Saturday, January 31st, 2004
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
The reason I wanted to try Linux in the first place was that I was doing some websites and needed to mess around with cgi scripts in perl. I thought since the servers run linux, it would make sense to emulate that environment at home. The first thing I tried was Slackware, I think v3. Well that was a little much, I had a book that I borrowed from a friend but it was quite involved and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I tried a couple versions of Red Hat in the years following that but there was no easy way for me to find out what exactly I needed to do to get an up and running install of apache and perl. I didn’t try looking on the net because I didn’t want to spend that much time on it. I also got the impression that without a thick book on Red Hat, I was totally lost. 