Blue Chi’s

I spend about an hour on daily basis responding to member questions on the Oman3D Flash Forum. It is usually a fun activity where I guide people on how to fix their projects and help them accomplish what they want to do using ActionScript… But then there are times when some members can get really ony my nerves.

I hate it when impatient people make stupid posts. If you are not blind you would have seen that the last message I posted is on the second page of the thread list and I have obviously not logged in since, I did not forget your stupid thread and I will get to answer it eventually.

I follow a standard procedure whereby I answer threads from the oldest to the newest (bottom to top), so if someone is impatient and makes a post to remind me to answer his questions that will only push it up the post list and down my to answer list.

So if you want to have a quick response from yours truly then make a single post and wait. Do not ever make a reminder post. Dont EVER do that. EVER.

(photo credits: samikki)

There is a craze all over the Omani Internet about the British people pissed mad about their canceled Oman Christmas holiday. The biggest story was published on the Daily Telegraph and the blog of one of its writers. In short, the GCC Summit is happening in Oman this year, it was supposed to be held in November, but it got rescheduled last week so now it will be held on the last week of December. The plan was to have it in Al Bustan Palace, but apparently its renovation is still not finished, so the Diwan issued an order to take over every single room in the top six hotels in town during the last week of December – and this practically meant that everyone who made a booking to spend the Christmas holiday in Oman had those plans screwed.

Apparently, a lot of British people had their holiday plans arranged to come to Oman, after all, Vogue UK did select Oman as the number 1 destination for 2008. Travel agencies and individuals are not happy about it at all. For many it will be a big hassle to change their holiday plans, but for those who have made their hotel and airplane tickets independently will most probably not be able to change their flight plans without a penalty.

Regardless of the reasons behind the change of plans at this stage, the government is supposed to be taking tourism as a serious industry and as one of the main targets for diversifying the economy pillars, what is happening is a mess, it is seriously bad PR for Oman, and will, to some extent, harm our tourism industry.

I think that the Government should make an apology to the affected individuals AND offer them a free stay in whatever hotel they had their original booking at the same number of days they were supposed to stay for next year. I don’t think that it will hurt the Diwan’s pocket at all, but at the same time I know that this will never happen because we do not have a culture of consumer compensation or consumer protection.

The reading that we have to do for our classes is insane. I only have four 2-hour classes each week. My lessons are a mix of lectures and seminars at the same time, but the trick about them is that you have to do the reading BEFORE you go to any of these classes. This is not like the LLB where you ony read for two seminars each week. For the LLM you have to read for the four subjects every single week. 

For Internet Law and  Comparative Intellectual Property Law most of the reading is online, at times it just feels like it is infinte and there is always another link to follow to expand on a certain topic. Corporate Governance is ‘finite’ but the amount of reading is massive, just random articles on specific topics can go up to 80 pages – and this is not the core textbook reading.  International Commercial Arbitration on the other hand seems to be the most manageable, most probably because the topic is very well established and there are good books on it, so there is rarely any article hunting that we have to do.

But somehow (I know that this might make me sound like a nerd), I’m actually enjoying it. It is different when you study some subjects just because you need to do them to get the degree, you might not hate them, but you might not be passionate about them either, but for me subjects like Internet Law and Intellectual Property are like leisure time hobbies, I am OBSESSED about them.

I find Arbitration cool, it is actually extremely relevant to what we do at the Ministry of Legal Affairs and it is relevant to all industries. It is very practical and does not have a lot of theory, a lot of procedure, comparison between different forms and instutions, and we will also study the structure of actual clauses, how cool is that?

Corporate Governance is my least favourite subject, my original fourth subject was supposed to be Internet related, but that one got canceled, I then decided to do International Trade, I attended the first lecture and I hated it, it was all about shipping. I am not interested in shipping at all. The subject will have some general topics related to the Sale of Goods Act, but I already studied that in my LLB twice (in Sale of Goods and Agency, and in Consumer Law). I decided to do Corporate Governance because it is more contemporary and because it is an independent subject (unlike International Trade which was very much related to Maritime Law, Carriage of Goods by Sale, and Shipping Law). I already did Company Law in my LLB, but this is a much more concentrated topic on just internal Coprorate Governance.

Now that we finished our second way, I must say that I think I’m doing really good. I would say that I am the most active person in 3/4 of my classes and I think ALL my teachers know me by name – which is really cool.

For some reason, I’m actually starting to feel competitive, I never had that feeling when I did my LLB.

Just read about this on TechCrunch, Google has announced an upgrade to Google Analytics, the free online service for tracking your website traffic. 

The new updates include AdSense tracking, API, custom reports, and motion graphs – and those are the most awesome thing I’ve seen in a long time. I can’t wait to use these motion graphs. Check out the video below to learn what it’s all about.

Read more about this on TechCrunch.

As some of you might remember, I moved my blog to WordPress exactly one month ago. It was previously hosted by blogger on blogspot.com. When I moved the blog to my own server on WordPress all my link were broken as all the posts had new URLs. So it was normal for my traffic to drop because all the inks to specific posts no longer worked and because the pagerank for all the pages restarted to zero I lost the majority of search engine driven traffic. The daily traffic to my blog is now less than half what it used to be when I was on blogspot.

This is usually not a big deal because Google will eventually index the blog all over again and people will be able to find it on Google, but for some reason, when searching for stuff I wrote before I moved the blog Google still shows up blogspot.com links and does not seem to recognize that the content can also be found on this blog. Google usually punishes those who publish ‘duplicate content’ as they are usually spam websites and does not show them on search results.

I’m surely that if I was in fact penalized, it must’ve been because of blogspot’s horrible caching. My new content shows up, but my old does not.

The solution to this sort of problem is to generate links to the old content, so that (1) Google knows they exist, and (2) the pagerank of these pages increase and they will have higher chances of showing up high on the search results.

It is pretty hard to get other people to link to your old content, so the easiest way for you to do this is to link to your content yourself. There is a higher opportunity to get higher ranking by receiving external links, but internal links actually also count, and they can have a significant impact if your website already has a high pagerank.

Most of the time I think that I’m doing the right thing by not blogging anonymously, blogging is a great way for staying in touch with people you know in real life. Professionally blogging can be a great way for precisly creating the image you want to be perceived in by blogging about the topics you choose and the way your write your posts.

However, there are certain times when I really miss the fact that I’m not anonymous, simply because I cannot talk about about shared experienced with other people (or experiences ABOUT certain people) because these people might be offended and some might not like to have personal aspects of their life broadcasted online.

I miss this feeling that you get when you write everything you feel about things and people and life, which you can only write when you know that nobody knows who you are. And I just can’t do that. Urgh!

You just never know who might be reading this, it could be anyone from Qaboos bin Saeed to family members and from people you work with to your friends in-laws.  It is insane.

So, bloggers and bloggerettes, are you anonymous or not, and are you happy about it?

Another month and another Douglas Coupland novel. Shampoo Planet is the second book Coupland wrote, it originally came out in 1992. The book title is mock at mad consumerism at the start of the 90s.

I like the character’s depth in Coupland novels, but at the same time he freaks me out with the cynical messages about life many of his characters express throughout his books. 

I still need to read Generation X  - the first book he has even written, and Miss Wyoming – a novel he published in 2000, then I would have read every single novel he wrote in English (he has one written in Japanese, so I think I’ll skip that!!!).

Just came from a reception made by the law school for LLM students. This was the first proper opportunity I had to mingle with other people the same course. I  originally thought that we would be starting classes this week, but instead the school is having a one week course to introduce the common law system to those who never studied in the UK before – I am not going for it.

I talked to several people during the reception, ALL of the LLM students (a bit less than a 100) are international. Most of them are European. I haven’t met a single person doing the same LLM stream as myself (IT and Commerce). Luckily, I found another person doing at least Internet Law. The majority of people are doing the LLM in Maritime, which is apparently what Southampton is known for.

Classes don’t start until Monday, I less than 10 hours of lectures a week, and will probably have about four hours of tutorials each week as well.  You can check out my lecture time table on the sidebar of blog (added it for the novelty of it! ).

I never imagined that getting a keyboard can be such a painful experience. I don’t think that I am a very hard person to please, but you will be surprised at how easily can stupid manufacturers mess up a simple product such as a keyboard if they really wanted to.

I just need a SIMPLE keyboard that has ALL THE BUTTONS IN THEIR RIGHT PLACES and I can’t find one. I originally bought a MS keyboard which, I swear, was placed over a shelf with a label that said it was a USB keyboard. After I threw all the bags (with the receipts) and tore the package apart, discovered that it was a PS2 keyboard. I ordered a PS2/USB adaptor and for some reason it did not work on my machine. It is a freaking Miscrosoft Keyboard and it is not compatible with Windows Vista – How can that be possible?

Anyway, I got desperate and decided to buy the first USB keyboard I find in the market. Got this one made by a generic Chinese manufacturer and it came with a mouse (It was just as expensive as the MS one and I now have three mice, not counting my laptop touch  pad). The keyboard felt nice when I fiddled with it in the store, but now that I use it at home the keys feel too flat AND I JUST HATE THE LAYOUT. How freaking common do people use the alternative slash sign for it to be right next to the space bar, and why is the backward space key smaller than a regular key – I thought it was one of the mostly used ones!?

I hate my keyboard so much I had to pull out some of the stupidly placed keys so that I don’t press the stupid slash sign each time I want to do an ALT shortcut or put my computer to sleep mode each time I wanted to delete a letter!

Urgh!!