It's gone all quiet...

Boy, am I glad to see the back of April.

I spent most of the month feeling like absolute crap, thanks to a viral infection that I still haven't shaken off completely.

Work (when I've been there - see earlier comments re: viral infection) has been less than great. The requirements for the project I'm working on were still changing three days after we were supposed to deliver to testing. Management are conspicuous by their absence from involvement in the project - which might be a good thing, apart from all the cross-division co-ordination that needs to happen in order to make this thing work.

To cap it all, I got home from Eastercon to some rather unhappy news (which I won't go into here).

So, here's hoping that May works out a bit better

Just Seen: Battlestar Galactica (2003)

[IMDB - Official Site]

It's actually rather good.

Being an SF-obsessed 8/9/10-year-old, I watched pretty much all of the original, but I wasn't much of a fan - even at that age, the whole seventies-US-ian-"family"-viewing-ness of it drove me up the wall. As for Larson's endless recycling of effects footage... (It was a good shot the first time, but I really didn't need to see it another 47 times to prove it)

Ahem. I digress.

While there are numerous nods to the original (spot the blueprints of old cylon centurions, Basestars in the museum, et cetera) it's a gigantic cosmic reset. Several of the lead characters have familiar names, plus the odd characteristic (e.g. Starbuck's cigars) and the plot is vaguely the same as the original pilot (the cylons attack the twelve colonies) but that's about it. Almost everything else has changed, mostly for the better.

It's not perfect - things move quite slowly, there are a few clichés flying around, and they're blatantly laying groundwork for a series to follow - but it works. They put together a pretty good script, hired some decent actors, and fitted it all togther well.

I'd be much happier seeing a US network back a full season of this than Yet Another Extruded-Trek-Product. I'd probably even watch a few episodes to see what happens next...