years ago: Actually design a theme for this site.

Right now I am using a modified form of the default theme for WordPress called Kubrick (after Stanley Kubrick, in my opinion one of the best directors of all time.) All I did was take the default theme and make my own header images. The top of the design is fun to mess with and I have about 15 different versions I have played around with.

Some of the headers were topical to posts or pages (this one was about movie posts and this one was about the music page) and some where just stupid (this one had a picture of JFK and this one was cut out of an image I found online)

But none of these things were truly ‘original.’ They made this blog look like every other blog out there, and while this is pretty much like every other blog in the world (run by a single narcissistic person with wayyy too much time on their hands… wait… nevermind) it is also something of a journal that I decided to post to the internet. Some people document their entire lives, I try to document what I think I should document so perhaps someone would learn something from it. Perhaps myself…

Or the entire Loyola mock trial team, family members, a few random people who seem to enjoy reading it, a spattering of colleagues, people who find stuff on Google/AOL/MSN, people who read it on Facebook, people who forward posts and just about everyone who searches for “ghetto prom pictures” for some reason. And some of it has become REALLY useful. Like a post I did about Vector Marketing and their misleading mail. Which has a bunch of comments from people who needed to search for information about this sham company. You never know when something is going to be useful to somebody…

But such a personal thing can not be put on just any old theme. There needs to be a theme that is kickass and really expresses my intent with this thing. It has been around for 3 years, so I am going to scrub through old posts and go through some statistics software to see where people are visiting and from where and start work on a new theme.

Update: Here are all the headers

A little over two years ago I did a post called One Year of Statistics where I went through my logs from the start of the blog (April 9th, 2005) until that post (March 28th, 2006)

Now that it has been over three years since that first post I figured I would come out with some more statistics (these include search engine spiders!!!)

Top 10 Pages:
RSS Feed - 64809 hits*
ATOM Feed - 63454 hits*
Home Page - 48224 hits
Ghetto Prom Pictures - 10184 hits
Comments Feed - 7714 hits*
Ghetto Prom Afterparty - 4925 hits
Logs for April 2005 - 4715 hits
Firefox Gets 50 Million Users - 3956 hits
Conservatives file FCC Petition without watching show - 3851 hits
Thinking of a new project - 3284 hits (which never took off)

Top Five User Agents:
Yahoo! Slurp - 102356 hits
MSN Search Bot - 26241 hits
Google Feedfetcher - 23612 hits
MSIE 6.0 - 19647 hits (I combined all MSIE 6 users)
Googlebot - 18741
The rest are all sub 10,000

Top Five Referring Pages:
MSN Search for “ghetto prom” - 2293
Fark.com’s ‘Top 10 Viral Videos Of The Year’ Comments Page (2005) - 743
Slashdot’s Apple 500 Million Songs - 248
Yahoo Search for “ghetto prom pictures” - 236

If you take into account only actual visitors, since November 15 2005 there have been 22,805 unique visitors and 43,101 pageviews (not including spiders)

I have made a total of approximately $113 off of those Google ads surrounding the site in the past 3 years (with only one payout in late 2006)

The most interesting thing is between February 5 and February 12 2006 I had the largest spike in traffic ever, with 2571 unique visitors and 3,380 pageviews over 7 days… almost all to that ghetto prom post, and almost all from the MSN search engine. That Ghetto Prom entry was posted April 30, 2005…

I really dislike those ghetto prom pictures… I just copied them 3 years ago, and when I took them down a year ago people kept commenting in every comment box on the site ‘where are the pictures’

And this is the 622nd post on the system

* I moved my RSS feed to FeedBurner a few months ago, so those statistics are not 100% accurate