Okay so I'm back, and I've got coffee. I’ve no real excuse for not posting except for being really busy.  That and the inevitable blog-apathy that comes in early every year.  If you could graph the frequency with which I posted I’m sure you’d come up with the winter being the least populous.  Right, so after typing that last sentence, I did just that.  I was wrong.  My least frequent posting is done during the summer. Here is the average number of posts I’ve made every month for the last nine and a bit years.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Now	Dec
Avg. Posts	5	5	6	8	8	3	4	3	3	7	6	4

Naturally enough, I also drew a pretty graph about it. So what can we tell from all this?  Well, I’m not the most prodigious of posters, that’s for sure.  That’d be about it really.  I do find it strange that the most frequent time of year for posting is actually in the Autumn, but that’s just me.  Anyway, the reason I was able to get all this data into Excel really easily is that I’ve been working a little on a new design for here.  I know I’ve been talking about this for months, I do have a good excuse for not rolling it out sooner.  I’ve just been really busy with other things, and not in a position to do significant typing with my finger. So, even though I’m still in this cast, here’s a rundown on everything that’s going on at the moment. 

I finished watching Buffy last night.  The ending was good but lacked something I think.  Then again, I was used to having each of the series end with a cliff-hanger, and this one nicely tied up all the loose ends.  It left something for the future, but I guess that never panned out.  Overall it was a brilliant series.  There were high points, such as “Once More With Feeling”, “The Body” and of course “Hush”, and… well not much in the way of low points.  “Once More With Feeling”, was an episode that was filmed as a musical and was so good that I can’t get the music out of my head. Its very Sondheimey, and brilliantly written.  I also have the entire six series of Angel to watch, though I’m a bit tired now, so maybe that can wait for a few weeks. Awesome series though, I have no idea why I didn’t watch it years ago.  If you don’t already know, the guy who created the show is called Joss Whedon. He the one who created both Buffy and Angel, and also Firefly with its spin-off movie Serenity. He also created the excellent series Dollhouse, which is airing right now.  I had been a fan of his long before I knew who he was.

German classes are of course ongoing, though a little slowly at the moment.  There were so few applicants for my course (ie: two) that they decided to change the times around to once a week instead of two.  On top of that, our teacher has been out for the last week, so apart from some homework (which I got mostly wrong!) there’s fuck all happening there.  I thought I had a complete handle on the meaning of the words in the homework – obwohl, falls, wenn, dass, weil, um, damit etc.  English translations would be although, if, that…, at…, with etc, and it turns out I didn’t know them as well as I thought I did.  I actually though I had nailed the meanings of these words about a year ago and had no problem with them. Until now.  Oh well, there’s a major re-learning session coming up I think.

I’m going to be potentially doing some interesting work for James soon, if a couple of quotes that we have sent out are accepted.  More on that as it happens, but there’s a chance to get better at some things I’ve been familiar with but never used extensively in the past.  Oh, and in the next post I’ll tell you about my new mobile.  I’ll start that in a while, just have to go do some things first.

Goddam... you'd think that there would be a spoiler warning on some sites where you get information about things you haven't even seen yet.  Oh no, as evidenced by this image on Ain't It Cool.  Damn them!

I wasn't actually watching the record breakers program mentioned in the last post.  I was watching Enterprise on my laptop.  I've just started series three and it still works.  It is one of the better series I think.  I'm not sure what I'll watch when enterprise is finished... I think I may have the first series of Heroes here on disk, but that's still pretty fresh in my head.  We shall have to wait and see. So, I installed the first Vista SP1 beta today.  I shouldn't have really, it doesn't make that much sense for me to potentially trash my PC when the backups are not available to me... but I did it all the same.  There are some pretty nice additions to NTFS and how files are handled across networks.  I believe is may actually cause Windows to run faster too - though that may be just the power of suggestion. Someone on the beta message boards mentioned that everything was running faster and smoother on his system and that may have stuck in my head.  Hopefully this beta will be good enough that I won't need to re-install within the next... six weeks.  That's how long its going to take until I have all of my equipment back up and running again.

Right them so there's a program on TV at the moment which seems to be shown every week, and apparently has been for many years in Germany.  Its a Record Breakers type of program - with special guests.  Today it is Jennifer Garner and Jamie Foxx doing the press junket for some movie.  Anyway, this program is one of the most popular on German TV, and I just saw another record being beaten. It was one of those silly ones where someone balanced ping pong balls on a tractor exhaust and then tried to get several of them into a basketball hoop in a set amount of time.  It was a success of course... and now some kid is trying to identify individual dolls from a collection of about fifty or sixty simply by rubbing her nose in their faces.  Yawn.

CSI rocked tonight, Grissom got involved with someone finally. Of course, it had to be Lady Heather, just about one of the coolest characters on the show who isn't a part of the team.

Work is completely mad at the moment. Everything for the last fourteen months has led up to the events of the last week - the release and launch of AOL 8.0. I had thought that I would be able to sit back for a while, take stock of where we are and where we're going, but it looks like we're going straight back into the fray with the next version. ::sigh::

There isn't that much else happening really. Too much of my life has been caught up in work lately, so we haven't done much. I have to fix that though, I don't think I really get to spend as much time with Anna as I would like, or she deserves. Weekends won't involve work for a while though, and late nights are going to be rare from now on, which feels real good :-) We're going to Paris in a few weeks, for my birthday. I've never been there before, other than on business, so I think its going to be fun. Anna has been, a few times I think, so she might be a fairly good guide. If nothing else, her French is probably better than mine ;-)

Yesterday was September 11. There was a documentary on BBC which was originally made to be a view of what it was to be a firefighter in New York, from the perspective of a rookie fireman. It turned out that his second ever emergency was the WTC disaster. The guys making the documentary had two cameras operating in New York that day, one following the rookie fireman, and one out with some other guys, getting some practice making movies. By co-incidence, he managed to be in the right place at the right time to film the first plane hitting the tower, and then was in the lobby of the building while most of the action happened. The film was horrifying. I found myself in tears several times during it, and shuddering involuntarily every time I heard the sound made when someone lands after falling 80+ floors. More later, it just got busy...

I've just seen the first episode of series two of The West Wing. Its a two-parter, immediately following on from the end of series one, where there is a shooting at an event Jed and the others are working. Now, I know that Jed and Joss got shot, and I know from further on in the series that both survive, though Joss needs counselling for trauma. This should have pretty much spoiled it for me. It didn't however. I still can't get over how fantastic the script writing is for this show, and how talented the actors are. Between episodes I'm like a junkie awaiting his next fix, and that hasn't happened much in the past. Twenty Four did it for me, though at times it was a little off. Enterprise did it too, but not as much. Going back, I can't actually think of another series that I have watched with as much fervour as this one. I want more, I want it now, and I don't want it to stop... ever. I have some of series two, and all of series three to get through, and series four is due soon I think. It just isn't enough though. My habit must be fed, and I can't accept that I have to wait it to be sated. Therefore, I must lead the life of a criminal, and download the show from the internet. Even with DSL though, this isn't quite the instant fix I need... the second episode of series two isn't going to be downloaded for another eight hours. What the fuck am I going to do between now and then????

There's a scene in the last episode of the second DVD of The West Wing, where it has become evident that the president has become too concerned with getting re-elected next time around, and lost his political fire. Leo and Jed argue about this and Leo shows the president what is going on. Then they decide to get back in the game and stop being so middle-of-the-road. It rocks. John Spencer and Martin Sheen have a magic between them that I haven't seen on screen for a long time. I saw this at about 3 this morning, and was wrecked, and therefore susceptible to being sucked in to the feeling of the moment. I had to see, so I just looked at it again. And again. And I'm going to watch it now.

The West Wing rocks. I'm very tired, and I'm going to be cranky in the morning. Again.

I've just seen the final episode of 24. It rocks!!! The ending is... interesting, and powerful, and not what I had hoped it was going to be. But it rocks :-)
We're going to Munich next Wednesday... and Anna has packed already ;-)