I’ve created a compact (fits on one page!) version of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics TV schedule. (Similar to the one I made for the 2008 games.)  And, like last time, I thought it’d be polite to share it with the world.

You can download it here (PDF format)

A few things to note:

• Times were retrieved from nbcolympics.com, on 2010.02.12. They are subject to change.

• Times are for east coast United States time zone. They’re also in military format to conserve space and avoid ambiguity.

• I don’t care about hockey, and there are a ton of hockey games, so I didn’t include them. If you’re into hockey this isn’t for you.

• Whatever aired on NBC from 8pm to midnight is usually re-aired at 1:30 am that night. I didn’t include that on my schedule.

• Some of the curling events are probably re-airings of the same events, but I’m not sure. I left out some that I thought were re-airings which might not have been. But does anyone really need to watch more than an hour of curling every four years? Just pick one hour, watch it, comment about how it’s such a weird sport and the people look so funny with their brooms, then forget about the sport entirely until the 2014 games in Russia.

• Universal and Universal HD air stuff nearly every day, but it looked like it was all recaps so Ieft it out.

• This was a bit tedious so it’s quite possible I made a typo or two.

• Feedback always welcome

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 Microsoft Word format

• 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!

This past Tuesday was Valentine’s Day, as I’m sure you’re aware.  I suggested to Stephanie that we go out to eat that night.  She said it would be crowded, but I said we’d leave early and get there by about 6:00.  I mean, it was a Tuesday night, and no one gets off work for Valentine’s Day, and who likes to eat that early anyway?  Turns out a lot of people.  We got to The Olive Garden at 6:00, to be told there was a “130-150 minute wait”!  We decided to go next door to the Red Lobster, where the wait was only an hour, then we went to the Toys’R’Us nearby to pass the time.

Now I know what you’re thinking- Kip!  You are SO clever!  I mean, I bet you’re the first person to notice that Valentine’s Day can be abbreviated “VD,” an acronym most of us associate with “venereal disease.”  That is SO clever!  I mean... wow!

While that is true, I ask you to please refrain from devoting your comments to telling me how clever I am.  I know all about it (I was there when I wrote it).

In other news, I mailed off the Nielson Ratings packets this morning.  If you’re curious how the system works, I’ll give you a quick rundown of the things I found interesting (see also Stephanie’s previous post on the same topic).

• They first contact you by phone, ask you a bunch of questions, the last being if you’d like to participate.  After you say yes, they tell you they’ll pay you fifteen bucks.

• Then they send you a TV Diary for each TV in your house.

• That $15 they send you is in cash... like, a Lincoln and a Hamilton.

• The diary is a grid, with columns for each person in your house on the right.

• Recording in the diary can be a little tedious.  You have to record the channel call letters or name, the channel number, the name of the program, and who watched it.

• If a program was DVR’ed (as most everything we watch is), you have to list the date and time that it was recorded as well.

• Sweeps week runs from Thursday through Thursday... so we had two Thursdays to record.  Makes sense I guess, since Thursday is the most watched TV night.

I enjoyed being a datum.  In fact, I generally do.  People will call me on the phone and ask me if I’d like to participate in a survey.  “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment,” I always tell them.  Well maybe not, but I should try to remember to do that next time.  It’s just refreshing to know that a dataset reflects me, because a lot of times you hear statistics and think “Where did they get these numbers?!”  Especially for something like TV, that matters, unlike irrelevant things like psychology.  However, I was disappointed that we were selected during Olympics week, as many of the shows I normally watch were either reruns or just not aired.  But there is a spot at the end of the diary for comments, and it asks you to list any shows you normally watch but didn’t get to during this week.

People can come up with statistics to prove anything.  Forty percent of all people know that.
  —Homer Simpson