Month: August 2008

So the countdown to our departure to Beijing is getting very short. Tomorrow we do the online checking and pray for decent seats, and finish the day by packing. (I’ve made our list, but haven’t packed a thing yet.) That should be straightforward, though. It’s damn hot, and we aren’t doing anything fancy, so mainly t-shirts, shorts and sandals.

But before we go, here are a couple of cool links/stories I wanted to pass on:

• Checklists for Doctors (from the New Yorker): A simple four-step checklist managed to reduce infection rates in intensive care units by 66%! In eighteen months, the group of hospitals saved 1500 lives and $175million.
• No matter how good someone thinks they are, and how much study they’ve done of complex procedures, checklists are absolutely necessary. After three years running a nuclear reactor, I can say this with certainty. While we were trained to be able to do everything without instructions, we failed any procedure where we didn’t use them.
• I really hope this is something that actually catches on in the medical community. It’s long overdue
• Looking for a quick laugh? I keep forgetting to check McSweeney’s. This feature is great: “Corrections to last month’s letters to Penthouse Forum.” (via kottke)
• If you like politics, and don’t mind a little math, you have to check out FiveThirtyEight.com. Developed by Nate Silver, who’s a pioneer in sabermetrics (aka baseball statistics), it’s a really deep look into the state of the Presidential and Senate races for this election. Very light punditry, very heavy math.

And to end this post, photos of Elise and Sarah’s bronze in Athens 2004, as well as Elise and Anna’s World Cup gold in June of this year.

This week my wife and I are flying out to Beijing to attend the 2008 Beijing Olympics! Needless to say, we’re getting really excited.

We had to order our event tickets well over a year ago, and recently purchased a couple more tickets from a friend that couldn’t go. Over the course of twelve days we will be attending: Rowing, Athletics, Gymnastics, Triathlon, Beach Volleyball, Wrestling, and Weightlifting.

Key tickets for us are everything rowing (as you can guess by my previous posts), the Women’s Individual All-Around gymnastics final, and Athletics (to include Men’s steeplechase and long jump, Women’s 800m, Discus and Pole Vault). Provided we’re able to swap one of our two pairs of Saturday rowing finals tickets for a pair of Sunday finals, we will see 26 different finals and medal ceremonies.

Why we’re going

The main reason we decided to go to the Olympics over a year ago was to support our friends from Thames Rowing Club, where we’ve been rowing for four years. Elise Laverick is rowing in the Women’s Double Sculls with Anna Bebington, and Ali Knowles and Beth Rodford are rowing in the Women’s Eight. Last year Annie Vernon rowed for Thames (she’s since switched clubs), and she’s competing in the Women’s Quad Sculls. Oh, and Al Heathcote is rowing in the Men’s Eight; he’s the brother of a guy on Thames men’s squad.

Getting ready

It’s only been in the last few days that I’ve started to get really excited about the Olympics. We decided to do a Homestay, which I was initially unsure about. But now that we’ve been in touch with the owners of the flat (a Canadian man and his Chinese wife) I’m stoked. We’ll have wireless access, so we should be able to upload photos and blog on a daily basis while we’re there.

The Olympic Committee also recently released their visitor’s guide, which finally gives a little more information as to how we’ll be able to get in between venues. Considering the Rowing and Triathlon venues are well outside Beijing central, this is key for us. It took a bit to download the 100 MB PDF (!), but it’s packed full of information. As long as we have a ticket for an event on the day, transportation in the city that day is free.

By the way, I’ve been using TripIt to organise our whole trip… I highly recommend it!

Visiting Beijing

I also hope to see a bunch of Beijing while we’re there. The Great Wall is a trip that we’re trying to fit in on one of the days, but since it’s a little way outside the city we may need to skip one of the event sessions; we’ll see. To be honest, I’m treating this as a secondary part of our trip. We want to see the spectacle of the athletes and competition, everything else will be a bonus.

Subscribing

If you’d like to get all of my Beijing blog updates, you can subscribe! Just click here to get new posts by e-mail, or click here if you’d like the RSS feed.

With wireless access, I hope to be posting daily with impressions and photos from the day. I may also be able to post occasionally from the venue with photos now that I’ve got my iPhone! Oh, and I hope to be sending updates to Twitter, too. This is going to be great!

So I’ve had my iPhone for a little while now, having never owned or used an iPhone or Blackberry before. These are my thoughts:

The Great:

• REAL web browser. This is just such a killer app. Whether a website has been “optimised” for the iPhone or not, it looks awesome, can be navigated easily, and is pretty damn quick! I use this extensively.
• App Store: infinite possibilities. I love the potential that’s wrapped up in the Apple App Store. Right now I’ve downloaded a bunch of different applications, though I only use a few regularly. (New York Times reader… awesome when it works!) As the iPhone ecosystem expands, there will likely be more and more very valuable apps here that will make the iPhone much more powerful.
• Push e-mail. While I have it turned off most of the time (I prefer to get e-mail on MY terms, not on a timer), it is fantastic when I’m expecting something important to land in my inbox. With this, who needs a Blackberry?
• GPS. This is awesome, especially when I’m out and about in London and need to figure out a) where the hell I am, and b) how to get home or wherever else I’m looking to go. The integration with Google Maps is fantastic.

The Horrible:

• SMS. Ouch, this is bad. I mean, yes you can text. You can even text multiple people. But you CAN’T save a draft text, you CAN’T setup standard template texts, and if a phone number is wrong, you CAN’T tell the status of a message after it’s been sent. (Or if you send it to one person with a correct number and a different person with an incorrect number, it will throw up an error, but won’t tell you if anything got sent at all.)
• This is really pretty damn bad. They are all features that I used a lot on my old phone, which was a Motorola RAZR I bought nearly THREE YEARS ago. I really hope this gets sorted out soon.
• MobileMe. I signed up with .Mac when it was still free so I could get the username that I wanted. I’ve paid for it since then, with decreasing value every year. I was initially really excited about MobileMe… push e-mail/calendar/contacts to the cloud, etc. But Apple’s roll-out has been AWFUL. I couldn’t access e-mail at all for the first 24/36 hours after MobileMe went live, it still acts up at times so reliability is still a problem. And then one day most of the phone numbers and a good chunk of my iPhone contacts just disappeared! They were still in the cloud, but no longer on my iPhone!
• Luckily this has since been solved, but I’m still very wary of MobileMe. I hope they actually get it to a point where it’s reliable enough for me to depend on day-to-day.
• Copy-and-paste. Everyone has been complaining about the lack of copy-and-paste on the iPhone since it came out. I don’t think it’s a horrible issue, but there are times (such as when I can’t forward a text) when I really wish I could do this.
• GPS. Yep, I listed it as one of the best things, but it’s also one of the worst. When it works, it’s awesome. But there are too many times where it just can’t seem to pick up a GPS signal worth a damn, even when I’m not near tall buildings or other signal blockers. I don’t know what the hell is going on with this, but I don’t like it very much.

So those are my opinions about the iPhone. Overall, a fantastic phone with a LOT of potential. (I can’t wait for the next software update to get rid of the 2.0 system bugs, though.)

What do you think?