The first time I heard about this serious was about 6 months ago but I never got the chance to see it cause it wasn't aired here. But I have finally come to appreciate the quality, Scrubs is excellent! What amazed me the most is how well written the first episode was. You get to know all the characters right away and it's done very well. Elsewhere you might see attempts to span it over several installments or feel that you barely know the people. In this case, everything fell right into place at the very start and already then I knew I would love the rest. The biggest talking point to me is how well crafted the senior characters are. Both Cox and Kelso are terrific as actors and as characters. On top of that you got the janitor, I love that little inset everytime.

Went to the Norwegian Hip Hop Awards last night.. frankly I didn't know what to expect, after all it's a Norwegian event. But it surpassed my worst expectations. First of all the music sucked. Apart from one group from South Africa all the groups were Norwegian, all of them rapping in their buttugly dialects. The noise was tremendous, I couldn't make up any of the words and it was just loud. The acoustics of course sucked so it was mostly a matter of noise, in whatever shape or form. It's funny how people go to concerts, not so much for the music as just for being there, as long as it's loud, no matter what the source of the noise actually is.

I'll gladly skip this bs next year.

2/10 for "Black noise", the rest was utter crap.

Did you ever have one of those days when you could imagine the universe conspired to convince you that getting up that day was a mistake? Last night was such a day. I routinely fire up Outlook Express to find out that the server isn't responding. Hardly a reason to panic, it's been known to die for unknown reasons throughout its existence, no ping packets being thrown back either. I head for the reset button but alas upon reset, there is no resolution to the problem. No I'm concerned, never has a reset failed to bring it back online.

Anxious to find out what the problem is, I turn it off and plug it in in my room, with a monitor plugged in. To my incredible dismay, it never completes the boot sequence, the post check fails and I'm sitting there staring at the screen for 2 minutes, it reads "primary master disk failure". WTF???? This is the second disk to fail on me in a month. Before that I've only had one occurence in 11 years. Coincidentally, the other one (featured in the gallery section) had a mileage of 4 years, this one barely a year. But the disk itself isn't the problem, the data is. I used it as a multi purpose server, for samba, nfs, cvs, ltsp, apache, ftp, mysql, mail and others. Now all that configuration is lost and I'm stuck rebuilding it. I did have a backup cause of problems with the box earlier but it was a cloned partition on the same physical drive, so it's useless now. How the hell does a disk just fail instantly? It wasn't old, it wasn't worn out. A Maxtor 2.5'' 30GB drive if you must know.

So it's going to take me weeks if not months to restore what was on it. It never fails, people always learn to back up their data the hard way. Even though I grew up with Windows, which is very unsuited for system scale backups, I still don't think I would place much importance in it if it wasn't for losing data. Fortunately, backing up the system in linux is very straightfoward and with gzip/bzip2, I was surprised to learn that it compresses the whole system down to an archive of handsome size. My desktop installation, for instance, is a mere 2-3GB, perfect for dvd backup.

It hit me the other day that Hans Zimmer has a considerable list of credits to his name. Only among those I have greatly enjoyed I find these (in no particular order)..

Crimson Tide

The Rock

Con Air

Gladiator

Hannibal

Pearl Harbor

The Last Samurai

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

It was not without a great deal of hesitation and prejudice I acknowledged that Tom Cruise would star in this picture. I didn't think he could handle it, I only remembered his performance from pictures with much noise and little substance. I'm happy to say that I stand corrected.

It was the moment I saw the trailer for "The Last Samurai", at a viewing of the "Matrix Revolutions" I believe, that I immediately recognized a desire to see this movie. I found Edward Zwick's direction to be excellent, especially the battle scenes. But it's the Japanese culture that has tremendous appeal and provides incredible inspiration. Above all else, I feel inspired by this picture. Am I to believe the portrayal in the picture, there is one virtue in anciet Japan that prevails above others: honor. It must require an immense inner discipline to live solely by the norms of society, to do what is expected of you and to lead an honorable life. Failure is unacceptable, because shame is the ultimate failure in life.

8.5/10