Month: June 2006

Without a doubt my favourite awards show to watch during the year are the MTV Movie Awards. The show is light-hearted, doesn’t take itself seriously, and always fun to watch. More entertainment than a chance for Hollywood to gratify itself, the list of stars that attend usually skews towards a younger set.

This years’s show was hosted by Jessica Alba who went through what seemed like a dozen costume changes throughout the show. Also in attendance were the likes of Owen Wilson, Steve Carrell, Will Ferrell, Keanu Reeves, Samuel L. Jackson, Borat, and Jim Carey among others.

As a sign of how laid back the awards are, the results are announced even before the show airs on TV. Taped over the weekend, the show will be shown on MTV and MuchMusic this Thursday.

There was only one category that I even cared for and when I read the winner for it, I was disappointed and a tad miffed. The Best Fight category is a unique one and always features some good nominees. This year’s list featured: King Kong vs. the planes from King Kong, some kung fu fight from Kung Fu Hustle, some gun battle with Bradgelina in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and last but certainly not least, the lightsaber battle between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker at the climax of Revenge of the Sith.

Now voting was done online and from what I understand, there are no provisions in place to prevent ballot stuffing. As such, results can turn out like rolling a pair of device. So guess which movie won? Mr. and Mrs. Smith. That’s completely ridonkulous. It’s actually a crime in all honesty.

The fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin should have won by a long shot. That lightsaber battle makes all those other fights look like verbal arguments between senior citizens. The sequence remains the longest duel in cinematic history. First hinted at in the novelization of A New Hope in the late 1970s, Star Wars fans had been waiting for nearly three decades to see how the events transpired on a lava-filled planet. How long did they fight? How did they start fighting? What did the planet look like? How did Obi-Wan defeat Anakin? How did Anakin drag his charred body out of the lava? All these long-standing questions were answered in this single, dramatic sequence.

It was this very fight that led to the creation of one of, if not the most, iconic villains in cinema history, Darth Vader himself.

So, my friends, how is it that Mr. and Mrs. Smith won? The answer is not because the fight sequence was especially good but because it had Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in it and they just happen to be the hottest couple in Hollywood.

Now Star Wars fans are usually pretty good with the Internet and stuffing ballot boxes so I’m not sure what happened this time around. All I know is that they dropped the proverbial ball like it was a thermal detonator in Jabba’s palace. I voted for Sith twice myself, once at home and another time at work, thinking it would be enough. I was wrong.

Sith was also nominated for two other awards, Ewan McGregor for Best Hero and Hayden Christensen for Best Villain. Suprisingly, Christensen won his category even though McGregor had a way better performance in the movie and simply kicked ass while channeling the spirit of Alec Guiness.

I’m probably the most miffed guy out there about a light-hearted movie awards show. You can download the 2006 MTV Movie Awards show on Bittorrent starting June 8th.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jerpcvXR–w]

In this segment, Borat investigates different hobbies. I’m not sure which part I found the funniest. It could have been when he showed the yoga teacher his dance, when he said to a woman she looked older, or when he sniffed some guy’s crotch.

Eggo microwaveable pancakes can be pretty damn tasty at any time of the day.

I threw up a little bit in my mouth when I read this.

Sometime around 10am on Tuesday morning some individual gained unauthorized access to the server that houses both my web site and my e-mail. I actually didn’t notice it until nearly 2am early Wednesday morning. I should have been in bed and was indeed heading that way when I strangely decided to see who else was on the server at the time. I usually don’t care.

The server I’m on is shared among many users. So when I saw that I was not the only one logged in, it wasn’t a big surprise. What was strange was the other user was named “test”. To my knowledge, no one has that username. That got me a bit worried. “test” also didn’t show up in the list of user directories which also worried me. What sent alarms off in my head was the origin of the login. It appeared that whoever “test” was, this person was originating from Romania. Eastern European hackers are notorious for breaking into places they shouldn’t be. I couldn’t see exactly what he or she had been doing but I could tell they’d be idle for over an hour and a half. I could also see that they’d been logged in since 10am that morning. It kinda looked like they were using the server to gain access to other systems.

It’d been over 12 hours since they found some way into the server. I began to get concerned for my data and e-mail. About six years ago, someone else hacked into the server and deleted everyone’s e-mails. I didn’t want history to repeat itself but I had limited options.

It was already 2am and the keeper of the server, Stephen would mostly likely be asleep. I didn’t want to call him and wake him and his wife up. It would, however, be another six to eight hours before Stephen could be notified of the intrusion. It could be mere minutes possibly for the intruder to delete my entire web site and e-mails.

Cursing the fact that I should have already been asleep I decided to download as many e-mails as I could. It took about ten minutes and I decided to delete a few documents I had lying around on the server that contained things like my SIN. I then crawled into bed. I closed my eyes for less than a minute before I decided I couldn’t just lie there while some hacker was running lose in my server.

Instead of calling Stephen I decided to call the network operations centre where the server is located. This place is also where Stephen works. A network engineer is on duty 24 hours a day. The phone answered on the first ring. I explained the situation to the dude on the night shift. It turns out he knows Stephen.

He poked around a bit but in the end, his hands were tied. He had no access to the server because he didn’t have an account. He also couldn’t block the Romanian IP from coming into the server. It was nearing 3am so I had to resolve this quickly. I told him to physically walk over to the server and then turn it off. It’d be a crude solution but it’d be effective. The network guy asked if I knew where the server was located. I told him I had no idea. He explained that the facility he was in contained thousands of machines located on several floors. He had no map that would help him find the right machine. There was nothing he could do.

Damn. I thanked him for his help. He said he’d leave a note for Stephen in the morning. I had to go to sleep knowing I could do nothing.

I woke up groggy this morning to find that the Romanian had done nothing major over the night. My site and e-mail was still there. I decided to wait until I was at work to contact Stephen. When I finally got a hold of him, he was pretty surprised at my findings. He said he’d go look at it immediately. We hung up and I went back to my computer to watch him on the server. He logged in as “root” and he immediately did stuff that I have no understanding of.

In the end, he cleaned some stuff up and booted off the Romanian. The weird thing is, Stephen has no idea how that person gained access in the first place. We also don’t know what that person did while he or she had acccess either. Odd and perhaps a little unsettling.

This is what nerds do when they want to cause trouble.