Blogging the Torino Games

Hi folks -- so yesterday, we had another celebrity appearance on campus: Men's figure skating champ Michael Weiss stopped by to do an appearance on the Sports Bloggers Live Internet radio show (and podcast):

Photo courtesy of Michael Weiss

Michael is a three-time U.S. National Champion, two-time World Bronze Medalist, and two-time Olympian. He grew up (and still lives) in the DC metro area, and he's blogging the Winter Olympics for the Sports Bloggers Live team. Here's his Journal:

Michael Weiss on Turin

Naturally, I managed to get a few photos.

First, here's Michael with the Sports Bloggers Live crüe:

That's Michael on the left, with fellow sports bloggers Jamie (Mr. Irrelevant himself); Kevin of The Lush Factor; Chris of Saved By the Blog; and Erin of The Year of the Bird.

Also, guys, I know it's ultimately my fault because I took the photo, but for future reference: It's customary to put the celebrity guest in the middle.

Here, we see Michael with Noelle; Noelle's been blogging The Road to Torino, and she will also be heading over to Turin in a few days to do some liveblogging of the games.

If you'll notice, Noelle is wearing official 2006 Winter Olympics Team USA apparel; she claims it was purely coincidental.

Here's another shot of Noelle:

The screen name that she uses for her blog is torinoelle, which you'll note is a clever mashup of "Torino" and "Noelle" that also produces "Torino Elle", which probably doesn't make proper grammatical sense but I still think is cool. So kudos on a clever screen name.

Finally, unlike my outing at the PostSecret exhibition, this time I did remember to ask someone to take a picture of me with Michael:

On a photo note, the original was really overexposed -- I fixed it to the extent of my limited abilities, but it still looks washed out. (As previously mentioned, I will blog about some basic photo editing techniques and resources in a future entry.)

Lastly, I could have pretty easily added the photos as an AOL Pictures gallery (which typically works well for a sequence of photos), but since it was only four pictures, I decided to just keep them in the entry of the blog. When I do this, I typically pick a width of 450 pixels, which seems to work well with the 3-column layout.

Here are my instructions on how to use File Manager to add photos to your blog (like I did here.)

Anyway, if you're a fan of the Winter Olympics, don't forget to check out Michael Weiss on Turin and The Road to Torino, and listen to Michael's segment from Monday's show.

Thanks -- Joe

P.S. I was originally going to title this entry "A Blogger of Olympic Proportions", but tales of the IOC putting the beatdown on people who abuse (in their view) the term "Olympic" make me nervous -- they might send some of those skiers with guns after me. Talk about a chilling effect on speech.