I was looking for a listing of the broadcast schedule for the Beijing Olympics that begin tonight, and I had trouble finding anything in a format that was close to what I wanted. Fortunately, as a programmer, I am used to taking existing data and manipulating it into a format that I want, with the help of a regular expression or two. The idea was to have something very compact that I could print out, that would be useful when deciding what to record on our DVR. I figured I’d share what I made.
2008 Olympics Schedule in PDF format (probably your best bet)
2008 Olympics Schedule in ASCII text format (not very pretty)
A few notes:
Schedule is subject to change. If it does, blame NBC and China.
I used data from TeamUSA.org because it was the closest format I found to what I actually wanted. If it is wrong, blame them.
All times are correct for the east coast and most are correct for the west coast. Otherwise, I’ll quote the source data: For NBC primetime and late night, all times listed are ET/PT. NBC weekday daytime show airs at same time in all time zones. For USA, MSNBC and CNBC all time listed are ET. For Oxygen all times listed are ET/PT.
The data is sorted by air date, to make it easier to pick what to Tivo in the next 24-hours. If you’re trying to find when a certain event occurs this probably isn’t the format you want.
The data is very compressed because it was intended to be printed. Through the magic of columns and margins I got it to fit on just two pages. I wanted to make it compact, because everything I’ve found online is either a huge spreadsheet or a huge list.
I have omitted the listings for events streaming from NBCOlympics.com because this was intended to help with DVRing.
I have omitted the Telemundo listings because I don’t speak Spanish.
I have omitted the Universal HD listings because they all said “24 hour coverage.” No need to repeat that every day. (The listings for USA were almost as vague with 12-hour blocks, but they at least listed the events that would be shown.)
I’ve omitted NBC Olympics Basketball and Soccer channels because: 1) it is pretty obvious what they air; 2) I don’t know if we get them; and 3) if we do I still don’t have any desire to watch basketball or soccer.
Be sure to watch in the HDs if you can. 6.75 times more pixels FTW!
