Tag Archives: Sydney 2000 Olympic Games ™
IT Fairfax: Discrimination blast on Games site
Posted on 20. Nov, 2000
http://www.it.fairfax.com.au/...
Paralympic do gooders
Posted on 01. Nov, 2000
One of the more amusing aspects of the post-Olympics pre-Paralympics period in Sydney were all the do gooders kicking up a major fuss about the removal of all the Olympic rings and related logos around Sydney. They wanted the rings left on the harbour bridge, flags left flying in the city and so on in support of the up-coming Paralympics. Little did they realise that the Paralympics are a separate event, with there own officials, organising committee and most importantly, their own logo. It was great that people banded together to fight what they believed to be a gross injustice against the Paralmypics, but you'd think they get their facts straight first. Ironically it illustrates that all these do-gooders had never payed much attention to the Paralympics in the past to know the Olympic rings had nothing to do with the Paralympics. Amusing.
SMH Sydney Games Photo Gallery
Posted on 17. Oct, 2000
The Sydney Morning Herald Olympics photo gallery has to be one of the best collections of online photos from the Olympics, check it out.
http://olympics.smh.com.au/...
Now this is something I wasn’t expecting..
Posted on 05. Oct, 2000
Sydney 2000 Olympic Games related porn spam: "It's Jenny from Sydney. I thought you'd like to see me naked on the Games! :)"
there_is_no_link_you_dirty_bugger
Olympics bring clueless tourists to Australia
Posted on 03. Oct, 2000
CNN: "One American asked where he could get Aboriginal shoelaces. Another yank, after learning spring had come to Sydney, wanted to know what month it was."
http://www.cnn.com/...
Yankee Journos Lost in Oz!
Posted on 03. Oct, 2000
OJR: "Australia isn't a difficult place to understand. The population is just 19 million. It only has five large cities. People speak English, some of them in such a clear, neutral manner they are chosen to present CNN newscasts. So why do American journalists have such a tough time getting this place right?"
http://ojr.usc.edu/...
Olympic Web Stats
Posted on 02. Oct, 2000
ZDNet has a brief look at usage statistics of the various Olympics sites. As expected the NBC Olympics site came out on top with 50 million page views, followed by IBM's terrible Olympics.com site with 38 million page views.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/...
Cashing in post Olympics
Posted on 01. Oct, 2000
Tonight, the biggest single steel structure in the world designed and built specifically for fireworks displays will again be closed to it's secondary task of moving traffic between Sydney and North Sydney for another fireworks display dubbed as the biggest ever. Not being too cynical, but biggest usually means longer not more spectacular, the Y2K fireworks went far too long. Fireworks aside, the closing ceremony and atmosphere in and around Sydney should be fantastic, it's good to see the city celebrating, the Olympics were brilliant, what an amazing past two weeks it's been in Sydney.
http://anthonyjhicks.com/...
The Olympic Flame by Night
Posted on 25. Sep, 2000
I took a great picture of the Olympic Flame on Friday night.
http://anthonyjhicks.com/...
Some American viewers not happy with NBC coverage
Posted on 20. Sep, 2000
Some interesting reactions to NBC coverage of Olympics, looks like many viewers have been turning to CBC (Canada) for live coverage, skipping the delayed broadcasts and melodramatic athlete profiles offered by NBC.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/...
Beat the Drum
Posted on 20. Sep, 2000
Did anyone notice the two performers wearing Triple J drum logo t-shirts in the opening ceremony? It was two guys with their backs to the camera doing something near the angle-grinding sequence. Everyone else was wearing a white t-shirt and flannelette shirt, these guys must have dumped their flannies just before going out into the stadium. DG, the idiot who painted his initials on the inside of cauldron the morning before the ceremony, missed a prime Beat the Drum opportunity.
http://www.abc.net.au/...
Just don’t ask for coffee
Posted on 20. Sep, 2000
Here are a few amusing tidbits seen in today's Sydney Morning Herald and elsewhere.
Apparently NBC had 7,264kg of Starbucks coffee shipped over to keep staff caffeinated, reaffirming a commonly held belief that Australian coffee is too strong and flavoursome for the bland American palate. The American journo's have also been having trouble with food, saying Down Under is a gastronomic disappointment. Truly bizarre, where are these people eating? McDonalds perhaps? Room service? What, no decent Bagels?
Taxi drivers are complaining that all the official courtesy Holden's are taking away from potential fares. In reality they're getting less fares due to the reduced level of business commuters and the focus on public transport utilisation by ORTA. Reminds me of all the claims 12 months back that it would be taxi chaos unless more taxi licenses we released for the games.
None of the chaos predicted by the cynics and doomsayers has eventuated. I took my first trip out to the Olympic Park today for Swimming heats, it took 10 minutes on an express train, and a 15-minute walk from Concord West station. I was seated in Aquatic Centre in about 2 minutes.
Not surprisingly, the Olympics.com web site is actually ranked third behind the Yahoo and NBC Olympics sites for page views. All future marketing by IBM claiming to have built the most hit site in history will be best taken with a grain of salt.
One of the reasons so many swimming records are being broken in the Sydney 2000 Olympic Pool is due to use of anti-wave lane ropes that reduce the amount of water disturbance from swimmers in adjacent lanes. This helps make it a 'fast pool', interesting.
http://www.olympics.smh.com.au/...
ZDNet Olympic News Special
Posted on 18. Sep, 2000
ZDNet Australia have guide to the technology surrounding the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/...
Better medal tally
Posted on 18. Sep, 2000
The user interface on Fairfax's Olympics web site is so much better than the Olympics.com one. The BBC UK Olympics web site isn't that bad either.
http://www.olympics.smh.com.au/...
Scalpers really are scum
Posted on 18. Sep, 2000
I read an article in today's SMH about two french ticket scalpers who bought about 2,000 Olympics tickets from an agent in France and have been trying to flog them out here in Australia. Fortunately, they've barely sold any of their tickets due to Australia's hatred of scalpers, buyers worried about forgeries and the police getting tough on suspected scalpers. Bad luck you scalping bastards.
Anyway, today's ticket sales figures show 5.5 million tickets sold for events in Sydney and 658,000 sold for events in Melbourne. There are apparently around 1 million tickets left. They've now sold 85% of the total tickets available, beating the previous record set by Barcelona for 82.7% of tickets sold. Impressive!
IBM on the Olympics web site and the Java Sports Consoles
Posted on 18. Sep, 2000
IT Fairfax: "But supporting millions of simultaneous connections to the Olympic Game's scoring systems would be prohibitively expensive in both processing power and bandwidth. IBM's answer is to do all the information processing at its big data centres, which then update static Web pages held at PODs points of distribution."
http://www.it.fairfax.com.au/...
A couple of minor American journo’s lay into Birch’s extravaganza
Posted on 16. Sep, 2000
Amusing, feeling a bit out done perhaps?
http://www.olympics.smh.com.au/...
Medal standings finally online
Posted on 16. Sep, 2000
I really preferred the Nagano web site, people love statistics, and you have to dig deep to find that level of information on the Sydney 2000 site. Along with no less than four banner ads per page, horrible colours, terrible navigation and frames! I wouldn't be that proud of your site IBM.
http://www.olympics.com/...
Olympics from SPACE
Posted on 16. Sep, 2000
SPACE.com also have a good high altitude imaging survey of Sydney and some of the Olympic venues. You can even zoom in on my office building. [via Tunney]
http://pump.imagepump.com/...
