I was surprised there was no recycle option here, so I picked "repurpose" as the closest choice. Last year I took an old PC tower, flatscreen, dead battery back up, and several old cables to Best Buy for their recycling program. Quick, easy, minimal effort.

I turn everything off: computer, speakers and monitor. The LEDs that remain for me are modem and battery backup since they are always "on."

Wow I guess you win... I hope you have blackout curtains for the bedroom at least.

I voted 1-3. However, I place cards in front of my 2 lights every night and remove them on waking. The thought of putting tape (can leave residue!) on my electronics is horrifying.

I totally forgot about this! Great point.

I looked at the three websites linked above, and they didn't really seem that bad to me. The author of the blog doesn't say if he can read Japanese or not, and it should not be assumed that he can for the fact that he wrote the blog entry in the first place. I think that probably makes a difference. Just looking at the language itself makes it seem more complicated than it might be.

Something that I've noticed on various Asian sites over the years is that they seem to be mainly text based, displaying a lot of information right when you go to them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for the Asahi Shimbun or it's English page. It's a newspaper, it should have a lot of information displayed right in front. So should the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (linked above). The New York Times has one of the best newspaper websites around, mainly because it uses very few images and displays a lot of information right on it's front page. Other local newspaper websites I've visited leave little to be desired. I think if the New York Times website were written in Japanese, one might feel the same way as the blog author.

Was this true only online, or also in the live broadcast?

The Opening Ceremony shown in the US on Friday was not live. In fact, right at the beginning it said "Previously Recorded." On CNN in the afternoon, they even had an article titled "Chinese president declares Olympics officially open," which is an event that takes place in the Opening Ceremony. China is 12 hrs ahead of the US East Coast. It could not have been shown live, as there were fireworks and darkness throughout the ceremony that daylight would have made impossible.

As far as the order goes, they did mention a couple of times during the television broadcast that the order was not what we were used to, and explained the stroke-number-system that the Chinese organizers were using. It was a bit odd watching, but it made sense to me. Glancing at the list on Wikipedia, I seem to remember the countries being ordered that way. So the TV broadcast and the Wikipedia lists match.

They also briefly showed us the countries that we missed while we were away during the commercial break.

I'm not going to watch the online version, so I can't compare to that. The Parade of Nations is very boring, and I can live until the Winter Olympics in 2010 before seeing it again.

One way to compare the accuracy between the TV broadcast and the online version would be to look at the bottom third graphics. Because of the different order system, they had a dimmed out preview of the next three countries, in a slider that moved along. So, if the online version has those graphics, and the images presented match up with the list shown on Wikipedia, then it is the same version... Yes, I know they could have edited those too, but I'd rather not get out my tin foil hat.