Ressell Beattie says of the Atlanta Olympics, "They lied to us horribly." He describes the early hype about the need to get tickets early. I don't know about Sydney but I know that the same kinds of deception were in evidence in Los Angeles in 1984.

I wonder if the seats won't be empty in the form of poor television ratings for the NBC record setting poor performance. Part of the problem, at least, seems to be NBC would rather cover those things that are easy to cover. This focus on what's easy treats us to hours of rowing coverage every day. Expanding coverage to more channels hasn't made the coverage any better. Instead the viewer is given more hours a day of the same thing that would be on a single channel. When it comes to events that are more difficult to cover, like equestrian eventing, viewers are limited to a few seconds of nationalistic coverage. Almost as much time was devoted to riders saying "hi mom" as it was to the total time spent actually showing the dressage portion of eventing.

A note that one of the places where online publishing and traditional publishing collide is on the meaning of "M". Don Park has a comment about Windows XP SP2 in which he says downloads will be limited to 2.5M downloads/day. In the traditional publishing world that would be 2,500 not the 2,500,000 meant by the post. Ad pricing is always expressed in CPM - or cost per thousand. The world of traditional publishing is tied to M, from the Roman Numeral M, meaning 1,000.

I'm in web-order limbo. It stinks. I tried today to order Missing Sync from Mark Space. Everything goes along fine, they take my money, send me the magic code and I install the software. Well really they send the first magic code that you have to some how turn for a second code. Problem is it doesn't work. Not a big deal I head out to the page on the website they say to visit... but if doesn't have anything about the product I ordered. Several others but not the one I ordered. That is part of the problem when a shop becomes the only game in town. I guess while I'm waiting for the response I'll go ahead and cancel Netflix who just sent another disc round tripping to themselves.

I was thinking there wasn't much to write today. But Jeff Beard's story about Dell's Horrific Tech Support reminded me that I'm still waiting for a call back from Nevada Power. Their support supervisor said that I was given bad information and then proceeded to suggest that I was "twisting the facts" when I had pointed out she said "she was not going to circumvent the normal policy to help me." I pointed out this meant she could but was not going to. That folks is what they call twisting the story.

I guess I'll have to file a complaint with the public utilities commission about the abuse at the hands of Nevada Power. If you take Jenina's word for it then a first-level supervisor at their call center is the highest power in the building. Sure sounds like all the call centers I've ever been in. Yup there are plenty of times where there are call-takers and their supervisors and nobody else.... wait that's not true.