Behold!  The original utterance of “That’s what she said,” from a 1992 “Wayne’s World” skit on Saturday Night Live, predating The Family Guy by seven years, and The Office by thirteen years.

That is all.

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!

I didn’t hold the highest opinion of Time Warner Cable before, but lately they’ve sunk to a new low.  They want to start introducing bandwidth caps on users but they can’t do this for existing customers who signed up for unlimited internet.  So what do they do?  They offer a new “deal” where you can get cable, internet, and digital phone service for a “locked-in rate” for a year.  Buried in the fine print is the fact that you’d also be signing up for a bandwidth cap.  Even worse, the afore-mentioned locked-in rate requires you to sign a contract for a year of service.  So if you found out after the fact that your bandwidth was capped, you’d have to pay a $150 early-termination fee to get out of the contract.

What is even more ridiculous is that the limit is set at 20GB per month.  When I first read about the 20GB limit, I thought surely that is per day.  That I could live with.  The only way you’re likely to use 20GB a day is if you’re downloading torrents constantly (which I still say is none of their business—courts have already ruled that the ISP is not responsible for what users do on their network).  But 20GB a month is very easy to reach even if you’re not pirating anything, especially if you watch TV online, or if you use VOIP (i.e. Vonage, Skype).  It’s almost as if Time Warner’s internet department has some financial incentive to limit competition from Time Warner’s cable TV and digital phone departments!  No, that’s just crazy talk.

I kinda know someone who will be on national TV this weekend.  Stephanie’s sister’s husband’s sister is Miss North Carolina USA.1  She is in Las Vegas right now preparing for the Miss USA pageant, which will air on NBC this Friday, April 11th, at 9:00 PM.

I was at home with the flu for a few days last week (not an experience I would recommend to anyone), and I did something I’ve never done before.  I watched a few episodes of Walker: Texas Ranger.  I had always assumed, based on the title I suppose, that the show was about your typical tougher-than-nails-cowboy-who-lives-by-his-own-rules-but-has-a-heart-of-gold type.  Turns out, it’s mainly about jumping out of helicopters onto people, and then proceeding to kick them.  A lot.  Like, I think there have been kick-boxing matches with less kicking.  Now I get all those Chuck Norris facts which set the internets abuzz a few years ago.

I also caught a few episodes of Ninja Warrior.  It’s kinda like Gladiators, only without the gladiators themselves (an improvement), and with the difficulty turned up about ten difficulty units.  And that’s on a scale of five.  You should totally check it out.

Now if only we could get Chuck Norris to compete on Ninja Warrior...

Remember when Dane Cook was funny?  That’s what Stephanie and I were thinking when we watched his new special on Comedy Central the other day.  Maybe it’s harder to write funny material when you’re not stealing it.

American Gladiators is back on TV.  (Or would proper grammar be “American Gladiators are back on TV?”)  In any case, Stephanie and I caught the show last night.  It’s kind of like you remember it, except with less stuff happening and more people talking.  In other words, just what you’d expect in today’s post-Survivor reality TV format.  I guess they want you to care about the contestants so they spend time talking about them?  I don’t—I just want to see people get jousted so hard their fingers come off.  And some of the gladiators are clearly trying to make names for themselves (ahem, Wolf, yeah it’s really cute how you howl whenever the camera points at you, but you look like an idiot).

Maybe I’m remembering American Gladiators through the rose-colored lens of memory.  In fact, I know I am.  I was, after all, twelve years old at the height of the show’s popularity.  Still, the new show isn’t entirely without its good points.  For one, the lady gladiators aren’t quite as scary (i.e. manly) as they used to be.  Another improvement is the updated Eliminator, which is now incredibly grueling.  Somehow moving the uphill conveyor belt to the end of the competition makes it a hundred times more difficult.  When the contestants finish, they are barely able to move.  I don’t think it will be long before someone finishing the Eliminator just throws up right on Hulk Hogan’s legs.  That would be hilarious.

I’ll probably keep watching, at least for a little while, although I’m not sure if I would be doing so if there were other shows on TV.

A few days ago I was talking to Stephanie and somehow the subject of ear-piercing came up.  Stephanie said she was seven when she first got her ears pierced, which seemed young to me.  I thought most parents didn’t let their girls get their ears pierced till they were thirteen or so.  She said no—for most parents who make their girls wait till they are a certain age, that age is nine or ten.

Afterwards I was thinking about it, wondering why I had an age of thirteen in mind.  I never had sisters, so it’s not like it was a rule I learned from my parents.  All of my friends were boys, and although some had sisters, I never really saw the parenting process per se.  The closest would have been some of my cousins, but even then I don’t recall ear-piercing being discussed.

Then I remembered that episode of Full House where Stephanie wants to get her ears pierced but her dad says she needs to wait until she is in Jr. High (i.e. about 13 years old), because that’s when D.J. got her ears pierced.  All of a sudden it occurred to me: everything I think I know about how to raise a girl I learned from watching Full House.

That’s a little scary.

If you’re like me you knew there was a writers’ strike but didn’t really understand what it was about.  It finally made sense to me after reading about it on Jenna Fischer’s blog and watching the YouTube video she links to, which shows Greg Daniels, Ryan, Kelly, Mose, and Toby on the picket line (they are all writers on the show).

The gist of it is that contracts were written in a time before the Internet and before TV shows were sold on DVD.  So when someone watches a show on NBC.com, for example, the network considers that promotional material and gets to keep nearly all the ad revenue (whereas the writers/actors get paid whenever a show is rerun on TV).  Similarly, the networks keep nearly all the proceeds of DVD sales.  Ten years from now, digital downloads and DVDs could very likely be the main ways people watch television shows, and it’s not exactly fair that the networks get to keep all that cash for themselves.

And if that’s wrong, then I guess I still don’t understand it after all.

Spoiler warning: If you haven’t seen any of Lost’s third season yet, this post will contain spoilers.  If you are caught up but prefer to not know anything about season 4, even if it comes from the writers and is vague, you might consider this post to contain spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

I think I am now a new level of nerd.  I am blogging about something that happened at Comic-Con.

Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse held a panel discussion at Comic-Con, and you can download the audio of the event, if you are interested.  There is probably video of it out there on your tubes, if you prefer.  In any case, I’ll outline some of the things I found intriguing.

• The show doesn’t start till February, but runs for sixteen straight episodes without reruns.  This isn’t new information, though.

• The filming for season 4 starts in a few weeks, giving them a lot more time to work on each episode.  This also means most of the season will be written, and a good deal of it filmed, before the first episode airs.

• Harold Perrineau (Michael) will be returning to the show in season 4, as an actual cast member (i.e. you won’t just see him in flashbacks).  Michael was never one of my favorite characters, but I am hoping this means Walt will be back in some form.  This leaves one to wonder if Michael actually got off the island and is now returning (with help?), or if Ben lied and Michael will, like Desmond, somehow crash back into the island.

• There will be more flashforwards in the final three seasons.  Starting around 22:30 in the audio, they say:

  At the end of season 1 we sat down and said ... this flashback device is not going to work forever.  The minute that we stop showing the audience revelatory moments from these people’s lives, and the minute that it starts feeling like we’re making it up as we go along, ... we knew that we were going to have to switch gears, and the way that we would be switching gears would be with flashforwards.

• The season 3 DVDs come out in December.

• At some point we’ll find out why Ben was heading across the island when he got trapped in Rousseau’s net (which was indeed an accident, not a plot to invade the survivors’ camp).

• They hope to get to Libby’s story in season 4 at some point (they’ll tell it in flashbacks).

• They haven’t told us about Rousseau’s story yet, because they’ll have to reveal other things that they haven’t gotten to.  We should learn about her in season 4 or 5.

After the discussion, they showed a new Dharma Initiative orientation film, for a new station, “The Orchid.”  This can now be seen on the official website.  You can find some discussion of the video, including screen caps of the frame jumps, by navigating your web browser to the destination of this hyperlink.