Month: August 2004

UPDATE: I hope everyone is enjoying the Olympic Games in London! I originally wrote this post in 2004 for Athens. Currently, there’s quite the talk about the Dutch women field hockey team. Judging by the visitor logs for this site, a lot of you are big fans of women’s volleyball!

Maybe it’s because I was under a rock during the last few Summer Olympics, but when did the Games of the Olympiad get so focused on sex appeal? I know the Olympics are now very much tied into TV ratings, but it appears choices are being made just for the sake of sizzle and flash, rather than pure athletics.

First up is, of course, beach volleyball. Granted, the outfits the women and men wear on the sand make perfect sense. It’s the beach, why wouldn’t you play in bathing suits? I would argue it’s probably the only Olympic sport where sexy and practical outfits are the one and the same. In Athens though, they’ve introduced those official Olympic beach volleyball dancers. They can already be found on the pro circuit but this is the first time they’ve appeared at the Olympics. Do they make the event more athletic? No, not really, but I don’t think anyone is complaining. This post would be incomplete if I didn’t offer some visual evidence of what I was writing about.

Next up is women’s volleyball. In North America at least, I’ve always seen women play volleyball in the standard garb of tight shorts and sleeveless shirts. You gotta admit the shorts are kinda sexy, but beyond that, I think it’s quite a respectable and practical way to play volleyball. The European and South American teams seem to prescribe to a different style of dress however. Pictured below is the Greek women’s volleyball team. They’re wearing tight, one-piece uniforms that appear to be made of Spandex. Is this really necessary? They’re essentially wearing a one-piece bathing suit to play volleyball inside. At least with the shorts, the women are covered down to the upper thigh, with these things, their asses are all hanging out. I’m surprised people don’t talk about this more. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not about to write the FIVB and ask them to change the uniform standards, I’m just wondering.

Next up is women’s basketball. You might be thinking, how the hell can basketball be that sexy? I thought that too, but then I started watching basketball in Athens. From watching the WNBA and NCAA basketball, I always thought the women just wore what the men wore in games, the standard basketball jersey and loose, long shorts. Both the men and women uniforms were basically interchangeable. Well, wasn’t I surprised when I saw what the Australian women were wearing. They were sporting these tight, one-piece uniforms. I suppose this makes them distinguishable from the men’s teams, but is it really necessary? Does it help with shooting and lay-ups?

I guess I could theorize that either women want to wear these type of outfits for their sport or that they need to draw more attention to their sport. I wish all sports could stand on their own for what they offer in terms of athletic displays, but that’s not reality. Between bathing suits in volleyball and glowing pucks in hockey, it’s about image in the end.

Look at some random dude that I captured on my web cam this morning.

The bonds of friendship here at SJC are among the strongest I have ever seen. People come away from this place with friends that will stay in touch for the rest of their lives. It has been an honour to have experienced this.

A few months ago, I was discussing this topic with Patrick, my friend and neighbour down the hall. Patrick has been here longer than I have, he has seen more and has had more time to reflect on the community that is St. John’s College. He told me time at SJC isn’t the same as time out in the real world. We live in “concentrated” time as he called it.

As explained further, it made more sense to me. In the real world during the week, most people get up, go to work, and come home. Most people see their friends during the weekend, maybe once during the weekday. In an average month, you’ll get to spend some quality time with your friends maybe four times, eight if you’re lucky.

At SJC, the community is such that you’ll probably eat dinner at the dining hall with your friends at least five times a week. You most likely share one meal with them during the weekend as well. That’s six times a week you’ll get to interact with them. And that’s just at dinner. I’m not counting trips to the movies and a night at the local pub. In an average month, that’s twenty-four opportunities to strengthen friendships.

Compared to the real world, that’s three to six times more interaction in a given month here at SJC. No wonder we get to know each other so well here.

I was talking to Adam recently about Pat, a resident who left about two weeks ago. He’d been here only 11 months, but Adam said he felt like he’d known Pat for years now. In a sense, he was right. It wasn’t really 11 months, it was more like three years in real time.

When I leave here at the end of the month, I will have known some of my SJC friends for about two years. Conservatively, that’s about six years in real time. When I think about it, that feels just about right.

One of the rare pieces of hardware that translated well over to XP was my webcam. I decided to put it up during the day while I’m away from my room.

I have it looking across the road that most people walk along to get to Wreck Beach. I know, the zoom sucks, but web cams are like that. The first person that invents a cheap web cam with an optical zoom will probably get very rich.

I’m in the process of trying to move the cam to a much better position. Stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, you may view the cam here.

If you’re going to leave out tuna salad for an extended period of time, don’t eat it. Throw it out and go get some chicken wings.

Every once in a while I think of a stupid way to waste some of my hard-earned and small amount of money. This is one of those times.

I’m thinking of making business cards. I’m not talking about those horrendous full colour ones either. Mine would be black text on a white background. The front would have only one line of text right in the center. It would read, www.erwintang.com. I was going to leave the back blank, but I was thinking of putting the quote, “A shining example of bad web design since 1996”.

You can design business cards on-line and preview your work. I was going to include a screenshot but my screenshot app got hosed from the move over to XP.

If I did get some cards made up, I’d most likely get raised lettering or card stock that had some texture to it. I think that would have a greater impact than some 10 colour layout. What do you think?

Things haven’t gone so well since my last post. At this point XP thinks my soundcard can only support two channels rather than 5.1. I actually thought this was my only problem, which I believed was quite solvable.

Since then, the problems have piled on, in much greater severity. First, before I formatted by C:\ drive, I thought I had backed up all my e-mail from my Interchange\Telus account. After I had burned all messages onto a CD, I browsed through the CD to make sure I could see all the files. I could. Stupidly, I thought that meant the files were safe. When I went to import my message back into the new Outlook on XP, it couldn’t read the messages. I tried the CD on two different CD-ROM drives and they couldn’t read it either. It turns out you can see the files and know how big they are but you actually can’t copy them from the CD. What the hell?!?!?! I can’t tell you how many e-mails I had backed up there. There were a lot of registration e-mails on that CD, things like the id/password combos for my domain registrar. I also had a lot of attachments. That CD was the only place I “backed up” those e-mails. I guess I’d be more choked if they were my erwintang.com e-mails, but still. And here’s the kicker, I had a whole bunch of other crap backed up on that CD, stuff I wouldn’t even think twice about if it was lost forever. Guess what? That reads fine.

If that weren’t enough, I also realized how stupid Microsoft’s requirements are for XP. They state that you need 1.5 Gb of free space to install XP. Yes, that’s true but they neglect to tell you won’t be able to install any programs on it afterwards. I have 50 Gb of space spread over two drives. I installed XP on a 2 Gb C:\ partition thinking 500 Mb would be enough for a swap file. And yes, I know that no matter where I install a program, they do put some files on the C:\ drive. Well, wasn’t it a surprise when after intalling a few program on my D:\ drive, I noticed my C:\ drive was up to 1.9 Gb! That’s total bullcrap. Soon XP started complaining about being low on drive space. I was so mad. I would have deleted a few partitions beforehand to make space if I knew I needed it. Now, with XP already installed, it’s going to be a lot harder to resize and move my partitions. Why doesn’t Microsoft tell you you’re gonna need way more than 1.5 Gb???

It’s going take me a day or two to resize my partition and hopefully things will be better. Did you know that Partition Magic 8 costs $100 at Future Shop?

It took me all afternoon to change over to Windows XP. I’m still installing drivers and applications. It will be several days before everything is back to normal. However, since you’re reading this, things have gone relatively smooth.

I can tell you one thing, I used the Windows XP interface for about 10 minutes before I had to switch back to Windows Classic.

Well, I have to get back to unzipping porn the rest of my apps.

For part of Class Day festivities, Havard University brought in comedian Ali G to speak to the students. If you haven’t seen his show, I recommend you find him on either HBO or Showcase. It is quite entertaining.

Anyways, I like Harvard’s choices in their Class Day speakers. In the past they’ve had people like Will Ferrell and Conan O’Brien.

I managed to find an on-line video of Ali G speech. When I viewed it, I thought it was funny, but extremely short. Most Class Day speeches hover around the 20 minute mark. I did a little more snooping and I found a transcript of Ali G’s entire speech. Apparently, Harvard edited out a lot of his remarks from the on-line video. Among the highlights cut out is this little snippet:

Checkit, me agreed to speak here today coz me wanted to talk to de brightest minds of our generation, to see what makes Harvard de most special university in de world, and also coz dey agreed to pay for me flight over here and hotel room. Sorry to bring dis up now, but when u iz told dat your hotel bill is bein paid for, u naturally assume dat dat includes essential extras like breakfast AND special interest pay-per-view movies. Imagine my surprise den dis morning, when I was given a bill for $164. Me was actually tryin to SAVE Harvard money by buying the 24-hour ‘slutfest’ packages at $19.99, rather dan paying for individual films at $11.99 each. Which would have cost u – [go thru them] Young and Tight….Backdoor Burglar 2……Backdoor Burglar 3…..Campus Confessions….Asian Fever…Shaven Buffet [get lost] twice dat one… Cold Mountain – dat was a mistake, Backdoor Burglar 4 ….almost 490 bucks. I mean come on, some of it was even research for dis, I iz sure one of de cheerleaders in ‘Ivy League Amateurs’ was wearin a Harvard sweatshirt…..

Be sure to check out both the video and the full transcript, funny stuff.

The Olympics officially started in Athens today. In related news, did you know there is an official Olympic beach volleyball dance team?