I checked out a few places.

My sister’s house in Ottawa: Looks like nobody was home. Nice house although I’m not sure my bro-in-law is doing enough to maintain the lawn in the front yard! Zing!

My apt. in Kitslano: I forgot just how beautiful Vancouver is. I haven’t had the time to explore much but I do hope that they toured the UBC campus. (But not Wreck Beach—some folks should never get naked in public.)

My ex-girlfriend’s house in Montreal: Yeah, I guess it’s a bit stalkerish but I wanted to check out the house. As coincidence would have it, she and her father appear in the Google image. Sonia’s dad is raking leaves and she is sitting on a chair just beside the front entrance. I wonder if they noticed the Google car when it passed by.

My old office building on St-Jacques: Back in the day when I was a lawyer, I rented some office space on St-Jacques St. (ouest). Street looks busy. I miss that place.

Peace.

This didn’t really come as much of a surprise to me. Variety reported that a bunch of losers—most notably Woody Allen—have signed some lame petition in an effort to get child-rapist, Roman Polanski, released from prison.

Let’s not get confused about the facts here: Polanski admitted to having sex with the minor child. When he realized that he was probably going to jail, he seized the opportunity to flee the US so he could escape justice and hobnob with his euro-trash buddies in France.

Some background on Woody Allen

As we all know, Woody Allen married Soon-Yi Previn in 1997. Soon-Yi (born in 1970) is the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and André Previn. Farrow divorced Previn in 1979 and was subsequently considered as Allen’s domestic partner from 1980 to 1992. When Farrow and Allen first began shacking up, Soon-Yi was 10 years of age.

Soon-Yi turned 18 in 1988. In 1992, Farrow found nude pics of her daughter that had been taken by Allen.

Although Allen never adopted Soon-Yi (Previn remained the adoptive father), it’s clear that he must have acted as her de facto step-father from the time his relationship with Farrow commenced. It’s horrific to contemplate that Allen participated in raising a step-daughter that he would one day marry.

Given his own personal (and creepy) history, Allen’s support for Polanski comes as no surprise.

The Mia Farrow connection

Ironically enough, Mia Farrow could be called as a character witness if Polanski is ever brought to trial. I found this tidbit on Hollywood.Com:

HOLLYWOOD – Hollywood actress Mia Farrow will testify in Roman Polanski’s defence at the Oscar-winning director’s forthcoming libel sex trial.

The 60-year-old actress will appear at Polanski’s London High Court case next month against Conde Nast, the publisher of Vanity Fair magazine.

The film maker has filed a lawsuit over a Vanity Fair article, in which he is accused of propositioning a woman on the way to the funeral of his late wife Sharon Tate, who was murdered by followers of serial killer Charles Manson in 1969.

Farrow, who rose to fame in the Polish film-maker’s 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby, was present with Polanski at New York’s popular restaurant Elaine’s, where the alleged incident took place.

A source tells Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper, "Mia regards Roman as a close friend and she says she will do all she can to help him."

Mia really knows how to pick’em, doesn’t she?

Yesterday, Montreal comedian Scott Faulconbridge wrote something about Aislin’s take on mayoralty candidate, Louise Harel. Scott and I attended the same elementary school. I didn’t know him well, but he generally came off as a pathetic whiner. Nobody liked him. I caught a few bits of his stand-up and well, it’s not a surprise that he ain’t a household name. Scott: Don’t give up your day job frying burgers or whatever the hell it is that you do.

LOL! I just remembered that many years ago, my then fiancé/girlfriend Isabelle gave me a handmade card for my birthday.  Inside was a handcrafted gift certificate for a vacation getaway to Tadoussac (Quebec) complete with bed & breakfast suggestions and some lame whale-watching itinerary. The only catch: I would have to pay for my half of the trip. In essence, her gift to me was that she would pay her own way. Oh, wait a minute, that’s not exactly true. Her plan was that we would take my car—which would have meant that I would have had to drive 400 kilometres (that’s approximately 248 miles) to receive a gift that I didn’t want and which I had to pay for. In addition to paying for my own accommodations (hotel, food, etc.), I was also expected to absorb the cost resulting from the wear and tear of my pathetic car as it endured the crappy roads that run through rural Quebec.

So, in other words, it wasn’t a bona fide cadeau. In Isabelle’s defence though, she probably thought that her gesture constituted a legitimate gift given that I habitually paid for everything. I guess her mindset was: I’ll let him off the hook for paying—what a wonderful surprise!

Whales are huge, in case you didn’t know. Why on Earth would I want to get on a boat, approach their swimming territory (or whatever the technical term is) and antagonize them? I don’t know about my readership, but I’m personally a staunch supporter of avoiding wildlife that can kill you.

And who wants to visit Tadoussac anyway? No offence to Tadoussacians, but you seriously have to wonder about a place whose biggest draw is all about something that doesn’t even exist within town limits. I mean, if they had great restaurants that served whale steaks, that would be a different story. But they don’t—at least I don’t think they do.

I refused the gift, of course. Isabelle left me not too long afterwards. I blame the whales. (I also thank them!)

Fagstein posted an interesting article about Louise Harel’s recent performance during an English-only interview on CJAD. I especially enjoyed this quote from his post:

I think George W. Bush has better support from anglo Montrealers. Stumbling through severe language difficulties to give un-nuanced explanations of why she supports policies that anglophones are most opposed to is an exercise in futility.

Personally, I’m not offended that Harel’s English is less than adequate. I am, however, somewhat surprised that she’s not functionally bilingual. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting every French Quebecer to be able to quote Shakespeare from memory . . . but how can you not pick up a little more English when you have been involved in provincial politics for approximately 10 years?

At any rate, who cares? The only reason I do not want her to win is due to the fact that she was the architect of the forced municipal mergers. Here in Saint-Bruno, we are still feeling the (financial) repercussions of being forced into an agglomeration with the city of Longueuil.

If you’re interested, pull a group of your peers together in a room, have them buy my book, Six Pixels of Separation, connect with me prior to finalizing the date and I’ll do everything I can to try and join in on your discussion of the book (either by phone or via Skype).

So, what are you waiting for? Why not become a local leader in your business community and start your own Business Book Club?

I wonder if Warren Buffett ever started his own Business Book Club?

Thanks for the chuckles, Joel!

Godaddy used to offer a cheap monthly plan, but now their low-end hosting is $4.99/month AND you have to pay the first three months in advance. Forget it.

Hostgator offers a $4.95/month package without imposing a long-term contract, but their support is notoriously crappy. Plus, they usually over-saturate their servers. They brag that they offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth but will shut down your account if you exceed system resources. So, something like 12 simultaneous connections will probably cause your account to be suspended…even though you have only consumed a tiny fraction of your allotted bandwidth.

Hurricane Electric now offers $1/month hosting but unfortunately, no mySQL DB support. Their next cheapest plan is $9.95 (includes mySQL, etc.) If I ever ran a successful high-traffic site, I would probably go with HE.NET.

I finally decided on a company that I had never heard of: lovinghosting.com. I’m paying a grand total of $2/month for 150MB of space and 3GB of bandwidth. For a small blog that nobody reads (like mine), that’s more than satisfactory. Thus far, I’ve experienced no downtime. I contacted customer support on two occasions and both times, I received a reply within 15 minutes.

If you are interested in a $0/month plan for your blog, you can always go with Blogger or Wordpress’s free hosting. Both services allow you to use a domain name in conjunction with your blog (registration costs are extra, of course). Unlike Wordpress, Blogger allows ads. Wordpress, on the other hand, offers a wider variety of attractive templates. Wordpress’s service also promotes your blog within their network. So, if you blog about Michael Jackson, a link to your article might appear under somebody else’s post about MJ. Both services offer admin panels that are easy to use. Oh, if you register your domain name through Blogger (i.e., Google powered by Godaddy), your account is configured to work with Google Aps. (If you register with Google, they’ll also hide your WHOIS data; that services is usually $6.95/yr extra if you register directly with Godaddy.)

Her blog entry is located here.

BTW, even though I don’t really use Twitter I do have a WordPress plugin that automagically tweets my blog entries (i.e., the title of the post followed by a bit.ly link to the blog.) The plugin is called Twitter Tools and can be found at http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress.