Archive for June, 2007

It’s been quiet on this blog lately, eh?

It’s not because I forgot about you. Oh no. It’s partly in fact because it’s summertime and that in summer, I’m rather lazy; but it’s also mostly due to the fact I made (and had made) a home improvement projects.

The land on my property is significantly higher than my neighbour’s backyard, leaving me with very few options but to build a retaining wall to avoid having a slope and thus losing a lot of space in my backyard. With nowaday’s properties, with 5 to 6000 square feet, after a shed, a pool a spa and a couple of trees, it gets pretty crowded.

Since I’m cheap, I had most of the work made by a landscaping company, like the drain, the digging, the levelling of the wall base, but I kept the chore of building up the wall, piece by piece, to myself.

We were 4 working on it. My mom, my dad, my wife and I. It took us 2 full days. After each row, we had to fill the ditch with gravel and since the ditch was (too) large, a bit of dirt too. Also, we had to glue the last 3 rows.

The wall has 8 rows, is 4 feet high and 60 feet wide. With about 80 bricks per row, it gives a total of 640 bricks. Each brick weighs 40 lbs. I thus moved 25 600 lbs of concrete bricks. And that goes without taking the 15 tons of gravel!


Of course, while I was building the wall, I noticed that they had build the wall base 1 foot short. They’re coming tomorrow to fix it and fill the ditch.

Isn’t it great?

In fact, I don’t really care whether it looks good or not, as I won’t be the one to see it everyday like my neighbour!

bremdyman


Bonus:

My Shaggy Shih Tzu Yoshi.

he he he!

Thanks Gog!

This story might seem like nothing, but it has the potential of creating a case law that could litterally cut the grass from under the feet of many bloggers.

In Montreal, Zeke’s Gallery is a place where unkown and experimental artists can show their art. Chris Hand, Zeke’s owner also writes a blog about arts to promote his gallery. He also comments on issues pertaining to artists, among which are selling of paintings, and of course, frauds.

November 25 2006, Chris wrote an article and linked to a couple of stories published from reliable sources (National Post, CBC, Radio-Canada, etc.) about a Montreal car dealer who “had previous dealings with the Montreal Mafia and boasted a mild criminal past”, mentionning he was implicated in a mob probe by multiple law enforcement agencies. He then went on to report that the said car dealer was now doing business with a “fellow” gallery owner who tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Québec, with a link to this story as well.

After a while, things went bad. Apparently, the people mentionned on Zeke’s blog were not happy at all about these allegations and asked him to remove all these “false” stories about them. The thing is though that poor Zeke only used the information from what was linked from reliable mass media sources! Why didn’t these people sue the mass medias then?

After receiving a couple of cease and desist letters, he was asked to go to court where the judge granted the plaintiff an injunction against him.

The judgement called for Zeke’s Gallery removal of offending material from his blog, though there is no mention that the source (National Post, CBC, Radio-Canada) has to comply with this injunction. Isn’t it odd?

Since I cannot afford a lawsuit, I will refrain myself from doing any name dropping, but here’s a link to an article from Hour.ca that has all the names of those who cannot be named.

I guess bloggers from outside Quebec and Canada could do Zeke a favour in publishing this information everywhere on the Web in protest, thus de Facto rendering the judge’s injunction ineffective. But I would never call for bloggers to do that. Oh no.

There is a difference between reporting facts published by known and reliable sources, and libel. Right?

Freedom!

brem


via Julie Bélanger

I learned from a very young age that one could build a house and a garage with full electrical door mechanism with only snot and lianas. Yeah, I’ve seen it in the movie Top Secret!, in the scene where they parody The Blue Lagoon.

Later in life, during my pre-teen years, I also learned one could get out of almost any situation by jury-rigging stuff with only a match and paper clips by watching the TV series MacGyver.

Well, now, at my venerable age, I just learned one could build walking robots with electronic junk from deep rural China.

And it’s Mr. Woo who does it. Paul Merton of the BBC made a piece on this excentric character. Watch the video below.

He apparently burnt his house down and his wife was so mad she considered divorce.

he he he

brem


Thanks Pag!