Today is a bit of an off day for me. We had an all-hands meeting at 09:00 so I came in at 04:00 and slept for 4 hours, then went to the meeting which lasted almost two hours, then went to sleep for a couple of hours. Now I'm mostly awake but not really sharp. Good enough to do most things but not high-level thinking that I need for some of my work.

The problem with sleeping at work is that I snore. I'm kind of self-conscious about that at work so I keep waking up just as I start to snore (at least I think I'm just starting to snore, maybe I've been snoring for a few minutes). I try to sleep on my side but the bed thing is not that comfortable, although much nicer than a sleeping bag.

There is also ambient noise to be worried about. People walking by and talking keep me awake, even if I'm tired. Strangely, I can put on my headphones and listen to music (and not necessarily sleepy music) and I do go to sleep. I guess I'm so used to listening to music and treating it as a background hum that I can ignore it when I'm tired.

Looks like I'm going to have a lot of taped shows by the end of this week. At least a good 12 hours, even after whittling a bit of it down nightly. So I'll probably be spending Sunday watching the tapes and clearing them so I can record new stuff on them next week. Looks like I'm not going to be watching any movies for a while, unless we don't game on Saturday. We'll see what I can do about it.

The annoying thing about Pax is that they're not showing Remington Steele in order. Not only that, for the last couple of weeks their programming has only been accurate for one week. Clicktv shows the programs out to two weeks, but only the first week is accurate, the second week is corrected by the time I check again on Sunday. It just means I have less confidence at times so I tape to a scratch tape and then transfer to the proper tape, which takes an extra 20 minutes compared to taping it correctly in the first place and watching that tape. That time adds up with so many things to watch.

I didn't watch much of the Olympics. The closing ceremonies were on Sunday and a happened to catch the end when they set off all the fireworks. It wasn't that impressive. Fireworks can only be just so impressive. They talked about the river of fireworks which was true, fireworks all along the river from the stadium to the harbor, but it wasn't well coordinated. It would have been cool to see it start at the stadium and wind it's way to the harbor like a snake or just a firebug, but they just lit it all at the same time.

I guess the Olympics were a big deal. Certainly movie attendance has been way down during the Olympics. But I don't hear much talk about them at work or online. The United States received the most medals, with Russia coming second. China was third and they have the most potential for overtaking the US in the future. Australia, buoyed by home country fever, was fourth in the medal count and the now united Germany was a close fifth.

It's strange that the Olympics promotes all this goodwill and relations between different countries, considering that the focus is competition among the many countries. There is a spirit of shared hardships, I suppose. Much like any other shared activity that requires a lot of sacrifice and effort and will to see through. I didn't see enough of the games to comment, but one of the knocks against NBC was the way they jumped from sport to sport, making it hard to maintain a flow. At least they tape-delayed it, which is not good if you get the news before the game is aired, but fine if you don't know what the results are.