This is our fifth anniversary at shopWebSpace.com and while it has been a good five years, we are implementing a shift from basic web hosting to ready-to-go packages for the technology challenged (while keeping some hosting packages for our current customers).

I have noticed in recent years how everybody wants to get on the web, and many people have the know-how, but there are a lot of people out there who want to start a blog or a community website or even a social network, but have no knowledge of servers, gigabytes, terabytes, databases, DNS records, email forwarding and what have you, and so are “stuck” having to use Google Blogs, or Blogspot (no offence) for their basic needs. Even though those are free and easy to use, they are very limited in terms of your “look”, or layout. You can express your thoughts, but not your personality. And that is where our new services comes in: for a low monthly rate you get your own hosted website with pre-installed scripts and themes or templates. We take care of everything: from registering your domain name and renewing it every year, to installing scripts for you with the plugins you want, or install a new template you want. We have a “WordPress Blog” package, a “Community Site” package, a “Social Networking” package etc. They are truly ready to go: as soon as you sign up, your blog or community website is operational. No installation required.

I am also happy to announce, that for those looking for more technical solutions, we now offer SSL Certificates, Instant Mobilizer, as well as Hosted Exchange.

Here’s hoping the next five years will be as exciting as the first!

One government giveth, the other taketh away.

Lovely isn’t it?

Anyone else find it curious that the first “tax rebate cheques” will be rolling out, uhm, say, three months before the next provincial election? And that’s Federal CONSERVATIVE money, by the way, that the Ontario Liberals will be happily handing out just before they need to be re-elected. And I’m sure we’ll see Dalton “That’s Not True” McGuinty’s trademark fake smile as he pretends to be Santa Clause, and how much do you want to bet he’ll say: “Oh, and btw, this cheque doesn’t come from us, it comes from Ottawa!”

Tory Senator Nancy Ruth told reporters on Tuesday that “Canada Geese should be culled and fed to the poor”. Now, I agree there’s too many Canada Geese, andexcrement is a problem, but feeding them to “the poor”, whoever they are, is not a solution. I mean, have you ever tasted wild goose? It isn’t much good. I am sure those “poor” (I assume they would include the bums on our streets who get their nutrition from a regular bottle of rum), would turn up their noses at the sight of Canada Goose. Might as well serve up beaver. Or Elizabeth May.

And I wouldn’t serve that to my worst enemy…

…who happens to be Elizabeth May.

Please don’t get me wrong–I feel sorry for Natasha Richardson’s husband, children and family. It is a horrible way to lose a loved one. Nobody deserves that. That such a seemingly small accident can lead to a person’s death is utterly shocking.

That being said, this situation brings to light two points:

1)  why is it that when celebrities die, people get upset, governments spring to action. How many regular people die from head injuries every year? Not taking away the tragedy of her death of course, but is her death any more tragic than the death of your mother from cancer or the death of your child caused by a drunk driver? These things barely make the evening news, nor do they darken Broadway. “Our” deaths don’t get governments moving. It just seems that celebrities are somehow more important human beings than us regular folks. 

2) this unfortunate situation brings up the immediate “Helmets should be mandated!” conversation. Quebec is jumping the gun on it, and no-doubt ban-happy McSquinty will follow suit (ban bare heads, I suppose). The helmet law, of course, is such an utterly useless piece of legislation: if you’re smart, you’ll be wearing a helmet regardless of the law,  and if you’re dumb, or don’t want to mess up your hair, well, you don’t wear a helmet, and you risk cracking your head. This may sound crude, but that’s the way it is.

This reminds me of the (great) Jerry Seinfeld. You should know that I struggled with the fact whether I should include this bit or not, because it is funny, and people in general don’t want funny in a time of shock and mourning, and it may sound to some of you like I am making fun of the fact that Ms. Richardson died from a head injury: nothing could be further from the truth.  This bit is about helmet laws, not people that die from head injuries:

“…The only thing dumber than the helmet is the helmet law, the point of which is to protect a brain that is functioning so poorly, it’s not even trying to stop the cracking of the head that it’s in…“

The once-a-year, feel-fuzzy-in-your-tummy Happy Hour is coming up again. Yes, let everyone in the world join hands and do our part in saving the world in this annual, all-out love-fest: Earth Hour is here! Turning off some lights for 60 minutes once a year is going to save our planet. Mayors of major cities across the world are happily jumping onto the bandwagon and turning off all city lights for an hour on March 28 (and leave all the lights on all night for the other 364.96 days a year).

So what are “we” doing all this for? “To Save The Earth”. To save the Earth? From what? Too much light? Turning off your lights for one hour really doesn’t do anything, except to highlight (or: lowlight)  the level of stupidity of people across the globe. Hey everybody, look at the 1 billion idiots! No, apparently, this hour long sit-in-the-dark thing is nothing more than a symbolic gesture. Whoop-de-do. That’ll teach all them energy wasters: we’ll sit here in the dark, while they are basking in the wasteful light. And that somehow convinces the energy-wasters to better their ways. This endeavor must be the worst idea since someone said ‘yeah, let’s take this suspiciously large wooden horse into Troy, statues are all the rage this season’. h/t

I’ve got news for you: I paid for the energy I use, it belongs to me, and I can do with it as I please: I can use it running my vacuum, I can waste it, throw it out the window, whatever. It’s mine. You’re gonna tell me how to wisely use my energy? Get lost! Go punch holes into walls with David Suzuki: I gotta say, I’ll tell you where I’d like to stick that caulking gun…

If it’s just a gesture, then don’t bother: gestures don’t do anything. Actions do. You can gesture all you want, until you actually do something nothing will change. First off, I don’t understand what exactly you’re even trying to change. We’re supposed to use less energy? Why? Einstein said there’s an infinite amount of energy in the universe, so there hardly seems to be a reason to conserve it. That’s almost, like, trying to conserve water, one of the most common elements on this planet. Why are we not conserving dirt? Or grass? There’s lots of that… And the best thing is, we’ll probably get a nice satellite picture showing us how many people participated in this nonsense, with nobody realizing that manufacturing and shooting up this satellite and taking pictures and sending them back to earth probably used up more energy than this whole stupidity is trying to save.

Here’s a thought for all you participants:

If you are so concerned about saving the planet, why would you wait until a once a year gimmick and turn off the lights for one hour, and not turn off your lights right now and leave them off? Oh, I see, you’re willing to give up something to save the Earth, but only for one hour. Not for any longer than that. After the hour, the lights go back on. We’ve got to be comfortable, after all. Oh, and we want to watch Survivor.

YOU’RE ALL HYPOCRITES! ALL OF YOU!

…and make room for Global Dimming. Yes, the Global Warmists, fresh off the Global Warming fiasco, and a fiasco it was, because, uhm, well, the Earth’s been cooling for over a decade now,  have now embraced the new threat to man-kind: Global Dimming. And what must we do to stop this infernal thing from happening? Yes, you guessed it: close all coal powered power plants, ie. conserve energy. So, to stop Global Warming we need to conserve energy, and to stop Global Dimming we need to conserve energy.

Wait a minute: if Global Dimming is blocking the sun’s rays reaching the surface of the Earth (hence: dimming), and Global Warming is trapping the sun’s rays on Earth, don’t the two negate each other?

Seems to me, that we can either: 1) spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to fight the two, or 2) spend nothing, and just let them fight it out amongst themselves, with the same net result:

We’ll be heading into an ice-age regardless.

This OC Transpo mess just won’t go away: after John Baird proposed to lift the exemption on Canada labour safety laws</a> on OC Transpo, Ottawa’s public transit, effectively limiting the maximum number of hours a driver can drive in one shift to 14, all the drivers are coming out of the woodwork today and yesterday complaining that this is unfair: you sure can drive for 16 hours straight. No problem. We’re a little bit sleepy, but that’s OK. We gotta make that overtime! Overtime! Two times and a half! Overtime! Uhmmm… 16 hours shifts… wasn’t the strike all about “quality of life”, and “drivers deserve to spend some time with their families”? How do 16 hour shifts fit in with that? Do you want time with your family, or do you want 16 hours shifts: 8 hours regular pay, and 20 hours of overtime pay?

Seems like quality of life = money, not family.

So I’m sitting in my favourite recliner yesterday evening come 11 pm, with a half eaten bag of pretzels on my chest, waiting for the local A news of Ottawa to come on, and what did I see appear on my TV? A comedy show! The A news had been cancelled. No announcements, no fanfare.

CTV, the station’s owner, had cancelled a whole bunch of news shows across the country for its A channels. As a private company, they have to cut back as ad revenue continues to decline, as opposed to the publicly funded CBC which just keeps on truckin’ without layoffs. CBC is out there with more employees than all the private broadcasters combined, competing with private companies with taxpayers’ money. How are Global and CTV supposed to compete with buckets and buckets of taxpayer’s money?

With no news at 6 nor at 11, and good old trusty Max Keeping of CTV’s CJOH is nowhere to be found on the Bell ExpressVu dial, people in Ottawa have lost ALL of their local news in one foul swoop. The only local news is now on in the idiotic morning show from 6 to 10. For some reason, morning shows have to be light and fluffy, with airhead hosts (Kurt Stoodley and Karen Solomon–at least she’s gone) and silly, feel good segments.

Do we need any more reasons to finally privatise the CBC?

BCE, fresh off a botched deal with the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund, which left about $1.2B cash in their pockets (that was merely the penalty for the deal not going through, don’t let anybody tell you the Ontario Teachers are not having a tough time), just purchased 750 The Source (formerly Radioshack) stores across Canada. Knowing how competent the people staffing regular Bell stores are, the level of service just dropped from ‘friendly and knowledgeable’ to ‘rude and incredibly brainless’. The personnel went from crusty middle aged balding men who knew what colour wire needed to be connected to what terminal for any given brand of 20 year old radios, to hip-looking twenty-somethings with their ear glued permanently to a cellphone and their eye on the iPod, who are more worried about their hair than their bottom line and spell “your” as “ur”. Great.

Next time you go into one of these Bellshacks and try to buy a battery, good luck with getting out of there in under two hours and with the right product.

In memory of Paul Harvey, who died today, I am reposting my story “The Old bag Did It” from May 07 below:

The Old Bag Did It

Young Charlie always had a fondness for nature. When he was a young boy he was known to be outdoors for most of his days. You see, Charlie loved animals. He loved them even more than his fellow humans.

But as young boys always do, Charlie grew up into a man. And his love for animals made way for his first love affair with Rose. Rose just wandered into his life on somebody else’s wedding. He was smitten from the start. Sure, she had a facial hair problem, but Charlie didn’t care. After all, she had a balcony, and he needed to put up his antenna.

When the relationship turned more serious, and there was talk of a marriage, neighbours told him: “This is a mistake, she’s a slob. She eats everything in sight. She’s milking you!” But that didn’t deter young Charlie. After they were caught having pre-marital sexual relations, he had to defend her honours and they soon got married and moved to the country. During the time of their short marriage, she let her self go even more: apart from over-eating, she grew a beard, let her toenails grow and stopped taking care of her teeth. Many a day she was found on the streets scrounging for food. But Charlie gladly put up with it. He udderly loved her, after all. And at least she kept the lawn neatly trimmed and took care of the garbage.

And just as news spread across the world of his wonderful marriage, it all came to an end when Rose suddenly died after eating a discarded plastic bag. For Rose, you see, wasn’t what she appeared to be. Rose, Charles Tombe’s wife and love of his life, was a mere… common goat. And now you know, the rest of the story.

Rose is survived by her son, Billy.