Month: November 2015

Film review – The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2

I’m one of the Hunger Games’ unlikely fans: I didn’t think I’d like it, but the first two were brilliant (we should see more of Donald Sutherland). Mockingjay Part 1 was okay (kind of), and having seen Part 2, I’m pretty sure that’s where they should have stopped at Part 1

Yes, it was beautifully shot: the actions scenes were real edge-of-your-seat stuff, and the sets were breathtaking. The acting didn’t disappoint (no one’s going to win an oscar, but the performances were creditable).

So, my only real problem was with the movie itself: what was the point? Aside from the obvious (to make the studios a big pot of money), I struggled to see what they were aiming for. I had a similar problem with the Fantastic Four, except that film had been cut to fit into ninety minutes, Mockingjay 2 had been stretched to cover two and a half hours.

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There was an awful lot of travelling about; a lot deep, meaningless conversations in rooms alternating between pitch black and blazingly lit; the heroine wandered back and forth between home and the frontline while sighing and gazing into the middle distance… I started wondering if this could have all been wrapped up in Mockingjay Part 1 with a bit of judicious editing. Maybe not, but there certainly wasn’t enough here for two and half hours.  I guess that the studio (quite rightly) wanted to feel that the audience was getting its money’s worth; I’m just not sure this was the way to do it.

Still, if you’re a Hunger Games fan then you’re going to see it to find out what happens, and so you should. (Just don’t worry too much if you show up late). There are a few interesting twists along the way, though you won’t be hard pressed to see them coming, and as I said, Donald Sutherland was manically brilliant.

Five out of ten.

 

Last night a backup saved my life…

Okay, so the other night, the unthinkable happened: I double-clicked the icon to open the book, and nothing happened.

Another click, same result. So I logged out, logged in and tried again.

This time I got one of those heart-warming boxes with a number as long as my arm, and a message telling me the document couldn’t be opened – not now, not ever again.

imagesWell, there’s no feeling like it:  six hundred pages and eighteen months work – gone, taken to the great cloud in the… er… sky.

Sphincter-loosening: yup, that’s how I’d describe it.

Deep breaths… Think it through.  The editor has a copy… but you’ve done a lot of work since then!

You have a mate who has a later copy, but he’s skiing or mountaineering or some other nonsense! Gaaahhh! If only I’d taken a backup! No wait, hang on… I did.

So once I calmed down a bit, I had my book up and running, with no changes lost. You hear stories like this all the time; sometimes they end happily, sometimes they don’t. I still run across a lot of folk who either don’t make copies of their most important stuff, or they make copies, but do it all wrong. Here’s Dom’s handy guide for doing it right:

  1. Your backup strategy needs to be invisible. There’s no point having one that you need to kick off yourself every fortnight or so. It has to run constantly, and automatically. The one I use saves incremental changes every time a file is saved, which means I can go back several revisions until I find one that doesn’t choke when I try to load it.
  2. Don’t keep your backups on top of your computer. I knew a fella who had his laptop stolen. I asked him if he had a backup disk. ‘Yes,’ he said miserably, ‘it’s in the laptop.’
  3. Test it regularly. Nothing worse than hitting the ‘restore’ key with a smug look on your face, only to find that the backups are just as corrupted as your hard disk. I like to try out test restores every few months to make sure everything is still working as it should.
  4. Be sure you’re backing up everything you need. It might not just be the documents (though that’s usually enough). What about photographs? Music? What about the library folders? Apple’s iClould keeps your documents in the library folder, not with your regular documents, which brings me neatly to
  5. iCloud is for syncing, not backups! There’s a big difference. iCloud is for making sure that your documents, images etc. are available across all your iStuff. If you have a corrupt file on your iPhone then its corruption might get synced to your other devices too.

Your writing is precious; look after it.