Benlucky's Blog

Thanks to Sean Wheelock and USSoccerplayers.com for this. A great PS on an interview with the funniest guy in MLS, Jimmy Conrad.

Don’t we all have fantasies?

The promise of internet video on demand seems to be close to fulfillment. So far, it seems that various events are available to view “on demand, on line” (OK, so far, only soccer games, but what else is so important besides bike racing?) at my convenience. And note, I enjoyed watching the Dutch play Nigeria without a voice over announcing what I could see for myself, and without promo and popup adds. It seems that nbc has put the raw feeds from the venues on their web site ( http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/index.html ) for your enjoyment. Check it out.

Now, of course, the bad news. NBC uses Microslop Silverlight as the player. Note from the screen shot that the resolution is decent on our DSL line. And it caches info locally, so there is no noticable stutter. But:

• Silverlight is only available for the major browsers (IE, FF, Safari) on Windows or OSX. Sorry Linux fans, can’t watch on that OS.
• Silverlight locks down the content with DRM, so you can’t save it locally without some hacks that I haven’t yet researched. I guess I should research this, but it seems I couldn’t burn this to DVD for archiving.
• There is no full screen mode. i repeat, THERE IS NO FULL SCREEN MODE. So the screen shot is the best I could do to watch it on the TV from my easy chair. I couldn’t get the stuff above the viewer “off screen,” but thanks to Firefox 3 I could zoom the image to take up more screen real estate. I estimate that on the TV I could use about half of the available pixels before I zoomed the lower part of the content off the screen.

But, I could pause, rewind, and fast forward, adjust the volume, etc.

And by the way, with the stadium sound pumped from the computer into the stereo in the living room, it did sound a lot like I was in the stadium.

Now, if they really cache the full bike race, and other full events, I won’t need to watch the evening shows much. I might avoid all that endless talking head filler that always gets in the way of the Olympics.

Sorry, Mr. Favre, but please look at this man as the proper way to retire. From the IHT.

Lilian Thuram decided to retire, even though his medical condition was a “false alarm,” to spare his loved ones from worry. Of course, he has enough money to last him ( and them ) a good long while.

Good old Spicolli, hero to surfer dude Frankie Hejduk of the Columbus Crew and Cardiff. Best interview from the Columbus Dispatch with him I’ve seen in a while, extolling the fitness one gets from surfing. It also allows him to get away with a high fat diet.

Some questions I wish they had asked:

• How many espressos a day does he drink?
• Is he a better surfer than Brian Ching?
• When is he going to open a brewery to make his own pilsner?

Well, there is a Lalas guy that has something worthwhile to write. Sorry, Alexi, not you, but your bro at Sports Illustrated online in this piece titled “The US soccer fans bill of rights.” For some of us, in fact more and more of us, soccer is as (is more!) interesting than football or baseball, etc. And we want the press to treat us with this respect, and not treated in some condescending way. And we want criticism of the game and its various players, coaches, etc., and not the homer hype marketing stuff that comes out of the team press releases and web site (sorry Quakes, but that goes for your site too.) Hence, we need more mainstream outlets to publish the kind of stuff you might find on Center Line Soccer dot com, or Pitch Invasion.

Nice to see that the Euros had rebellion against all the corporate hype and rules that mar the game now that money is the most important element. Check this out.