I remember in 1984 watching the Olympics during a family reunion in Michigan. We would gather around at night to watch Mary Lou Retton or whatever U.S. athlete was dominating that night without the soviet teams there.

We watched whatever the one channel on TV showed.

Now here it is 28 years later and I am sitting at my dining room table, blogging on a laptop, tweeting on an iPad, while waiting to watch the live streaming of the 400-meter women’s preliminary heat in London so I can see how Palm Springs’ Lynette Lim does for Team Singapore. Now that’s a technological upgrade.

Suffice it to say they didn’t show a lot of Singaporean swimmers’ preliminary heats back in 1984.

Despite the technological wonders of the current time, we still can’t get live coverage on NBC.

Oh well, I’m enjoying this experiment. It’s currently 3:22 a.m. this NBC Live streaming app isn’t entirely fool proof.  It goes in and out. I keep getting knocked out. However, it looks like the heat before Lynette’s is in action right now. It’s a heat of just two women. Weird. Both girls swam a time about four seconds slower than Lynette did at the 2008 Olympics.

OK. Here she goes. She’s in Lane 1 she’s swimming, she’s swimming, she’s swimming, she’s not in the top half of her heat aaaaaand she finished seventh out of eight in her heat. Her time is … Noooo, they just cut to commercial right when they were revealing her time. Lame. I’ll have to check some of my other apps to get the results.

The dedication to her sport is amazing. Coming all the way to London, knowing you’re not going to qualify for the championship round of the top eight out of 35. Yet still competing for your country. It’s definitely admirable.

You could be the woman swimming in London at 3:33 a.m. Pacific Time or the guy at his kitchen table writing about it at 3:33 a.m. (actually it’s 3:46 a.m. right now). One is living their dreams and the other is, well sipping a Diet Pepsi trying to generate Web traffic.

Oh, I just found her time. 4:18.64. Not sure how she’ll feel about that. It’s a tad slower than what she swam in 2008 (4:17.67). But there she finished 30th and here it looks like she’ll finish, huh, weird it looks like 30th again.The qualifying time needed to finish in the top eight was 4:05.75. In fact none of the eight swimmers in her heat qualified.

First, second, 30th or 35th, the valley is proud of Lynette and she should be proud. I’m glad I stayed up until (3:57 a.m.) to track her. Now to tweet, write an online update and then go to bed.

Kudos to Lynette and good luck in the 800. She’ll swim that at the much more reasonable time of 2:27 a.m. on Thursday.