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February 22: Well, that was annoying: had my usual fight with macOS Server trying to automate the SSL cert swapout process, culminating in me disabling the email server and reenabling it. Now it tells me I've no domains configured even though they're clearly listed in the on-disk config, and seem to be responding to clients.
February 19: More endings: we finished House M.D. I think it ended as well as it could; I did in fact shout "House, you ASSHOLE" at the TV shortly before Wilson said approximately the same thing, so from that you may conclude that the ending was plausibly in character for the rest of the show. Glaring omission of Lisa Edelstein from the finale, where they pretty much brought everyone else back, which sort of suggests there was more to her leaving the show when she did than is available, say, on some movie trivia website. Anyway. Prime Video is offering us one more show, some sort of series retrospective, so I guess we'll watch that and then we're back to Midsommer Murders.

Had an interesting time over the last two days in the office. A Thing Occurred which required some assistance, for which I volunteered, for which I received a thank you from a half-dozen or so people of various degrees of seniority to me (all the way up to "as high as we promote technical people in this company"). Which, to be honest, was pretty cool.
February 11: And so it came to pass that we completed Star Trek: TNG by watching The Naked Now. This is our last episode, but in some sense it's the first episode of the series; there are visible differences from the two-part pilot which preceded it (Data's makeup has improved, for one, and Troi is no longer dressed as a modernised version of Uhura; however, Wesley is still an irritating little shit) and the story works a good deal better albeit the whole "we're all drunk and oversexed" thing is a bit skeevy. This is a more convincing argument to run a seven-year show, all things considered. I understand it's a remake of an episode from the original series, but you know what? I think that's ok.

(OH it is to laugh. The director of this episode said of it, "It's all quite subtle compared to the original, because the original episode was quite heavy-handed like most of the original episodes were." Yes, because having Denise Crosby suddenly wearing a backless outfit that doesn't have much of a front either is subtle.

Now what?

Well, we've been watching Midsommer Murders haphazardly for years, and at least one of the channels recently started a full rerun, so I've set it to capture the first few seasons at least. We'll see how that goes. American Gods season 3 is also waiting for our inspection, and I'm sure there's another Bosch in the pipeline somewhere...
February 06: The tellybox finally coughed up the missing Star Trek: TNG episodes we had missed (or rather, had recorded, but Virgin Media's DVR replacement process does not care for your recordings...) so we sat down to watch "Encounter at Farpoint". And it's, well, not terrible, but oh my how did this get extended into a seven-year series? Obviously the cast hasn't yet gelled, but honestly if this was my first introduction the the Star Trek universe it'd likely also have been my last encounter with same. One of the jarring things in it is Data: his makeup is perhaps intended to convey artificiality and instead conveys, "man who doesn't know how to has applied cosmetics to self", the stilted speech ("Inquiry: <asks question>") is too stilted, and the whole gimmick about him not understanding the word "snoop" is made more ridiculous by Picard himself immediatly noting that Data has access to all the world's knowledge and can't figure out a simple thing like this. Worf's head looks like a lightbulb, and Troi is completely overdone melodrama in a Uhura-ish short skirt. And the whole storyline with Q and the trial in front of a bizarrely anachronistic crowd works ok at the end of the series, but here it feels like a bad gamble. Oh well. Now that we've watched that two-parter, there's only a single episode left unwatched, and we've managed to snag that as well.
February 05: Vertigo was a bit disappointing. In particular, the literally last-minute twist ending felt cheap. IMDb tells me, "Poorly received by U.S. critics upon its release, this movie is now hailed as Sir Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece.". I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I received this poorly, but I definitely wouldn't rank it over some of Hitchcock's other work that I've seen.

(and no, I don't think Jimmy Stewart's age is the problem, either.)
January 29: The Equalizer 2 is not a patch on the first one. It spends ages setting things up, to the point where you're wondering if there's any actual story, then there's sort of a brief flurry of activity and it's all over. Really disappointing; I see from my notes that the first one had the same slow build, but it was a build - it wasn't random flapping about and then suddenly tension. And really, the whole bit with "let's introduce Caring, Kind Hero to Family Man Bad Guy" and you're wondering how that's all going to work out in the end, and, well, let's just say they may as well not have bothered with the Family Man bit because it didn't seem to make the slightest difference to how the plot would turn out.
January 23: I don't recall if I'd seen The 39 Steps before, but I do recall reading the book and waiting for the twist that didn't come (I think, maybe, I was waiting for apparent saviours to turn out to be in league with the bad guys). This is a pretty good movie, but I can't for the life of me remember if there was a love interest in the original; certainly this seems clumsy and grafted on - "OH! You're handsome but I'm engaged." "Ah yes, but *waggles eyebrows" "OH! My fiancé has been murdered. Are you free?" The other somewhat jarring sense throughout is how capable the protagonist is; someone makes a passing expository remark late in the day to account for this, but this is a guy randomly thrust into international intrigue and before long he's mugged a vicar in a railway station toilet to steal his clothes. Which, you know, people under pressure driven to extremes and all, but really now. I think I'm going to have to read the book again to see how this actually worked in the original.
January 22: Rewatch: Rogue One: it stands up well, 4 years on from when I originally saw it. I'm not sure if I noticed the various hat-tips to the franchise the first time around: there's the obvious "I have a bad feeling about this" which you can't miss, but there's some more subtle stuff going on in shooting angles and scene compositions that harks back nicely to that first outing in 1977 (which, well, I didn't see it then; I really don't know when I did see it). And there was definitely at least one visual nod to Blade Runner, too. There are flaws as well but I think I'd echo what I said the first time around: it's leaps and bounds ahead of what Lucas did with the prequels.
January 21: One of the more amusing facets of having hooked up some home automation: I've got a TRV on a radiator next to the front door which in addition to controlling the radiator also reports the temperature. I collect this data and put it on a graph (to be honest, mainly because I have no idea what I want to do with it, and until I figure that out it can't hurt to keep collecting it). Looking at the graph, you can tell - during current cold spells - when the door has been opened, even if only to receive a delivery.
January 19: Well, I guess as season finales go, "driving a car through your ex-girlfriend's house, injuring your best friend in the process" is pretty dramatic and, uh, final. So that's the conclusion of House Season 7. One season left!