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

I couldn't get any sleep last night due to a dental problem so I got a chance to see "Apocalypse Now". Well it's a famous movie and an interesting one at that. It was done in 1979 so compared to today's box office productions, it's outstanding. Of all the Vietnam pictures, this one approaches the subject from quite another perspective. I'll also say I enjoyed Coppola's filming, there is something there about not showing you the full picture and letting you feel the movie that I like about it. It wasn't the ideal watch-to-stay-awake-at-4am flick but it was worth the time. Martin Sheen in the lead was excellent.

This is one of those I might want to see again sometime, perhaps I'll get a better feel of it a second time and hopefully more aware to enjoy it.

7/10

Another thing is I discovered I had seen one of those closing scenes before, it was on Seinfeld. The time when Peterman goes to Burma and Elaine goes to see him, it's even better now that I know where it's from..

I've been waiting for Hans Zimmer's next production and I happened to stumble upon it on an internet radio channel. I've been listening to this station that plays exclusively symphonic movie score and one of the tracks I thought were so good that I wanted to check what it was. Turns out it's from "The Last Samurai".

Well the soundtrack is very good, the music is slow and soothing. There are rather few glimpses of Zimmer's more dynamic work but they're there. I haven't really had a chance to listen to it that much but right off the bat I love it already.

7.5/10