What's it all about, Alfie?

I was flipping through Netflix a while back, and came across a updated take on Sherlock Holmes done by the BBC in 2009 to 2010. It was updated to current day, and the really nice effect they did was to display Holmes' observations as little white, pop-up text near the clue so that we in the audience can get the clues without Holmes being a blabber-mouth. The effect was perfect. Holmes still appeared to be the genius pulling deductions from thin air, but we knew how he did it. Fantastic fun.

The series was a three episode run, and I read somewhere they are planning on releasing three more in the fall of this year. Great news. But that's not the real reason for this post. The real reason is what I found because of watching (and rating) Sherlock Holmes. Netfilx's suggestions included another BBC show - MI-5, or as it was known when aired on the BBC, Spooks. Very interesting show.

It's basically a dramatization of a group of folks in MI-5, and their professional and personal lives. What's been very interesting to me is the ability of the producers to kill of main characters. In a US production, it'd never happen with such speed. Middle of the season, and you're shot in the head. End of the season, and you're out. I think there is probably only one or two characters that make it through the eight seasons. Harsh, to be sure.

But what an interesting show. Well worth watching.

It's been several weeks since I posted anything. It's been a hard time on many levels, and it's gotten me to the point that I just couldn't bring myself to write a thing. There was certainly a large component that was work. Things have been very unsettling at The Shop recently, and it's only very recently that I've been able to get some amount of distance from these issues and put them into a little bit of perspective.

But home has been stressful as well. Certainly, it could be argued that the one is a contributing cause of the other... working 13 hours days with a hour plus commute means that I am home very little time in the evening before I have to get some sleep for the next day. I certainly can't blame the family for this, but they certainly have added to the stress and feelings of helplessness and drifting.

So it's been a tough couple of weeks. I'm not exactly sure what's happening, or what will happen. I do know there have been a lot of updates to Google Chrome dev - it's now at 15.0.849.1 and doing fine. I'm not sure about all the update posts... It's nice to look back at them and see the update history, but after a while it seemed like the only positive things I wrote about were the software updates. That really started to contribute heavily to the de-motivation.

So today I decided I needed to write this down. I'm not sure that it's going to make a big difference in things, but maybe it's just the act of writing again that I needed. Maybe it's just taking the time to think about things in a slightly larger context that helps make things look a little less gloomy. I sure would like it to be that easy.

Well... that's the source of the silence. Self-imposed. Maybe I'm turning a corner.