I'm in a break between sessions, so I thought I'd scribble down a few lines. It's been more of the same, the last couple of days. I found a way of skipping the last session of the day yesterday, and darted back to my hotel so that I could work out while I still had some energy. After that, my poor night of sleep caught up with me, and I took a long nap until dinner-time.

This morning, I slept in disgracefully again, and didn't even wake up until 8.20. At least I finally feel like I'm caught up with my sleep. We have half hour breaks between each session, and it's a time where you go out into the hotel lobbies and look for familiar faces to pass the time with. Although I'm starting to feel as if I know a lot of people in the company now, I still suffer, every now and again, from a weakness of mine, a relic of childhood, the feeling that nobody is really interested in me. I know it's crazy, because, deep-down, I know I'm an interesting, unique individual (jeez, I'm starting to sound like that guy on Saturday Night Live). But put me in a situation like this morning where I spot an office colleague, Heike, standing around by herself, and I go up to her to chat for a while, and I can't help but feel that she's just biding her time waiting for someone really fun and interesting to come along.

I do, however, have a very good friend to fall back on, Mark, a man I hired at my old company several years ago, and who now works for my present company in the same capacity as myself. He's an unusual individual; about ten years older than me, overflowing with jovial bonhommie, and entirely unself-conscious (you should see what he wears when we go running together!). We first bonded on a shared interest in art and literature, our similar views on politics, and a recognition of mutual respect for our technical abilities. Yet despite our similarities, I can also see that there's something in our backgrounds that has made us enormously different. Like when he greets me with, "How are you, guy?" or when I overhear him talking, in a tone of boyish love, on the phone with his six-year-old son. He's that rare person in the world of computer-programming: a people person; he remembered Jed's name, for example, weeks later after meeting him just once briefly; and everybody I've ever introduced him too has liked him immediately. Except for Jed, come to think of it, who, I think, mistrusts over-effusive people; that's a British trait, really - don't know how Jed, an Italian-American, acquired it.