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?

Those may well be the two sweetest words in Technical Support. Under Warranty. Anything that fails under warranty can conveniently be sent out for repair in exchange for a loaner service unit so you get minimal downtime. Some companies don’t even bother to repair a failed unit, they just ship you a new one. American Power Corporation (APC) does that with their UPS products, and Iomega with their storage solutions. Some systems even come with a lifetime warranty, like the HP networking switches. Bust one port on an HP 8- 24- or 48-port switch and they ship you a whole new unit, even if your unit is 5 years old.

One of my best experiences about warranty is the IBM Thinkpad’s 3-year warranty. Our office issue Thinkpads have in their third year of warrantly had suffered one minor form of failure: The R40’s display would every now and then become garbled, The T40’s LCD cover when moved would cause the display to disappear, and my T42’s fan just quit. In all cases, our supplier Technopaq had taken in the laptops and arranged for a new system board for each. I still have two more years to go on the warranty on the T42, but both the R40 and the T40 were on their final months of warranty. Getting a new board for them is almost like getting a new machine.

So my T42 (well, technically not MINE but the company’s, but no one else gets to use it but me, so there) is in the shop. It’s been there since Thursday. They have the system board on stock so I should be seeing it again middle of next week after tests and all, almost as good as new.

Which means, I have an excuse NOT to work this weekend.

He he he.

I once gave a mini-lecture to an office-full of computer newbies about the benefits of saving their work, telling them of the various yet quite simple ways of preventing the primeval scream that may be heard from a user whose work has disappeared because his computer has crashed. I enumerated everything from “clicking on the diskette icon on the menu bar” to hitting Ctrl+S on one’s keyboard every time your fingers become idle after typing, including not to turn your fiber cable into a doorstop, and capped it off with this well-known I.T. joke:

Jesus and Satan have a discussion as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest, with God as the judge.

They sit themselves at their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight. Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over.

He asks Satan to show what he has come up with. Satan is visibly upset, and cries, “I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well, then,” says God, “let us see if Jesus fared any better.”

Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers. Satan is astonished.

He stutters, “B-b-but how? I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact. How did he do it?”

God smiled all-knowingly, “Jesus saves.”

Things could be worse. We’ve had our share of computer mishaps from Coke on the keyboard to mice in the minitower. But this list from Ontrack.com tops all lists that I’ve seen so far.

The Ontrack 2005 Top Ten List of Data Disasters and Remarkable Recoveries

10. PhD Almost an F : A PhD candidate lost his entire dissertation when a bad power supply suddenly zapped his computer and damaged the USB Flash drive that stored the document. Had the data not been recovered, the student would not have graduated.

9. Suffering from Art : While rearranging her home office, a woman accidentally dropped a five pound piece of clay pottery on her laptop, directly onto the hard drive area that contained a book she’d been working on for five years and 150 year-old genealogy pictures that had not yet been printed.

8. Domestic Dilemma : A husband deleted all of his child’s baby pictures when he accidentally hit the wrong button on his computer. His wife hinted at divorce if he did not get the pictures back.

7. Bite Worse than Bark: A customer left his memory stick lying out and his dog mistook it for a chew toy. Ontrack was able to recover all of the data despite teeth marks all over the stick and a hole that went completely through.

6. Don’t Try this at Home: A man attempting to recover data from his computer on his own found the job too challenging mid-way through and ended up sending Ontrack his completely disassembled drive with each of its parts in a separate baggie.

5. Out of Time: A clockmaker suffered a system meltdown, losing the digital designs for all of its clocks. Ontrack literally beat the clock recovering all their data just in time for an important international tradeshow.

4. Drilling for Data: During a multi-drive RAID recovery, engineers discovered one drive belonging in the set was missing. The customer found the missing drive in a dumpster, but in compliance with company policy for disposing of old drives, it had a hole drilled through it.

3. Safe at Home: After one of their executives experienced a laptop crash, the Minnesota Twins professional baseball team called on Ontrack to rescue crucial scouting information about their latest prospects. The team now relies on Ontrack for all data recoveries within its scouting and coaching ranks.

2. Hardware Problems: A frustrated writer attacked her computer with a hammer. When the engineers received the computer, the hammer imprint was clearly visible on the top cover.

And finally, the number one most bizarre data disaster of 2005:

1. La Cucaracha: In hopes of rescuing valuable company information, a customer pulled an old laptop out of a warehouse where it had been sitting unused for 10 years. When engineers opened the computer, it contained hundreds of husks of dead and decaying cockroaches.