It’s not often that I get out of the cold confines of the Dev Room where I work. Last time I was out was to Cotabato, teaching the staff of an NGO how to use their high tech computer gear. That was in 2006.

This time it’s not going to be as far as Mindanao, but never the less adventurous. I’m heading off to Masbate for the introductory meetings leading to the two-week teaching stint that will start on the last week of November and will run into the first week of December.

I am going as Project Manager and Trainer for the Corporate Social Responsibility program of one of our clients at work. The startup project involves 13 computer systems to be spread out to four schools in the city of Masbate, and Municipalities of Baleno, Milagros and Balud. The packages each include a Lenovo K300 desktop system, an HP 5610 printer, an APC BackUPS E500 and a SmartBro USB Internet kit, complete with computer table and chair.

The package also includes Ate Vikki to teach the teachers how to use the system, and how to milk the internet for all its worth.

My first trip will consist of a plane ride from Manila to Legaspi, hired car from Legaspi to Pilar, a ferry ride from Pilar to Aroroy in Masbate, drive down to Baleno and then Masbate City to meet the two nearby schools representatives, determine who the training participants will be, and to help decide on the best places to position the computer sets. On the second day we will be heading off to the Municipalities of Milagros and Baleno to meet the representatives there, and then back to base in Aroroy, for the trip back home the next day.

On the 25th of November I will be back there with one of our tech guys to put in all 12 computers in the respective schools, and start the round of 2-day training sessions on the use of Windows Vista and basic MS Office.

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?

One of the services that the company I work for provides is a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Program (BCDRP) that is tailor-made for offices based in various parts of the Philippines.

Practically speaking, in the Philippines there is no such thing as 100% uptime for any office, unless it has generators that automatically kick in when the power goes out. Even when the building that houses the office itself is backed up by a generator, there is the question of availability of backup power for the individual servers.

Not all offices, especially startup ones, can avail themselves of backup servers, much less of Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units that can sustain a server’s activity until power is restored. There are various ways in which a building, or the entire area where the building is located, can lose power. A cut transmission line, a blown up power transformer—these contribute to the uncertainty of when power can be restored. And when there is uncertainty, no UPS or backup generator will be enough to keep a server running.

With the loss of power for some key areas also comes loss of internet connection. When this happens, no automated, remote controlled monitoring and management can occur. A company offering BCDRP services that are fully automated, can rely on automation only for as long as the power and Internet is up. Once they both come down, and there are no warm bodies to kick in, then there is a problem.

This is where our BCDRP program becomes practical. Every day we send out a team that goes around from one client to another, replacing backup external disks and taking the previous night’s backups away for safekeeping offsite. This is on top of remote server backup and management that we also perform.

This is practical BCDRP for the third world.