Browsing my regular website for news related to the Internet and information technologies, idg.se, I came across a reference to these articles about the revised DMCA that would introduce penalties of up to ten years in prison for attempting piracy, far more than the sentences for assault, robbery and rape, a clear indication of how mega corporations look upon the human worth as compared to it of money.

Here's a short diary, or rather recollection, of the week I spent in Val Thorens skiing. I hope it will come in useful for others planning to spend their vacation in this area or are just curious about it. Comments are welcome as always.

Half the week has passed, I'm coming online here to check on things and post another short update. I'm having a great time, I can't say I've ever seen or experienced such fantastic skiing so accessible and enjoyable. If you get away from the lower slopes which are dominated by beginners, who tend to make skiing riskier for everyone else*, you'll be treated with high altitude pistes that go for miles and if you venture outside the marked path you will, without much difficulty, find perfect powder.

I've been in France since the past four days, enjoying awesome skiing in Val Thorens in the French Alps near the border of Italy. I'm currently in an Internet cafe that is overpriced just like everything in this village, a tribute to tourism and commercial exploitation. The worst thing with Val Thorens is doubtlessly its lack of atmosphere, genuinity and soul. Imagine three dozen sport hotels built out of concrete on some distant mountain top surrounded by 30 lifts and you get the idea. Basically everything here is expensive, and quite boring, it's all about the money! You're here to do one thing: ski! So about the skiing.

The past two days have been quite stressful to say the least, the recent site downtime happened when my previous hosting company didn't meet their obligations and simply shut my site down since it required too much server resources. Well, if you pay $60 a year for hosting, what do you expect? I wasn't totally surprised to be honest, but it's still bad news and added significantly to my stress level.

I've been busy ironing out the bugs I've discovered since the launch of the site. It still suffers from a mysterious bug in IE related to the loading of background images of certain elements, which makes the page header look strange in IE. I hope to be able to find a solution soon.

This is it the result of nearly four months of work: my new website. Getting here has been a dream come true. Over the years I've had many ideas about features and content I'd like to incorporate into my site but I haven't been able to due its rather limited format. Starting now, that won't be an issue.