If you are a cycling fan like me, then you are gearing up to watch the final grand tour of the summer, the Vuelta a España. Fans in the USA have few options for getting their fix of these races, which stretch out over three weeks. Cable subscribers who have access to the Versus channel can catch the Tour de France, but Versus does not broadcast the Giro d’Italia or the Vuelta. Another option is to try your luck with websites that stream the European broadcasts live. Although free and relatively easy to find thanks to sites like Steephill TV, this approach has some drawbacks.

The biggest drawback for me is timing. As these races take place in “The Europe”, they start early in the morning for viewers in North America: 8 am EST. That’s 5 am on the West coast! Time-shifting with your DVR is not an option here so if you need your sleep or have to get to the office, you’re out of luck. You’re going to miss most — if not all — of the day’s stage.

Thankfully NBCSports offers a subscription service for each of the grand tours. NBCSports streams each stage live, as well as provides an archived option so you can watch the entire stage at a more convenient time. Perfect! This is exactly what I need! I signed up to view the Tour, and was psyched.

The honeymoon was short-lived. By the second stage, I came to find one glaring flaw in NBCSports’ site design: Logging into the site to reach the cycling dashboard, I was presented with a page containing a few elements: A big button that took me to the day’s stage streaming video or the archived video, a map and a leader board WITH THE CURRENT RACE LEADERS. (Click on above image.) For users like me, who were excited about being able to watch each stage on-demand — say, after work rather than live — that leader board spoiled the fun and thrill of the race. And like clockwork, NBCSports dutifully updated the leader board at the completion of each stage. So while I’d do my best every day to avoid spoilers and news of the day’s stage, each site visit would dispel the magic as I’d be confronted with any shake-ups in the day’s standings once I tried to actually watch the thing. By the third stage, I had come up with a ridiculous workaround: I’d cover half of my monitor in an attempt to block out the leader board, resulting in my having to navigate the site blindly, all the while trying avoid ruining the ending.

Surely I’m not the only one who was using the site to time-shift my viewing of the Tour de France. This daily frustration led me to wonder: Did NBCSports do any research at all on who their users might be, and how those users might be using their site? The streaming and archived videos were available to US residents only, so they had to know that the live broadcast times were problematic. Were they thinking that it was just a matter of access? A quick Google search, or a short conversation with a cycling fan, would have alerted NBCSports to a site like Steephill TV where dedicated fans can find a stream. Did they consider hiding the leader board under some sort of spoiler alert tab? Even Steephill, a rather unsophisticated site (and free,) has a means of shielding the race results from their users. What is the point of archiving footage if not to accommodate the time-shifting viewer?

Sporting events are thrilling for a variety of reasons, one of the main ones being the Unknown. The beauty of an event is that it is happening live, and no one – not even the athletes – knows the outcome. Most of us cannot watch every stage of a 3-week long bicycle race as it unfolds in real time. I applaud NBCSports’ effort to offer archived Tour stages to fans, but giving away the ending before we even watch the race spoils the fun. Making archived events available is really not enough. It’s about the user experience! NBCSports has to do a better job of understanding the nature of sports-watching, and of respecting the emotional investment their users have made, particularly those who have shown their loyalty by pulling out their credit cards for exclusive online access. More importantly, NBCSports needs to find ways to preserve the excitement of a live event without sacrificing the anticipation and anxiety that make sports worth watching.

Spectacular Brooklyn Heights Opportunity!

Brown door with debris.

The influence of Facebook’s vote-up approval matrix crossing over in the physical world. Gives new meaning to “writing on someone’s wall.” Or is this case, the MTA’s.

In the not too distant past, pancake palaces provided syrup in a pitcher. Sure, the retractable self-sealing mechanism didn’t prevent drips or stickiness, but it also didn’t choke our landfills needlessly. And whatever became of the pat on a mat with a hat? This was the old way of providing a single serving of butter: it was a “pat” of butter on a “mat” (biodegradable square of waxed paperboard) with a “hat” (a little square of wax paper on top.)

Convenience can have far-reaching consequences.

Something to watch while the data is logging

I’ve been logging the ambient light levels for a project I’m working on. In the process of developing a system that records dawn and dusk, I created a little program for an Arduino that sends values from a photo resistor to Processing. Processing then records the values with a time-stamp then after 24 hours, spits out a text file with the data.

Here it is for you, in case you ever have a need for something like it. You can easily swap out a photo resistor for any input you like, and change the timeframe to meet your parameters.

Here are the links to download the Arduino code and the Processing code.