I could decipher GSM stuff: "Full-rate Traffic Channels (TCH/F) and half-rate Traffic Channels (TCH/H) are allocated together with a low bit-rate Slow Associated Control Channel (SACCH)." Or I could decipher JavaScript stuff: "Note that unlike C, C++, and Java, JavaScript does not have block level scope." (That doesn't make sense! Java and JavaScript are the same thing! I think...) Or, I could watch "live from the Ice Sheet at Ogden: Curling!" Hey, the point of the PPLP was to learn something, and I hadn't known the first thing about curling. So, in the spirit of self betterment, I absorbed the mysteries of curling. "Their shoes are SO slippery. Hey! Actually, it's only the left shoe. Curling is the coolest."

Okay, last Olympics, with the limited coverage that curling gets in the USA, I was like, "Look, it's that sliding stones thing. Those people are concentrating so hard on nothing! What the hell are they doing?! Hey, weren't the Olympics supposed to be on?" By the end of last Olympics, I had copped on to the fact that curling was actually an Olympic sport (for the first time), and my understanding had advanced as far as "Is it really so dusty that they have to sweep that often?"

But after a few days of avoiding half scope block channels, I was like, "I think they'll try to draw one directly into the house rather than getting rid of the guard. There are only two stones left in this end, and the other guys are lying one." I was also trying to feel like I had learned a lot during my time in England, so I added comments like "If your cell phone supported untyped variables, we could GSM that URL and ask the EuroSport guys what they think will happen. But that technology is Third Dimension, so it won't be here for a while yet. Besides, if EuroSport doesn't have a 3D license, they'll get kicked off the air. They better go down to a government auction, (you know, the kind with the repossessed cars and seized drug traffickers boats) with about thirty 'thousand' pounds. The English mean what we would call a billion when they say a thousand." Every so often, though, it would be obvious that I had misunderstood something, and I had to correct myself, as in "I was wrong! They're getting rid of the guard stone!"

My addiction to curling was just the latest aspect of my now "unemployed and avoiding self-imposed work with access to 24-hour-a-day coverage" case of Olympic Fever. Of eight biathlon events, I had only missed one. I had not only seen Janica Kostelic of Croatia win two Alpine golds, I had watched her win each one twice, live in the evening and again the next morning on replay. And just as the biathlon events closed, the ice hockey quarterfinals started.

Hockey is the only Olympic sport shown on British EuroSport that does not have British commentators. The commentators are Canadian, with comically Canadian accents. I wish I could type their accent. "The quarterfinals are single elimination, so the losers go home. We've got all four games coming to you live overnight tonight, so get the corn popping and the coffee boiling and join us for all this great hockey. As I said before, the losers go home!" The play-by-play guy seemed utterly preoccupied with the idea that the losers go home. He said it about fifty times.

In fact, he just about hypnotized me with his repeated mantra. I had gone in to turn the TV off. Everyone else had gone to bed. But I got sucked in to the first period of Russia versus the Czech Republic. "I have to watch," I thought, "The losers go home!" During this period, it was revealed that the Czech Republic was the defending gold medalist from Nagano. It was revealed through statements like "The Czechs are down. If they don't turn it around, the defending gold medalists will be headed home!"

This got me thinking. Czechoslovakia split in late 1992. They had won the silver four times and the bronze four times, but never the gold. I would have thought that by dividing into two, they would be weaker. But apparently not. Two Olympics later, with Hasek and Jagr, the Czech Republic had won. They were in the quarterfinal again in 2002. But Slovakia was not. It seemed pretty clear to me where the hockey chaff came from in the silver medal squads of old Czechoslovakia. "Yes, the stick has a front and back! You're a Slovak, aren't you?"

Part of the reason I watched the Czechs for a period was that Hasek, "The Dominator", was in goal again. He had played so well the previous Olympics that he could have entered the Games as the Republic of Dominik Hasek and tied every game 0-0. Maybe he could even have scored the length of the ice as time ran short and the other teams pulled their own goalies so a sixth player could pounds shots at him. That guy is like Wonder Woman in hockey pads. (Wonder Woman in hockey pads... ooohh...)

In one of the very few hockey games I have seen live, Hasek was in goal. Thanks to the season tickets of my friend Michele, I got to watch him in goal for Boston University. I did a web search to verify this, but his official record goes from the Czechoslovakian league, up until 1990, directly to the Chicago Blackhawks in 1991. I guess he just decided to help BU crush the rest of NCAA Hockey East while the Blackhawks waited for the INS to process his H1B. ("Okay, sirs, and what will his job description be? Goalie. Okay. And that will be 40 hours a week?")

In a weird quirk, the lobby of BU's Walter Brown Arena has a display that mentions somebody with my last name. In the 60s, BU had an All American hockey player named Herb Wakabayashi. That's not a name you see every day, and almost never associated with "All American athlete".

Watching the Czechs lead me to another thought. It occurred to me that there was both a Slovakia and a Slovenia in these games. Huh?! In high school, I had memorized the capital of every country in the world. But 13 years of "The Fall Of Communism" and Balkanization (and using my brain primarily to prevent air from rushing into my skull) had left me at "Slovenia is country?!" (Man, if the capital isn't Slovenia City, I haven't the foggiest.)

I decided that I could not justify pulling an all nighter for Olympic hockey quarterfinals. Besides, I didn't want to risk missing a morning highlight segment that might show me a Kostelic gold for the third time. As I was drifting off to sleep that night, I had one piece of PPLP insight: satellites are not directly part of consumer mobile phone networks. I realized that there was no way that a little pocket phone with a small battery optimized for talk duration could have enough power to reliably send a cell phone signal into space. Besides, if it could, then it would mess up nearby cells, making the whole low-power insight of cellular moot. There is absolutely no way that ordinary cell phones connect to satellites. Unless I am wrong.