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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: The Blu-Ray, BTW is beautiful.
I bought the original ones on DVD (they take a lot of space on the bookshelf!!) and then went for the Blu-ray when it came out.
I haven't yet committed the time to watch them. Part of me fears the show might not have aged as well as I'm hoping. Although TOS has held up, and the newer versions look glorious.
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: Blu-Ray Star Trek: The Next Generation
Is there any benefit to having the Blu-Ray set? I always thought TNG was recorded on low quality film.
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Randor wrote: Is there any benefit to having the Blu-Ray set?
IMO, yes. I don't know how much better they appear than the DVD's, but they are worlds better (pardon the pun) than the original broadcast or VHS. Small details are much more visible like ship markings, planet details, screens and control panels, even tricorder screens.
The only downside with the Blu-Ray's is that make-up is more readily apparent, even in the regular cast where more attention to detail was paid.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I guess there is probably some truth to that.
But honestly, I think a lot of shows just don't have the ideas/writers to keep them up to standard. They bust all their ideas on the pilot/first season just to get the show picked up and then they run dry quickly after that.
One series that always comes to my mind with things like this is Wayward Pines. I really enjoyed the first season because there was so much mystery to it, but for obvious reasons they couldn't continue that and I didn't even finish the second season... just wasn't interested any more.
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Um ... it isn't always true: Season 3 of the Expanse was excellent for example, as was Babylon 5, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and loads of others.
In terms of "unscripted" series where the outline of the whole story isn't pre-planned at all season 3 is where the studio execs are reluctant to make changes in case they alienate existing viewers, so it gets very "formula" scripts (often by new writers / directors) and you get a worse season as a result, I suspect.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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And they jump the shark when they run out of ideas for plots! 
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A great theory! I think it holds true for most stuff.
Some exceptions...
like Star Trek TNG (already mentioned above)
And all seasons of Breaking Bad were overwhelmingling good in so many ways.
...Dexter bends this rule a little, season three was good as the first, so it's seasons four and five were it's "Season 3"
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A bit of a rant....
I'm overwhelmed with new technologies.
I'm starting doing some html/css/javascript/typescript/vue work.
I'm supposed to be fully productive this week. (according to everyone, lol)
Every examples, tutorials or paid online courses, I see have different configurations, different versions of those things, clone their github repos, try to run their things, nothing works, obscure errors every time.
They all start easily enough, but BAM, in a few minutes, they go to console.log("hello world") to full fledge web sites with gazillions npm packages.
There doesn't seem to be a real progressive learning curves to these technologies.
Am I seeing this the wrong way ?
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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I am the same with some of it, but that is probably more a reflection of my aged brain. Fortunately I don't need to use such skills to earn a living any more.
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I'm not old, but at the age of 45 in tech terms I'm ancient.
my decades in development have helped keep the door open for new opportunities, but I think I've found a nice spot writing code for a local community college. the work load is just about right, still try to push myself to learn something new all the time, but damn some of the new platforms are so much waisted processing power for little gain, and it really hurts to see such inefficient layers of code.
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Maximilien wrote: I'm overwhelmed with new technologies.
Yes, I was. I started programming before the web was a thing. Also doesn't seem worth to study the tech of du jour, since it obsolete tomorrow.
Maximilien wrote: They all start easily enough, but BAM, in a few minutes, they go to console.log("hello world") to full fledge web sites with gazillions npm packages.
I don't use npm packages. I'm responsible for the result, so I don't muck around with code that I haven't read in detail.
Maximilien wrote: There doesn't seem to be a real progressive learning curves to these technologies.
Not from a Garfield-approach ("what is in it for me?")
Outside of the learning curve, there is the issue of trusting other people's work. I'm not sticking a backdoor in my software after that work, forget it. Log4j? Not in my code, it's not like a logger is too complicated to write.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Another benefit to writing your own logging code is that you can make it uniform across all your systems.
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Yep! It can be a challenge. It helps if you can find a work buddy to help you through the tricky stuff - as this definitely saves a lot of time. On the downside, if your "buddy" is doing it the wrong way, you just learn bad practices. Which, pretty much, is the story of my .Net/c# learning curve: quick, but rubbish! 
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Maximilien wrote: with gazillions npm packages
And therein lies the problem.
Certainly on the front-end, I refuse to use packages. Yes, there are the occasional exception to that rule, but when it comes to any of these krufty overly "crafted" front-end frameworks, they can all burn in the dumpster fire as far as I'm concerned.
So, no, I'm not overwhelmed with new technologies. Whenever I ask "why should I use this?" the answer is quite simple: nobody, not my fellow developers, nor anyone here, not the websites themselves (which always fail to answer the "why" question) can give me a good answer. So I simply don't use them.
And being able to say "I only do back-end work", I can leave all that "craft" to others, because I have absolutely no intention of ever learning any of it.
And I quite enjoy doing front-end development in TypeScript for my own projects, mainly because I'm not pulling my hair out.
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Sadly, I don't think you're going about it the wrong way.
I ran into the same mess, and I thought it was because I was deliberately avoiding web work (which I was) and that the industry had moved on without me (they did), but it's more than that.
There is so much "web" out there now, that the # of technology stacks exploded. Elephanting exploded.
That's what it looks like to me.
I'm sure that there are currents in this sea you can swim if you look - you're actually stuck with a stack you were given though. 
I can't help you learn this stuff, nor really point you to resources very well, because I'm in your same boat in terms of my lack of exposure, and also I don't learn well with courses and books. I dive in and google my way through problems these days. People mock the googly coders, but what can I say, it's just faster for me that way. 
All I can really say is best of luck with this.
Real programmers use butterflies
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The worse part is I don't know what to google for.
Most of the time it returns stuff with different technologies/toolkits.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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I stay away from anything 'new' for professional development. I'll wait until it becomes mature enough to have an established knowledge base.
I am a team of one and have no use for github or npm packages...the closest to this I've come is jquery and even then, refuse to allow external links/resources.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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When do I know it become mature enough ?
HTML/CSS/JavaScript seems very mature.
TypeScript seems to also be very mature and well adopted.
Vue (in this case) also seems to be well adopted.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Maximilien wrote: HTML/CSS/JavaScript seems very mature.
I don't consider these to be 'technologies' but rather the essential building blocks for creating web pages. It's mostly the server-side part of things (the part that actually puts these blocks together and works with the database) that I consider as 'web technologies' or frameworks, oftentimes connected with it's own language. Examples:
0: ASP.Net
1: PHP
2: Angular
3: Node
4: React
All of these are mature and have tons of resources so I wouldn't hesitate to learn any of them if there was a need. I've been doing web development for over 20 years and started with classic asp. The only web platforms I use these days are ASP.Net (heavy) and PHP (moderate).
Maximilien wrote: When do I know it become mature enough ?
You know when a google search on it returns more than a dozen results. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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You don't need to use github, but even in a team of one git makes sense. You can use your locally installed TFS server for that. Source control really brings value to the development and the power of git branching is second to none.
As for npm packages, if you use any web framework, like Angular, there's no way around it.
Is it more complicated than it used to be? Yes, no doubt about it. Messier? Heck yes. Impossible? Nope. I'm in my mid fifties and working with a team on average 20 years my juniors. I can still keep up... I assure you they're not immune to these things. The issue with most of them is that they don't have a reference point in the past, to judge things in perspective. The current tech and work style is all they know and they believe it's the best. As a result they over-complicate things. There will be dependency injection, services and all that good stuff even if they have to write a simple console app to load a file...
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The only writers I bother with are the ones that limit themselves to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; and rave about it. Mind you, I only have to answer to myself.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Maximilien wrote: I'm overwhelmed with new technologies
I like the pocket guides and references by O'Reilly[^]. For me they're much better than the mammoth tomes that pass for programming books these days. The other problem with BIG BOOKS is that they are organized according to the author's bias to the material. Features that they don't like or don't understand don't get a lot of attention. Stuff they do like and understand they use only in their preferred style.
The guides provide a concise survey of the technology and its syntax. I currently have their books for HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, HTTP, and SQL on my shelf. They occupy a little under 3 inches of space. If I need more detail or depth, Google[^] and CodeProject[^] are my friends  , and Stack Overflow[^] is a reluctantly, occasionally, and necessary evil  .
Software Zen: delete this;
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I haven't had an issue with html, css*, or javascript/typescript, but I've never used Vue. Angular has some really good documentation in my opinion. I don't have much experience with React but it seemed... alright. There's a lot of "magic" under the hood though which was confusing since you absolutely need to understand how it works for all but the simplest tasks.
I feel you though. A lot of documentation seems to be written for the author rather than the reader. It's a problem I've run into with learning functional programming. Once you get past the beginner stuff, most of the resources are written for people that already understand everything. You have to have a Master's in type theory, set theory, group theory, category theory, nth-order logic, and more just to parse the terminology in a single sentence.
*: Except for layouts. Good lord, we have tables, box, flex-box, grid, etc and none of them aptly solve the issue without "clever" hacks half the time.
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Jon McKee wrote: Once you get past the beginner stuff, most of the resources are written for people that already understand everything.
This is still a big problem sometimes.
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Having lived through (and indeed taken a small part in) the development of CP/M, MSDOS, windows etc. I have long since adopted the philosophy of using dev stacks that run behind the pack. The number of times when I hadn't even completed a coding task only to find that some dependency had changed, or a library no longer worked the way it did before (or even got completely broken by some update - Hello Borland!? Anyone there?) are too numerous to count.
For my recent web/mobile apps the only framework I have used has been Bootstrap, and that only because it is both so long in the tooth and so widespread it is at least fairly mature and has at least some chance of being maintained into the future (ie like PHP!). It is also completely available as source code, and I keep a buildable copy of the version I am using in my setup at all times.
Of course, even in that kind of setup, so much is outside your control: something I built less than a year ago is already being slowly strangled to death by Microsoft forcing Windows to use Chrome based browsers and yet within it's own apps (eg Office) still only providing IE based browser controls. Thus all the services this little add-on to Office talks to are gradually refusing to work, so I am having to find a way of calling an external browser to do authentication with third parties rather than doing it within the app...
The only thing that remains the same in this industry is the rate of change!
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