Been very, no really, very busy at work the past few weeks. One guy quit which left only two of us to handle an increasing amount of work. Today the other guy called in sick so I had to come in and do his work too. Just for today, I hope. So for today the office got a bargain, a person doing the work of two (three when you actually look at it) for the price of one.

Schedules like this do not allow me to go to the movies to unwind, which is tough because I happen to like the movies and popcorn and a cold dark place to hang out every once in a while. But even movies these days don’t come cheap in the Philippines, after tickets for two, bucket of popcorn, liter of root beer, there’s not going to be much left out of my PHP500 (roughly US$10-12).

So I go for the next best thing. Movies at home. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I do torrents, and that for me uTorrent must be the best ever software installed on my computer. uTorrent 1.8 is even spiffier than the previous version, with everything laid out in tabs giving you more control over the way you download whatever it is you download.

One problem I had run into is how browsing seemed to stop while I had uTorrent running. Quick google told me to look at the Bandwidth settings on Preferences, and to change a couple of settings from the default:

In Global maximum number of connections, bring it down to 100 from the default 200. And in Maximum number of connected peers per torrent, put in 30 instead of the default 50. That should bring your browsing back while you download whatever it is you download in torrents. Worked like a dream for me.

I’ve downloaded quite a few movies to start an eclectic collection of flicks that would have cost me hundreds of pesos, and with a program called ConvertXtoDVD I can even burn them into disks that I can play on a DVD player that will play home made DVDs.

With this system I don’t even need Quiapo.

There are movies that restore your faith in human nature, even as they show how little faith other people may have. Films like The Green Mile, Syriana, Munich show the evil that men do, and what good men have done to counter it.

But when evil does not have a face, or too many faces that it becomes difficult to know where it is and how to stop it, things happen that make you wonder if having faith in human nature is a good thing in the first place. There are films that make you wonder what human nature really is.

I first heard about Untraceable while on the dnsstuff.com website, on my daily tasks at work. It touted the movie as having used the dnsstuff.com services as part of the movie’s technical background. The movie was shown in Manila last February without much fanfare. I suppose that’s primarily because Diane Lane really isn’t the typical Pinoy’s leading lady, not in the Anne Hathaway/Angelina Jolie/Cameron Diaz mould at all. But I have faith in Diane Lane and she’s never let me down, not in Murder at 1600, not in Unfaithful, and certainly not in this movie.
The movie also features Colin Hanks, whose voice is starting to sound more and more like his famous father’s. I’d only seen him twice: as Lt. Jones in Band of Brothers (ep. 8 The Last Patrol), and as one of the kids in That Thing You Do. I learned he was also in the later version of King Kong, but I haven’t seen that. Colin Hanks is one of the most underused actors in Hollywood, in my opinion.

Here is the synopsis from imdb.com:

A secret service agent, Jennifer Marsh (Lane), gets caught in a very personal and deadly cat-and-mouse game with a serial killer who knows that people (being what they are - both curious and drawn to the dark side of things) will log onto an “untraceable” website where he conducts violent and painful murders LIVE on the net. The more people who log on and enter the website, the quicker and more violently the victim dies.

Untraceable made me wonder about what human nature really is, apart from curiosity and the general belief that man is inherently good. That there are people that upload videos of unfortunate events on the internet, such as actual beheadings and snafu movies, there is no doubt. But the realization of how many people actually watch these videos and how they react to them made me think of what the internet has allowed people to become.

The website featured in the movie, www.killwithme.com is actually a site that not only promotes the film, but gives one a brief insight on how curiosity can actually kill more than a cat. When you load the site in your browser it warns you that proceding may cause harm to a human being, but knowing that it was a movie site, I clicked Enter anyway.

The second I did, I wondered what if it weren’t a movie site, what if I had been one of the anonymous surfers who had logged into the fictional site. Would have I clicked on, despite the warning?