Shedding Some Light

I really like to watch/listen to the Winter Olympic coverage while I do some coding or pay bills (things I did yesterday), cut invoices (this morning’s task). I find it hard to believe the NBC coverage here in the States does not have anything to broadcast live. Fortunately our neighbors to the south (yes, Windsor, Ontario is south of Detroit) have CBC doing some excellent coverage of the live events. In fact, I prefer watching the Canadian coverage because they show us all the excellent athletes from all around the world, not just snippets of the Americans and the other winners.

The impressive feats so far are the Canadian women hockey teams complete dominance of their competition, the ski jumper who fell on the landing and returned later for a second attempt, Zhao Hongbo (Chinese Pairs Figure Skater) who is doing jumps and throws with his partner after a serious injury to his left Achilles tendon six months ago, and anyone who can speedskate for 5000 Meters.

I guess I should be thankful for NBC and their various networks because I know I can watch replays later this evening if I get too intense in my coding and miss something important.

I was happy to see Detroit put on a great Super Bowl XL and I have some hope the world will see our fair city in a different light. I did watch some of the game as I coded and it was better than the commercials in my opinion.

My favorites:
1) FedEx Caveman (especially the end where he stomps out of the cave and gets crushed by a dinosaur)
2) CareerBuilder.com “Monkeys/Jackass” (created a sensation of “I’ve been there before”)
3) MasterCard McGuyver
4) Stunt City (unfortunately I don’t recall the company name so how good was it?)
5) Bud Light’s Roof Problem Fixers (especially using the vent as a cooker)
6) Rock Financial’s – Chauncey Billups, Ben Wallace, and David Hall (from Rock) watching the Super Bowl on the Palace Vision screen (this was a local commercial not shown to the national audience)

Worst commercials:
1) Burger King Whopperettes (by a landslide, the PR firm should be publicly humiliated)
2) Cadillac Models coming out of the water
3) Dove’s female self-esteem movement (I agree with the fundamental concept, but why spend 2.5 million for 30 seconds?)

I am not even mentioning the flat out boring ones. So much wasted money. I guess I question most companies choice of spending 5 million a minute, but I figure I could easily set up a foundation on 2 minutes worth of spending. So many homeless people could be sheltered and feed. So many sick kids could be healed. So many disadvantaged people could be educated. Oh well, don’t expect ever to see a White Light Computing ad during a future Super Bowl.

For the record, it was a productive year on the coding front. {g}

I was also happy to see Jerome Bettis and Bill Cowher walk off the field a champion. I also proved once again that I cannot pick a winner in this game. If the Lions ever make it to the Super Bowl in my lifetime I will root for the other team.

Yes – we get snow in February and it is no big deal. The weather has been so warm (as in just above freezing) most of it melted as it hit the ground. We have about three inches of the wet stuff here north of the city, but it probably snowed enough to measure six to eight inches, and this was after it rained hard for a while.

So all week the media have been covering the celebrity sightings and the big parties. Bright lights, lots of music, dog sleds, ice skating, surfing and sledding, and tons of spectacular food spreads. Finally, today they remembered there is some football game being played at Ford Field. The first time two professional teams will be playing in this stadium all season. You see we have this minor league team called the Lions who play here eight times a season, but they are not even remotely professional. I think we have some high school teams who could kick their behinds.

I will be following my Super Bowl tradition – coding during the game and watching the commercials. Last year the game was good and the commercials stunk. I am hoping both are outstanding this time around.

I am picking the underdog Seahawks to win the game. The only reason is a simple one – the Steelers were in the news a lot this week attending all the parties and getting in front of the cameras all week. The media went overboard on The Bus (as in number 36 from Pittsburg). The Seahawks just came into town and went about the business of preparing for the game. They also come from a city where a lot of geeks live, so this is not surprising. I also like the Seattle coach and was hoping he would get hired by the Lions, but that is not going to happen.

So go Seahawks!

Kevin Cully has been blogging about it, threatening to do it, and is finally announcing he is officially putting on the Fox Forward conference in Hot-lanta in September. This will be a “code camp” weekend type of conference from the information I read on the Web site.

Sounds like Craig Berntson is skeptical/negative/grumpy before all the details are flushed out, but I have taken part of “code camp” style of conferences and they work. In fact, they work well. I don’t see this as substitute for a great Fox regional conference like Southwest Fox (or what Essential Fox, DevTeach, or the old GLGDW was), but it can be a great supplemental way to expand your knowledge.

I see this as an experiment in the Fox Community. It will be interesting to watch to see how things develop, to see the topics bubble up, and how the loose details are tightened down.

I am disappointed on the timing of the conference because it means there are four conferences in a ten week period (Advisor, Fox Forward, Southwest Fox, and German DevCon – and possibly a fifth with OzFox). I expressed this to Kevin in an email this evening. I wish the conference organizers could get together and spread these out through the year. Maybe it will be better in 2007. I know it is tough, but this schedule makes it difficult for development shops to send some of their people to all the conferences when the money is being spent all at once.

So what conference are you going this year?