winter

Which is better? Watching half-baked highlights of the Winter Olympics or competing against Michael Phelps?

The answer might not seem obvious to you. After all, perhaps you're not a terribly good swimmer and you're sure you'd embarrass yourself, your family and anyone who might be interested in you on a come-hither basis.

However, what if you competed against the great Olympic swimmer to see who was better at putting golf balls into a plastic cup? Surely you would have a chance. Phelps has terribly short legs and a long torso. This might encourage him to overbalance.

Are … Read more

The death of 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili-- who crashed on his luge practice run just hours before the 2010 Winter Olympics began Friday in Vancouver--wasn't the first signal that something was wrong with the track.

Several Olympic lugers from multiple countries had been calling into question the safety of the world's fastest luge run throughout this past week.

Even Armin Zöeggler of Italy, the top-ranked slider in the world, crashed in training on Friday.

On Saturday, The New York Times reported on the Olympic committee's announcement that the "men's singles luge start will … Read more

A crowd-controlled blimp created by students at Canada's Simon Frasier University is getting ready for its big date with visitors to the upcoming Winter Games.

Just over 3 feet long, the helium-filled WeBlimp is outfitted with a tiny camera that wirelessly transmits video back to a laptop in the "control room" of the two-room media installation. The little propeller-powered airship, created to explore crowd collaboration in the context of navigation, conceptually places observers inside its attached gondola by projecting images onto a wall-size screen and offering a bird's eye view from the blimp's perspective.

But … Read more

After tonight's opening ceremonies, the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games will get down to business: skating, slaloming, bob-sledding, and all the rest of it.

Of course, it's always a challenge keeping tabs on the various events, which is why I'm tickled to have the free NBC Olympics app on my iPhone. Among other things, it serves up a complete interactive event schedule.

That schedule includes a scrolling TV guide so you can easily see what events are being aired during any given day--and on what station (NBC, CNBC, or Universal Sports). The app provides online listings as … Read more

In case you weren't on Twitter or Facebook in the last few minutes, Lindsey Vonn wants you to know that she's feeling a bit better about her injured shin and her prospects at the Winter Games.

"I was really happy to be back on snow today even if it was for only 1 freeski run," Vonn said in a Facebook post. "My shin was still very painful, but I feel like the injury is finally progressing a bit. The pain level has gone down from a sharp debilitating pain to something that I feel I … Read more

With the Winter Olympics finally kicking off, it's time to take a quick look at Vancouver 2010, the "official" video game of the 2010 Winter Games. The title's been out for a couple of weeks, but I finally got around to playing it a bit and in typical Olympics video game fashion, it has just enough positives to frustrate you into thinking about how much fun you might be having had the developer had the time, money, or vision to take the gameplay to the next level.

For starters, as you can see by the screenshots below, Vancouver 2010, which is playable on the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, looks pretty good. And individually, the events themselves (there are 14 of them) are engaging and keep you interested--at least initially. (Critics have said that this game's an improvement over Beijing 2008, which Sega also produced).

But then you start to notice that many of the events have similar mechanics. For instance, the skiing, bobsledding, and snowboarding events have you pointed down a mountain, trying to steer your way to the fastest line. The ski jump and aerials have button-timing controls to master and short-track speed-skating has you button-mashing to maintain top speed and cornering with the left trigger (on an Xbox 360 anyway).

As I said, it's all pretty fun at first and you'll certainly get a kick out of trying out each event and improving your performance to the point where you earn a medal. But what's ultimately lacking is a greater goal and bigger payoffs for victory.… Read more

In a world full of gall, NBC Sports deserves an asterisk.

Sporting events tend to be rather more fun when you can watch them live. You, indeed, might want to watch the Winter Olympics, which begin Thursday, live. Well, NBC Sports is the kind of host that will invite you for dinner and serve you cornflakes, coffee, and a dried croissant--in the restroom.

It seems only yesterday that NBC was annoying people, especially those on the West Coast, with its coverage of the Beijing Olympics. The peacock network takes pride in being able to censor your ability to watch Olympic … Read more

Organizers of the Vancouver Olympics had a pretty simple message to the technology providers creating the massive network to power this month's Winter Games.

"We demand that this is flawless," Chief Information Office Ward Chapin said in a briefing with reporters this week. To meet that goal, Chapin said, there has been a tremendous amount of redundancy built into the network as well as thousands upon thousands of hours of testing.

"I would not want to be the individual that had to go up to Hans the ski jumper after his world record jump and say '… Read more

With the Winter Games in Vancouver only a few days away, a continued topic of conversation among Olympic watchers remains the snow, or lack thereof, at Cypress Mountain.

Although Whistler, home to most of the skiing events, has plenty of the white powder, organizers have been scrambling to get Cypress Mountain ready to host events such as moguls and snowboarding. The enemy has been an unusually warm winter, combined with rain that has further eroded the snow at lower elevations at the venue.

In addition to continuing to shuttle in snow via trucks and helicopters, event planners have now shortened … Read more