...and I know anyone who may still be reading these probably wants them to be over by now, too. Well, rest easy, today's is the last one.

Track and Field: The greatest Olympic misnomer (though it doesn't have much competition)... this could easily be 10-15 separate events. And probably should be. This, more than any other event/category of events, is the true Olympics. Well, except maybe race walking. I've recently read an article where it was compared to letting people who can't swim very well compete in the dog paddle, which was funny until I realized that the dog paddle is about the only style of swimming that isn't an Olympic competition (why? We should start a petition to the IOC to include it as soon as possible and correct this enormous oversight immediately!).

Sadly, if you ask NBC, the "field" part of Track & Field doesn't exist, or at least isn't worth any more than a brief mention. Ask me who won the long jump this year, and I'll be clueless (well, I'd look up the results, but you get the point). The most they've shown of any field event is a 5-minute recap, complete with both of the important participants' performances (usually, the American and the winner... maybe a glimpse of the other medalists). Oh boy, how exciting. Quite sad, because the field events, while not as quickly-developing, as, say, the sprints, can be just as fun to watch.

As for the "track", one cannot mention the 2008 competition without mentioning Usain Bolt, who, while not winningnearly as many medals as Michael Phelps in swimming, quickly put doubts even in NBC's minds about who the greatest athlete ever is (and thank goodness... the talk of Phelps as greatest athlete only lasted a couple of days, and I don't know how much more I could take of it). I mentioned before that Phelps won 3 golds "that matter" (to me, obviously not to Phelps or the American public) - one in an individual event, and 2 in relays. Bolt also won 3, and only 1 was in a relay... a more impressive performance by my count. Oh by the way, like Phelps, he won every event he entered, and unlike Phelps, he set a world record in every event he entered as well, a feat much more difficult in track & field than in swimming, where world records seem to fall every Olympics.

But enough comparing the two... they're both great, that much is clear. All three of Bolt's records impressed me a lot... the 100m record, because he was slow to start and was celebrating 15m from the finish, and still set a world record (I shudder to think how fast he might've been); the 200m record, because the record he broke was one that many thought would stand for decades, and he broke it running into a slight headwind; and the 4x100m record... well, first it has to be said that it is not Bolt's, but rather Jamaica's, since it was a relay... this impressed me because they broke it by 0.3s, a huge gap in the world of short-distance running.

I wish Bolt would have run the 400, and the 4x400... he was so dominant in the 200, I just can't see him dropping off so much over just 200 more meters that he wouldn't still win. Hopefully he'll run those in London in 4 years' time. Sadly, the speculation has already begun here that he may have been doping. Odd, no such speculation for Phelps, surely because Americans never dope (ahem... Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin, Marion Jones, anyone?). Anyway, I hope that no Olympians dope, but as that is not the case (several had already been disqualified for it), I at least hope Phelps and Bolt don't. Would be far too disgraceful for their respective sports otherwise.

Now, I recognize there were other track and field events besides those run by Bolt... unfortunately, I can't cover everything (and couldn't cover the field events if I wanted to, for reasons already mentioned), and those were certainly the most memorable.

Trampoline: Not sure why this is listed as a separate sport instead of being just one more apparatus in gymnastics. For what it's worth, its scoring system seemed better than that in gymnastics, so maybe it's not all bad. As for the competition itself, it was pretty interesting, although seemed to me to be quite dangerous... I wonder how many injuries happen in that sport.

Triathlon: Endurance sports such as the triathlon and marathon are unlikely to ever be all that exciting for spectators, myself included. Still, any athlete who participates in them, even if they are slightly crazy, has my respect...

Volleyball: I'm rather surprised by the success the US men enjoyed, considering volleyball is pretty much classified as a "girls' sport" here... with the US women also making the final, it offered plenty of opportunities for TV coverage, which is a good thing, because I found this along with badminton to be the most exciting of the actual sporting events (as opposed to pure athletic competitions like swimming and track & field) to watch. Congrats to the US for the excellent performances, though as with most sports, I wanted the US to lose (what can I say, the media's "patriotism" has the opposite effect on me than on the American public).

Water Polo: This is something I look forward to every time the Olympics roll around, and every time it disappoints. Why I look forward to it is beyond me, as odd as that may sound. Not a terribly boring sport, but there were better, perhaps made worse by my high expectations.

Weightlifting: Never ceases to amaze me how much those guys (and gals) can lift. Perhaps oddly, this was one of the most exciting sports for me, and the TV coverage was pretty good too, leaving me quite happy with it. Saw one competitor get hurt pretty badly, though... a shame, but this event is inherently dangerous, too.

Wrestling: The Greco-Roman variation didn't impress me too much... I said before that there is no Olympic competition for wrestling with one hand behind your back, but this is pretty close in terms of restricting the athletes and artificial rules. The freestyle, on the other hand, was much more fun to watch. The coverage wasn't too extensive in either variation, though. From what I did see, the scoring controversies that plagued the sport (according to what I read online) were nonexistent, fortunately, although there was one rather famous one during these games (I did not see the match that caused it, not even in replay), where a Swedish wrestler thought he was robbed of a victory in a semifinal, won the bronze in his next match, but declared he was not satisfied with anything less than gold, and during the medal ceremony, accepted the bronze medal, then promptly took it off his neck, placed it on the mat, and walked out of the ceremony in protest, for which he had that medal taken away by the IOC.

(Yes, that was one long sentence... I need to catch my breath after that one)

I guess I've seen worse ways to protest (see Taekwondo), and at least based on the few matches I've seen, the scoring was at least mostly accurate. Then again, I don't know too much about wrestling, so perhaps it's just that I don't know errors when I see them.

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Well, that wraps it up. Overall, a good and enjoyable competition; let's hope future Olympics find ways to improve on it (although they're adding more events, I've heard... not a good start). In the meantime, bring on Vancouver 2010!

Not much time for writing today, but will knock out what I can... continuing from yesterday:

Swimming: This may as well have been called "The Michael Phelps Show." 8 gold medals in 8 events, what more needs saying? I will say, though, that I still think he lost to Cavic in the 100m butterfly... every replay I've seen, including the still photos that supposedly prove Phelps won seem to prove the exact opposite to me. But in spite of that, Phelps is clearly the greatest Olympic swimmer, now and ever. As for greatest athlete ever? Well, I don't think he is, though he can't really do anything more to convince me I'm wrong, short of transferring to track and field and beating everyone there too.

At the least, I don't think it's fair to call Phelps the greatest based on his medal count. Swimming is one of the few competitions that I think are what the Olympics are really about, but it also horribly skews the medal counts. In no other sport that I can think of can you win a gold medal for doing things less efficiently than you can. There is no such Olympic competition, for instance, as running backwards, or wrestling with one hand behind your back. Nor did the organizers create a high jump competition for each of the various styles that were used in the old days before the now-dominant Fosbury Flop was invented. No, if you can jump higher than anyone else in the world using the straddle technique, more power to you, but if not, you'd better learn the Fosbury Flop or not compete at all, because you certainly won't be winning any medals for being the best straddle jumper in the world.

Why, then, does swimming have competitions in the backstoke, butterfly, and especially breaststroke, when those are clearly slower than the freestyle? And then you have the individual medleys and medley relays, too... Phelps won only 3 all-freestyle events, and two of those were relays (although granted, those were the only 3 he entered), but was able to pad his medal count nicely with the "slower" style events.

All in all, good sport, good coverage... couldn't have asked for more from an Olympic competition.

Synchronized Swimming: That over there is swimming. This is synchronized swimming. No relation. Pretty much everything I wrote about rhythmic gymnastics yesterday applies here, including the part about Russia winning 2 of 2 in I-don't-know-what.

Table Tennis: Not quite as fun to watch as badminton, but pretty fun. Was quite predictable, though... the Chinese team won even over all the Chinese players other nations "borrowed" for this competition, as expected. I wish it could've been more competitive, but with 1.2 billion people playing it as a national pasttime, like Americans playing baseball, it's unlikely that much will change anytime soon.

Taekwondo: Haven't seen any of this either, except for a replay of one fighter kicking the referee in the face after being disqualified. I hope that wasn't the highlight of the competition, because I heard the scoring was similar to boxing in its atrociousness.

Tennis: Like football, this just isn't that popular at the Olympic level. Still, the top 3 men's players in the world showed up, and two of them got medals, a big improvement from earlier Olympics. And Russia swept the women's medals, why wouldn't I be happy?

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Time's up... Track & Field and the rest of the events to conclude this series tomorrow.

The Olympics may be over, but my rant is far from it. Continuing with the events where I left off yesterday...

Gymnastics: Another judged event, and sadly it seems this is the most popular of the Olympic events, at least here in the US. Well, it got lots of coverage, which at least leaves me with plenty to write about.

The Americans and Chinese were expected to compete for gold in pretty much every event, and it seems that everyone got the memo, including NBC and their commentators, as well as the judges. NBC showed practically exclusively the US and Chinese gymnasts, but that wasn't my main problem with them. My main problem is that they couldn't have assembled a more biased group of commentators and studio "experts." Now, I'm not questioning their knowledge of gymnastics; they undoubtedly know more than I do, but saying something to the effect of "wow, what an incredible routine" after every US gymnast's routine that didn't contain major errors, and brushing off equally (or more) impressive routines by the gymnasts from other countries as merely "pretty good" (and at times nit-picking at the smallest details to give the impression that those gymnasts didn't do as well as the Americans) isn't my idea of expert commentary. Bela Karolyi the studio expert wasn't any better, I'm afraid. My favorite line from the experts to come a bit later.

The judges got the memo too, about which countries are expected to win. It almost seemed as the results, barring major errors on the part of the gymnasts, were predetermined before a single preliminary event took place (and the judges even managed to erase a couple of those major mistakes). I'll give the NBC experts credit, they were right on one count: China was enormously favored by the judges. What they refused to see, though, was that the US was, at least on the women's side, also enormously favored over every other nation that competed (perhaps not quite as much as China, but close). There is a reason China got 14 gymnastics medals and the US 10, while nations such as Romania, Russia, and Japan, traditionally pretty strong in gymnastics themselves, didn't get more than 2, and it had little to do with the quality of their gymnastics. In fact, no country save China and the US got more than 2 medals, and Russia didn't get any. But no, the Americans, in their very American way, would much rather complain about getting silver instead of gold, when it could easily have been no medal at all.

Take two of the most outrageous decisions by the judges, at least if you agree with NBC. On the one hand, you have Alicia Sacramone being edged out by China's Cheng Fei for bronze in the women's vault competition after the latter landed on her knees on her second vault. On the other, you have Nastia Liukin being scored the same as China's He Kexin for gold in the women's uneven bars competition, the tiebreaker giving He the gold. I'm going to discount the tiebreaker here, the rules were established long before the competition began and the gymnasts and experts should have known what the rule was. But the commentators also complained that Liukin received too low a score to begin with, and thus was "robbed" of gold.

Oh, how quickly they forget... in fairness, I agree with the Americans on the first controversy. But one absolutely can not complain about both at once. Yes, landing on one's knees in any gymnastics event should never, IMO, yield scores of 8.5 of 10, which is what Cheng got on her second vault. Sacramone should have probably won bronze (although her own vaults were far from great, and perhaps should have also been scored lower). That is a problem with the scoring system... difficulty matters way too much, and the execution deductions are too minor, even if the mistakes are major. I do not believe I've seen any performance at these Olympics scored lower than an 8.0 (save Anna Pavlova's 0.0 on the same vault competition, only because she started her run-up too early... ludicrous, in my opinion, but whatever), and I've seen a fair number of bad ones. Gymnastics should learn from diving, where a bad dive can be scored a 6, 5, 4, 3... I've even seen some 2.5 scores. In gymnastics, I could probably just walk up to an apparatus and walk away, and if I'm Chinese or American, get higher than a 5.

But everyone here seemed so quickly to forget that Liukin landed on her back in the preliminary round of the uneven bars, and still got an 8.25 score for the execution, good enough to qualify for the finals! So if Sacramone was robbed of bronze, Liukin was certainly not robbed of gold, but instead practically gifted the silver! Oh, and how lucky for her, by the way, that preliminary scores don't count in the finals, otherwise she would also have struggled to compete for any sort of medal, let alone gold. The experts comment on Liukin's fall, and my favorite line of this year's Olympics? "She'll still be in the final, because she's just that great" (emphasis mine).

For what it's worth, in my not-even-close-to-expert opinion, He Kexin did a much better routine in the final of the uneven bars than did Liukin, and that bronze medalist (also from China) Yang Yilin was also better than Liukin, and should have got silver. Not to mention some of the other athletes in that final, who, not being Chinese or American, were far too underscored and should have at least been much closer to the top 3, if not in it.

Yes, Sacramone may have been robbed... I wish the scoring system were different, with bigger deductions for huge errors. Then Sacramone would have likely had bronze. And Liukin wouldn't be in the finals at all. And the US men's team would have never got bronze after two of their three gymnasts fell off the pommel horse. Perhaps if the commentators gave some thought to what they were implying, they wouldn't be so quick to claim that every US athlete who didn't win gold was somehow robbed. A pity that most people who would have seen all these events probably believed the experts on the basis of their expertise (and of their patriotism, which I prefer to call xenophobia), rather than think for themselves.

One more word (OK, maybe a few words ) about another controversy... that of the Chinese women's gymnastics team's ages. They're probably not 16, that much is true. But to me, it doesn't matter what age they are. If the best gymnasts in the world are 12 year olds, they fully deserve their medals, and the other countries need to reevaluate their training methods. International Olympic Committee's president, Jacques Rogge, claims the age limit is there to protect young gymnasts from injuries and long-term effects of practicing gymnastics, but if the fact that China's gymnasts start training at age 3 is so widely known, then so should be the fact that age limits don't help at all... they may not compete, but training is just as dangerous. So either ban China altogether for their training regiment, or let them compete.

Controversies aside, congratulations to Romanian Sandra Izbasa, who was one of only three gymnasts not from China or the US to have won a gold medal, winning the women's floor finals. The other two were Leszek Blanik of Poland winning the men's vault, where no Chinese or Americans qualified for the finals, and North Korea's Hong Un Jong winning the famous women's vault (sadly, I doubt many in America remember who won that event, only who got bronze), where both the Chinese gymnast and the American gymnast stumbled or fell. Both were great accomplishments, but not nearly as amazing as Izbasa's, who won against two Chinese and two Americans, three of the four having pretty clean performances. How good must that performance have been to win over the judges... of course, the American commentators, after 10-15 seconds of silence, declared that performance "pretty good." On to the other events...

Handball: A rather odd sport, but one a bit more interesting to follow than, say, field hockey, IMO. Can't say much about it besides that, since, just like with field hockey, the coverage was sporadic, both finals shown late at night despite several games leading up to those finals being shown during the day.

Judo: Didn't see any of it... nothing I can say about it except that it happened (I think).

Modern Pentathlon: An interesting idea, were it not for the fact that it was conceived in 1912, and two of the five events (equestrian jumping and fencing, the other three being shooting, swimming, and running) have become quite outdated. It seems that neither the Olympic organizers nor NBC had much interest in the sport; I didn't get to see the men's event, and the women's was shown as a mere recap, from which I gathered that the athletes didn't receive some of the benefits of the state of the art stadiums enjoyed by most of the other athletes (the swimming, equestrian, and running events were held at different stadiums than the main competitions in those disciplines; not sure about the other two).

Rhythmic Gymnastics: One of the few events at the Olympics that I actually avoid watching if possible. Yet it seems to have had considerable coverage here over the last few days of the Olympics. Can't believe anyone could actually stand to watch that. And I honestly have no clue how they judge it. Russia won both competitions (don't ask me what the two were), a fact that I ordinarily would be quite pleased with, except that I have no idea what it is they actually did better than the rest of the world. Two gold medals more than they should have had, in my opinion.

Rowing: Yet another event that was rendered difficult to follow by the coverage. Can't say it was the most interesting of events to watch (perhaps because I know nothing about the teams/athletes involved), but it is one of the relatively few that do perhaps belong in the Olympics.

Sailing: Didn't see any of this either.

Shooting: Now there's a fun event to actually do! (OK, most of the Olympic ones are). Didn't see a great deal of it either, but what I did see was pretty interesting. It does, however, seem to suffer from the same problem as archery: the competitors are too good, leading the competition to be decided by who makes the fewest mistakes, rather than who does something great. Hard to say what can be done about it, but surely something can.

Softball: I played softball once, just a couple of months ago, and it was great fun. However, when they (NBC) said it is not really a version of baseball, I laughed. With minor rule changes (shorter game, slower pitches, smaller field), it is baseball! It is being removed from the Olympics of 2012, apparently due to too much dominance by the United States. What irony, then, that in what could be the final Olympic softball game, the US lost to Japan! Like baseball, I won't miss it when it's gone (although unlike baseball, it at least didn't take over the coverage for hours)... I'd rather play it than watch it, anyway.

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OK, I need a break... Swimming and some more to follow tomorrow.

...and because I have spent nearly every waking hour over the last two weeks watching them, and because I haven't written anything here in far too long, I wanted to write about my impressions. And I have a lot of impressions, so prepare yourselves, this will be long.

First off, about the TV coverage here in the USA. Now, I don't want to say I'm disappointed by NBC's coverage; I actually expected it to be quite bad, and despite a few bright spots, it was mediocre at best. An unfortunate effect of the TV business is that the networks are catering to the lowest common denominator in order to bring in the most sponsor money, instead of really covering the Olympic games. The coverage was, as it has been in prior Olympics I've witnessed here in the States, 80% team USA and 20% everything else. A shame. Also, despite boasting all those hundreds of hours of coverage, nearly everything I've seen was taped... maybe not a huge surprise considering it's night in Beijing most of the time when I'm awake, but even the primetime shows were mostly taped even when there were live events going on, and plenty of events that occurred during primetime or late evening here had been delayed long enough to be shown only late at night. I had actually considered switching to a nighttime schedule to be able to see events live, only to find out on the first day of competition that many events that NBC wanted to show taped in primetime or even during the day were not aired live at all.

One excellent step NBC have taken, though, is broadcasting some events live over the Internet. It could use some improvement, as is natural for any first-time endeavor (for instance, as there was no audio commentary for these broadcasts, many of the events were a bit confusing to follow), but in theory, this could well be the future of broadcasting events like the Olympics (then I might not complain about the selective broadcasting, but instead just fire up whichever event I want to watch... I'm sure the TV networks and sponsors are capable of screwing that up too, but I can dream, can't I? ).

On to the games themselves... Before moving on to the actual events, I will say that in my opinion, the majority of these events don't belong in the Olympic games, for different reasons. The Olympic motto is "Faster, Higher, Stronger"... now tell me which of these an event like synchronized swimming falls into. Another group of events is all the sport competitions... I like those sports, certainly, but I believe they need their own separate competitions; football (soccer) in particular already has the World Cup, and players, clubs, and nations just don't take the Olympics seriously enough.

And now on to the individual events, one by one:

Archery: Didn't get to see very much of it at all. What I did see (a couple of event finals) was pretty interesting, but at the highest level it almost amounted to who manages to score fewer 9s than the other competitor, as scores other than 10 and 9 were quite rare. Perhaps they need to score based on exact distance from the center of the target, or just make the innermost rings smaller, or something.

Badminton: Now there's an interesting sport if there was one, although it would still fall under the aforementioned category of not belonging in the Olympics for me. Still, quite exciting and I wish I could've seen a bit more.

Baseball: I'm not a huge fan of baseball in the best of times, and not to say that it hasn't had its interesting moments (although only team USA was covered, from what I saw... didn't even get to see the gold medal match due to that), but due to the games' length, the daytime broadcasts of baseball took away a ton of airtime from the other events, which was the real shame. The other problem was the lack of top players participating... baseball is not coming back for the 2012 Olympics, and I can't say I'll be all that sad to see it go.

Basketball: From the USA men's exhibition game against Russia and their Olympic opening match against China, I predicted right then that the US will not only win the tournament, but that they won't let any team get within 10 points of them in any game. Sure enough, I was right (although Spain nearly spoiled my second prediction in the final, losing by "only" 11)... these guys proved they really are good. On the women's side, equally one-sided, the only difference being it didn't surprise anyone. I heard softball is being removed from the 2012 Olympics due to it being so one-sided... the same applies to an even greater degree to women's basketball.

Beach Volleyball: Why is this an Olympic sport to begin with, honestly? Seen plenty of it over the past two weeks, but just couldn't get interested in watching the US obliterate everyone here too (OK, there were close matches on the men's side, but the US team's opponents seemingly just kept folding when it mattered most). One thing I found hilarious is how the commentators kept saying that May and Walsh would become (and later, became) the first back-to-back Olympic champions "in the history of the sport"... such a feat would indeed be amazing if the sport has been around for 100 years, but these are only the fourth Olympic games where beach volleyball was played! That means that prior to this year, only four teams (two men's and two women's) had the chance to defend their gold medals at all, and I'm not even sure how many of those four actually competed in the next Olympics after winning. Honestly, records are great... if they're not made up.

Boxing: Another bright spot for NBC was here, thanks to the almost completely unbiased selection of matches to cover and the excellent commentary by Bob Papa and Teddy Atlas. Unfortunately, the event itself failed to match NBC's presentation. The scoring was atrocious, and clearly fixed in some bouts... China was heavily favored by the judges, but that at least could be explained... the favoritism toward Cuba was almost equal, and I for one have no idea why, and some fights seemed to be fixed regardless of country; the refereeing was OK for the most part, but was equally atrocious at times. The fighting... well, it was overshadowed for the most part for the scoring and refereeing, although a few exceptional fighters did manage to leave the judges no choice but to declare them the winners.

Canoe/Kayak: Didn't really see enough of it to comment on...

Cycling: Didn't really see a great deal of this, either... from what I did see, this sport seems to be suffering from the same problem as the Olympics as a whole: too many events. I'd say that aside from a few track events of various distances, the individual time trial and maybe the road race, the rest of the events seem extraneous due to some rather artificial rules. Cycling should be simple... he (or she) who crosses the finish line in the fastest time is the winner... events like the "points race" take that simplicity away, with not much in the way of benefits to show for it. Although I must say that even the road race is too artificial... this "ride as a huge group, chase down whoever breaks away, and fight it out at the end (and by the way, the leaders get to relax in the big group as their teammates who have no chance at winning do all the work in front)" thing just doesn't seem like a true race to me...

Mountain biking is perhaps OK... at least on those narrow, bumpy courses, riding as a big group is pretty much impossible. BMX? Well, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but still, it's only there to capitalize on this fad of "extreme" sports, another group which I don't believe has any place in the Olympics. Any sport which requires 3 runs to determine who advances to the next round is clearly too random to be a true competition. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Diving: And here we come to the first of the "judged" events (not counting boxing, but thats not judged in the same sense), yet another group I'd rather not see in the Olympics (yes, the Olympics would be so simple, boring, and short if I were running things... perhaps they need events like this to create controversy and raise interest in the Olympics as a whole). This, in my opinion, is actually the most respectable of the judged events, with little doubt, usually, as to who should win. As in a few other events of late, though, the rules had been changed, and I don't believe it was for the better. Preliminary dives not counting in later rounds is one thing, but why have semifinals that eliminate only 6 of 18 competitors, then? The scores of the other 12 don't matter at all, and they may as well eliminate those 6 after the first round, instead of making them do it again, creating lots of fairly meaningless dives in the process. The final rounds, by contrast, were pretty fun to watch, even in spite of China's almost total dominance, although coverage of only a select few divers made it a bit difficult to truly follow the competition.

Equestrian: Not a big fan of this event... seems rather outdated to me. It also didn't get very much coverage here, so I can't really comment on any specific happenings.

Fencing: Another event that seems outdated, and another that didn't get much coverage. What little I've seen was due to the success of the US women at one of the early competitions... it was pretty funny how every time there was a close call, both competitors would immediately turn toward the referee, scream and pump their fist like they've just won the point. Other than that, though, not much excitement here.

Field Hockey: Watching this event, I begin to see why many people don't like football (soccer). This has all of the scoring (or lack thereof) of soccer, and almost all of its length, and for the life of me, I just haven't been able to really get into a match. The coverage didn't help matters, either... it was very sporadic, making it difficult to follow the tournament... for instance, I saw the bronze medal game, but not the gold medal game.

Football: Also known as soccer, the most popular game in the world has never enjoyed that kind of popularity at the Olympic level, and it's not hard to see why. While the International Olympic Committee is removing baseball due to the lack of superstars, here it is that very committee that prevents most superstars from showing up. The teams, you see, are limited to only three players over 23 years old. This makes for some unusual results, when compared to, say, World Cup play, which hurts the reputation of Olympic football, which leads to even players who are eligible to show up to skip the Olympics, and so on in a circle. Argentina won... what that means, I can't really say.

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OK, that's enough from me for today... the next topic is Gymnastics, and it might take me a whole hour to convey my even-more-negative-than-usual impressions on it... and I do have to go to work tomorrow after these two weeks off.

...plus, I haven't written anything here in a while, so why not?

Took last week off work... then they told me I had to come in on Saturday... I didn't realize I had to put Saturdays on out of office notices, but I'll remember that next time I go on vacation. Best include Sundays, too, just to be safe. All of you reading might think about that too, next time you take time off work, lest your vacation end up a bit shorter than expected. But anyway... at least I got overtime for coming in today.

Went to the IT Symposium yesterday... yes, I've already graduated and have no plans for going back, but I wanted to watch my friends' presentations and it's not like I had anything extremely important to do on vacation (as if I ever do). Was pretty fun, and they did well, too... between the two of them, they won 5 of the 7 awards they were up for. Couldn't be happier for them.

Still, I left there just a bit ticked off...

You may recall (or just read the bottom of the "...Well, Not Far Anymore" blog a bit further down ) my disappointment at having been beat out for the Outstanding Computer Science Senior award last semester... At least, that's what I thought for 6 months. But yesterday, I was looking at the plaque with all the winners of said award, and noticed a funny thing: in at least two separate semesters, there were four winners. No doubt (though I didn't pay much attention to the rest) there were plenty more semesters with two or more winners. So it turns out I wasn't beat out... merely that for whatever reason the professors deciding the award didn't think I satisfied its criteria.

That alone was bad enough, but then both of my friends who were there won that very award... nothing against them, they both deserved it, and I'm happy they won (I think they, like me, thought they were competing against one another )... but I'd done everything they had while I was there (quite literally, since the 3 of us were always in the same group), and then some... heck, one of them said I was directly responsible for his graduating on time.

Yes, it may be a minor thing on a generally good day... but I still feel robbed. Now I know what sports players feel like when they complain about the refs. Those medals were nice, too... *stares at medals with envy*

All right, enough of that, I'll miss Naruto if I keep whining too much longer. Have a nice day, everyone!