Journal entries - June 2009
A Master of Laws
It is done. Five years of suffering, toiling, sweat and tears are over. All right, maybe it wasn’t that bad. After all, I had lots of fun.
Nevertheless, the news item remains the same: I have successfully completed my Master’s degree in Law. As of Friday 26 June 2009, I have become a “Master of Laws”, and with “Distinction” too (for the Brits, it’s a “2:1″; for others, it translates into a “B”).
There, you may bow down before me and call me “Master”.
Now… one year left. I have met the requirements for my offer at King’s College London to become “unconditional”, so there’s a 99% chance I’ll be in London next year, for a course on Information Technology Law.
Yet more law, I know. I must be suicidal. That’s life!
Saving one’s future reputation
Having realised that most reputations are destroyed on the basis of embarrassing information published after a person gains a reputation, I believe that publishing such information before gaining a reputation may be a way of avoiding later damage of one’s reputation. Indeed, the act of making the information public means that people can have access to it, and the “new” character of the information is negated. Moreover, by making such information public, a person shows that he/she can be honest about his/her past, something that isn’t always easy after gaining a reputation.
As such, I have compiled a list of six events “potentially most damaging to my reputation”. Brace yourselves for an insight in Peter’s past.
Disclaimer: not suitable for serious people. Those people should instead check Peter’s CV.
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Easter Island in June
The other day, we took a plane to Chili, before hopping into a plane for a direct flight from Santiago to the Easter Island. All in all, it was a long journey, somewhat tedious, but the anticipation and excitement set aside concerns relating to comfort and so on.
However, as we approached the island, we realised that we couldn’t get a nice view of the small place from above. As such, as soon as we landed, we convinced a helicopter pilot to bring us out and back in again.
As the helicopter circled a few kilometres off the island, hovering above a glittering sea, we picked up our cameras and took our first series of shots of the island, and were lucky to see some lava pour down from the still active volcano.
European elections: lack of interest by the media
The European Parliament plays a major role in enacting 70-80% of the legislation of Member States of the European Union, and its role is about to get even bigger when the Lisbon Treaty finally gets adopted.
Between the 4th and 7th of June, European citizens were invited to elect new MEPs (Members of the European Parliament), but indicators show a disappointing turnout: only 43.09% of electors went to the poll stations.
The media have called it a lack of interest of citizens, but aren’t they themselves, along with politicians, at fault?
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Website errors hopefully over
Over the past few months, the quality of the hosting provided by my current provider, OVH (the largest hosting provider in France, apparently), has steadily decreased. I’ve seen an increase in database connection errors, in “HTTP 500 – Internal Server Error” messages, and so on.
It had become bad to the point where in IE6 and Firefox, I seemed to systematically get an error when trying to access the ARPIA2 and iTunesque pages. Why on earth they worked fine in Safari and Opera, I do not know.
Anyway, as I saw the quality of OVH’s service decrease, I entered into contact with ICDSoft, a company with servers in Germany, the USA and Hong Kong, and whose reputation seems excellent.
In a moment of frustration, I finally decided to make the move. Hopefully all problems should be over. Let me know if you experience anything weird!
Edit: sometimes I feel so stupid. I forgot to check all caching systems. *hits himself on the head*