Yet another reason why I like Orangina

All aof you who know me know that I love Orangina, especially when served with an espresso in the French alps. Here is a great commercial that will probably never make it to North America.
Some of the puritan elements in our society would consider this short animation to be immoral. But for those of you who found my blog here it is .

Orangina Naturally Juicy

Religion in our World

Here I am on this Sunday evening one day before the second most holy day in the Christian religion. I am watching a documentary about god and religion in our world. I am listening to religious leaders from the different religions in our world say that there is no evil in religion. I don't understand how these learned men can say such things; they are blaming violence on men not religion. But religions are man made institutions, with all of the fears, prejudices and insecurities that come with men. I have always been a firm believer in treat people the way you would like people to treat you. So if your neighbour believes in a different god then yours, you should stand up and fight with every fibber in your body for his right to worship that god. And only then will we start to be able to say that as people we are making strides towards being a tolerant world. As I watch this show I am reminded how beautiful our world is. This beauty stems from our differences. Religions are the root of our greatest triumphs and our greatest failures, as humans. Today as I sit here watching this show, I understand that the human animal needs to believe in something and that belief whether in god or in ones self, belief is the one thing that keeps us going. But we should not let our beliefs trample another's. As I sit here my friends Nath and Radu are having their first child, I hope that this young man will be able to grow in a world where his beliefs guide him down the right path for him and that his beliefs lead him to happiness. I can't say that I am a religious person, because that would be a lie. But I do think that what people call god is not a spirit watching over us, but the spirit in each of us. In my mind this spirit is the most beautiful thing we can offer one another in this world. I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy life not just a new year and I wish us all peace within.

Christmas Cheer

Christmas Cheer could have been in short supply in my Neighbourhood of Pointe Saint Charles this year. One of our local food banks almost closed due to lack of funding. This area is a great working class neighbourhood with a rich history and a great community spirit, but on the back side of all this diversity we find people who need help to feed their families. We also have some great people who are willing to give their time to help the members of our little community who need it most. But sometimes giving of your time is not enough.

La maison de partage de Youville has been helping people in the south west end of our fair city for 23 years now.But this December they were confronted with the reality that their rent and heating budget was going to come up short.They had all kinds of food, clothes and furniture but they had run out of money. But fear not here come our politicians to the rescue the MNA for the area dug into her discretionary fund and managed to raise $23,000.00 with the help of some of her colleagues.
Now the question becomes what happens when that money runs out? The problem is that we have more and more poor and working poor in this country needing help and more organizations wanting to help but the pool of funds is not getting any deeper. Leaving charitable organizations to fight for funding.

I know we are all tired of hearing about how we should give our hard earned money, to an ever growing number of agencies, who want to change the world. But I believe that before we start fixing the world at large, we need to fix the world we live in every day, our neighbourhoods. If we can help make our local communities an easier place to live for our fellow citizen and everyone does the same thing in their cities and Towns. We could then turn our collective hearts to helping people on the other side of the world. Charity after all begins at home. So next time the church, community or soup kitchen in your city or town asks for a donation pleas make the extra effort and give them a little more time, money or even both. Montreal is a great city we need to keep ourselves healthy and warm over this holiday season. I wish you all a merry Christmas and a Happy new year

Une importante banque alimentaire du sud-ouest de Montréal espère un «miracle» pour éviter la fermeture.

Here comes the change for J.F. Houpert

    After a week and a half of rest and relaxation, my transformation from truck equipment salesmen to an SEO consultant is almost here.

Monday morning at 8:00 AM I will be hopping on the metro and making my way to the La Presse building in old Montreal, for what I feel will be the start of a new and exiting chapter in my life.

I have to admit, I am terrified, exited and curious. I don't know what to expect, I will be working with a team who seems at first glance to be motivated, and driven to succeed. I know this is going to hard work and it's going to push me to get the best out of myself, something that I must admit I haven't done in quite some time. You see my time spent in the trucking industry was not the happiest time in my professional life, barring a few exceptions the people I worked with were not people I enjoyed spending time with. Our cultural and ideological differences were too great to bridge. I had trouble adjusting to the rural Quebec mentality that the people in the industry seem to be so proud of, the thinly and I mean thinly veiled racism, sexism and fear of anything other then their norm was hard for me to deal with. I also had issues with the fact that I could not have a social conversation about anything, other the usual pleasantries one talks about with strangers.

 

But that chapter in my life is now behind me, it was a short chapter and I know that the next one will be much longer and much more interesting. The world I heading into (Search Engine Marketing) seems to be populated with people that are vibrant, living life to the fullest while still working hard to accomplish their goals. Don't get me wrong I know this is still work and it will have its good days and bad days if it didn't it wouldn't be called work. But I do believe the atmosphere will be a healthier one. If anything it will be an interesting one. I know that not to many people read this (Google Analytics) but I do want to thank Wendy Best for making my last few months in the truck business liveable. I also want to thank my friends and family for their support in this time of change, I also want to extend a very special thanks to Radu and Nath for helping me make this change.

Small town takes important step.

I was reading La Presse a couple of day's ago. And I saw a short article on the 23 rd page about how this small rural town, that was going to offer wireless internet access to all 1900 of its inhabitants. After reading this I felt like finally someone had taken a step in the right direction. The cost of the service would be $250.00 for a repeater that would go on the roof of the house and $50.00 a year after that. That's right I said $50.00 a year for high speed wireless access. In my mind internet access should be like radio or TV, it should be paid for by advertisers. I think that in North America we have enough daily web users to sustain a service that would be free to the consumer and paid for by advertising. Large companies who need huge bandwidth would still have to pay, like if they were using a premium service.

Most people use the web on a daily basis to communicate with others or to do research; I think that keeping high speed internet access expensive is doing our society a disservice. I understand that if advertisers pay for our access like TV and radio, they might want to censure what is available through this service but as with TV people who would want access to questionable services such as porn and gambling would have to pay a little extra as they do now for cable TV. This surplus paid by users could be used to maintain the infrastructure needed for such a project. If a town of 1900 can do it why can't larger cities such as Montréal do something like this? You would think that with the population density of this city one tower would serve many more people the one in a small rural town, making such a project viable. But what would the large Telco's and cable companies have to say about that, all of a sudden they would go from making a profit from providing access to spending money to advertise on the system. I believe that sometimes companies have to make small sacrifices for the grater good.

 

 

Homeless man fights city hall

A couple of weeks ago I went out for breakfast with a friend of mine. She picked up the news paper to see if one of her reporter buddies had a story in the Saturday edition. The story she found was one about a homeless man who had had his dog taken away from him by the city for taking a bite out of crime (I apologize for the bad pun). This gentleman has been homeless for about ten years and has multiple dogs. One rainy day Mr. Paquet was taking refuge from the rain under a stores awning (with the owner’s permission). When two of Montréal’s finest came along to remove him from his dry piece of pavement. One of the police officers grabbed Mr. Packet by the shoulder. I don’t know about you but I know better then to manhandle someone when they have dogs with them. Dogs will always protect their owners from what they perceive as danger. The police officer had to get 12 stitches in his calve. The city then took this mans dog away and sentenced it to death. The courts have overturned the city’s action and released the dog back to his owner. The city came back the very next day and took the dog back to the SPCA to be euthanized.

I don’t understand how the police and the city think they are going to get away with this. If a police officer came along and grabbed a “regular person” to make them move, we would hear about it and that police officer would probably be disciplined. But if you roust a homeless man it ok. I understand that sometimes people who live on the streets for one reason or another may need to be physically restrained to protect them selves and other, but this man was standing on private property with the owner’s permission to keep dry. How was he being a threat to anyone? And as for the city they should use some common sense, if they have no previous complaints about this man and his dogs, why go after them with such zeal. This man lives on the street and I’m sure his dogs play a vital role in his safety out there. I’m not saying that the city shouldn’t investigate the mater, but to take this dog away and kill it before the investigation is concluded is just plain dumb. Two courts have overturned the city’s decision, I think they should just back off and leave this man and his dogs alone.

Read Hugo Meunier's Story

Short term savings lead to long term economic blindness

Iwas at some friends house last night for a dinner party when the topic of discussion came to our Canadian dollar. This friend of mine was telling me about how much money he had saved by buying some things across the border on a shopping trip he and his family had taken a couple of weeks ago and how it was so great the our dollar was worth so much in the U.S. Don't people realize that our Canadian economy is in some trouble, even if the western provinces are doing well and will continue to do so as long as oil prices are hight, but the rest of us out east are suffering. Ontario and Quebec are manufacturing based economies and most of our manufactured good head south for American consumption and we all know they are having a hard time with the combination of bad sub-prime mortgage paper and slumping housing prices affecting consumer confidence. The economic crisis that our U.S. neighbors are going through at the moment, will move north soon enough if we aren't careful about how Canadians spend their money. We have to keep our dollars in Canada to keep both our little and large retailers doing well because if they are doing well we all do well. People seem to think that if they buy at places like Wall-Mart, Canadian Tire or Future Shope to name a few, that their money just goes into a corporate fat cat's pocket never to be seen again. But what people forget is that all these stores have employees that live in our communities and that the retail stores they occupy generate tax revenue for our cities and towns who in these time of federal and provincial transfer payment cut backs need all the help they can get. All this to say that we live in communities and it is our responsibilities to keep our communities healthy, because if we keep them healthy then our society will remain healthy and that is good for all of us. So why not go and buy something for the mom & pops store down the lane today, I know they will appreciate it.

people reacting

On Halloween afternoon a tragedy took place, a little girl was killed by a two teenage boys who did something stupid. One of the boys took a car out without having a license and not knowing how to drive a standard shift car, to avoid colliding with the car belonging to the other boy he swerved and hit a fence crushing the small girl behind the fence. And now people are calling for the government to raise the driving age to twenty one years old. As horrible as this loss was I don't believe we should paint all young drivers with the same brush. If this accident had been caused by a twenty five years old would people be as upset as this? Here in this province of ours drunk drivers go on driving even after multiple convictions and having their licenses suspended. A few years ago, a man leaving a country club impaired by alcohol hit another little girl riding her bike home from a friends house, he then left the young girl on the side of the road. After his trial he was sentenced to six months of prison and who knows how long on probation. But now people are calling for these boys heads, and they want to stop all the rest of the young people who never get into trouble on the road from driving. As horrible as this accident was, and as much as we may need to look at what these boys did and punish them accordingly. But punishing all young people is not the answer. We do however need to look a how we give out licenses to new drivers. Maybe we should have a graduated system of licensing or at the very least review the standards we use in our driving school and testing facilities.

Remeber the 5 th of November

I know we are only the November third, but in the U.K. on Nov. 5th a man called Guy Fawkes initiated a plan known as the gun powder plot. And that reminded me of the idea behind the gun powder plot although I don't agree with his tactics (attempting to blowup the houses of parliament) But I do think the idea of change in government is a good one, and hers is why I think this.
In the last little while we have been hearing about this so called reasonable accommodation.
And now our right honorable Pauline Marois and the party she heads saw it fit to introduce a a bill for the house to examine and debate that would require immigrants who decide to settle in this province to know how to speak French before they would be able to run for office or even hold a post in the public service. My question becomes what are we becoming? I believe we are on a slippery slope of intolerance. Have we forgotten how this country was formed? This was not a french only society in the beginning yes the English invaded Quebec and became the ruling class that some people still blame for all of the French woes to this day. But let us not forget the fact that in the beginning the French, Irish, Indian and later Italian, Greeks and Jews worked and lived together as well as intermarried to make what has become todays Quebec. We live in a great province within the greatest nation, but we cannot let our fears get in the way of what can only be seen as progress. Todays immigrant comes from places that are very different to our province but instead of being afraid of what might happen. I think we need to embrace their cultures and by accepting them and who they are into our society then and only then will we be able to make them part of who we are. We need to remember that here in the west we have the most powerful assimilation tool, consumerism. Given enough time our new arrivals will have all the wants and needs the rest of us seem to have its just a mater of time. I ask you one question. When did different become dangerous?

Government Offices

Today I went to the passport office in ville Saint Laurent to renew my my passport. As I was standing in line to speak with the lady at the reception who was going to check my paper work and direct me to the right counter. I took a minute to look around at people surrounding me, behind me were two young ladies pushing a baby stroller both of them were dressed in country stripper chick, faux velvet track suits exposing their mid sections. The young lady pushing the stroller had a tattoo on her lower back, but this tattoo was more of a brand then body art it said Bissonette with a stylized arrow pointing down. Now can someone tell me how else one supposed to interpret that? I don't care what anyone says to that means she practises the oldest form of birth control, (if the swimmers are in the wrong pool how can they win the race?) My trip to the the passport office also made me realize what a great country we live in their were people everywhere waiting patiently for their turn to speak to a civil servant. All of us thinking the same thing that this was taking way to much time and that we would rather be outside enjoying the last few moments of warm weather before winter sets in but no one got upset or out of hand. We all waited our turn.

Intro

Good evening to everyone who is taking the time to come and read my little spot on the web.
I have always thought that a blog was a self indulgent use of the web but yet here I am. So before I bore you or even annoy you with my opinions, I think I should at least tell a little about myself. I am a 34 year old single man from Montreal. I in the middle of making a career change and I must say I find myself very excited about the future and what I like to believe is going to be positive change in my life. That being said I am still working in an industry and a company that take a little more out of me every day I find hard to get motivated to get up and go to work not to mention deal with the customers and people I work with every day. But enough with the belly aching. I hope this blog will give me a chance to share a little piece of myself with others out there and again thank for dropping in for a quick read.

J.F.