Legislators in Ireland are under pressure to pass a SOPA like law from the subsidiaries of the same companies that lobbied the US for SOPA. Earlier today, news broke on Twitter that Sean Sherlock’s (the man behind the Irish version of SOPA) site also contained copyright infringement. This site was also taken down today and probably we can safely assume that it will reappear without copyright infringement.

In Canada, there is pressure on parliament to pass Bill C-11 (Canadian version of SOPA). Can you guess what’s coming next?

The party currently in power in Canada is the CPC party. Lo and behold, In the lower right of the CPC website is a fake Youtube Logo:

Youtube does provide a terms of service for using their logo. Youtube also provides the approved logos in downloadable form.

Yes, those three sites only had minor infringements. But, they are infringements nonetheless.

• How many websites currently have accidental fake logos?
• How many websites currently have an image downloaded from a photo hosting service (ex. Flickr)?
• How many websites currently have an icon the developer borrowed from Windows, OSX or an application?

The answer is probably millions. Is there a point at which technically illiterate politicians will clue in that the laws they are proposing will negatively affect millions of existing websites?

The additional irony with the CPC instance is that Youtube might end up being blocked from Canada if C-11 is passed.

Under current law (DMCA), you & I are allowed to incorporate existing content into our own works so long as it falls within “fair use”. Fair use means you can use short clips from movies, short music clips from other artists, quotes from other written works, etc. without it being copyright infringement. SOPA & PIPA eliminate fair use.

Further to that, the proposed laws also make linking to web sites that contain copyright infringement (under the new definition) illegal (on the grounds of aiding and abetting copyright infringement). What that means in practical terms if SOPA & PIPA pass into law is that most existing blogs both foreign and domestic would fall into the definition of a copyright infringing website and/or intellectual property theft.

A person who has a site offering free yoga videos and instruction is technically taking revenue away from the traditional entertainment and broadcasting industry. However, most like the person running that site is making money from advertising and/or creating a customer base for one on one consultation. From an economic standpoint, the site may be eliminating a job at News Corp or one of the other media conglomerates but it is not costing the economy a job.

The media conglomerates cannot get legislators to shutdown the distribution infrastructure (the Internet), so they drafted legislation that targets the content producers (ie. you & I). If you have not already done so, I encourage you to contact your representatives to let them know that you do not want the Internet to be censored.

I went down to the basement and shut the pump off for the night. A few minutes later, I turned on the tap in the upstairs bathroom and only got air. I thought, “Well, this isn’t good.” On Monday, I took the cap off the well and checked for water with a flashlight and was somewhat relieved to see light reflecting back. I spent the entire day Monday trying to get the pump primed. I succeeded in getting about 15 gallons of quite dirty water but had no luck on getting the pump to hold it’s prime.

On Tuesday I checked out the local rental places to see if I could rent a video camera to lower into the well to see what I was up against. The population is low enough here that there isn’t enough people to rent one on a frequent basis, so none of the rental shops had one. After a couple phone calls I found a plumber/well-drill company that had one.

On Wednesday afternoon, the well/plumbing guys came by and lowered the camera into the well. The good thing that we saw was that we found there were several feet of water in the well. The not so good part was that the bottom of the well didn’t look like the bottom of a well. It looked like a pile of mud & rubble. Just below the bottom of the well casing there was a fair sized pocket that was quite a bit wider than the rest of the well. The casing only went about 10-12 feet into the ground. The guys said it looked like the well had collapsed. That sounded like what I saw.

Since there was water in the well, we moved on to trying to get the pump primed. The guys did get it primed a couple times but as soon as the pump shut off, it was back to square one. Either something had happened to the line between the house and well, or something had happened to the line in the well. My guess was that the last collapse had damaged the foot valve. At that point the alternatives we had were

• Dig out and replace the line between the house & well (and hope for the best).
• Drill a new well.

The catch was that the old well is inside a carriage house converted into a garage and the water line goes under about 30 feet of asphalt driveway. Even though it might be less expensive than drilling a new well, it wasn’t going to be pocket change. Andrea & I didn’t have much trouble opting for a new well. The prospect of doing the repair and then having the well collapse again in a year or two wasn’t worth whatever price difference there might be.

Since we didn’t have a few thousand lying around in the middle of August, I set up a temporary water system. I moved the pump to the garage & ran new pipe down the well and too the house. You can see the water line in this picture (in front of the car):

I should emphasize temporary. Winter comes early in Canada. We’ve already had a couple nights where the temperatures have hovered around the freezing mark. We have had the pellet stove on a few times. Once I had the temporary water system hooked up, I scheduled having the well drilled this week.

Today was that day. I’d never been up close on a well being drilled before so I wandered out a few times to check on how things were going & watch the whole process. Once the well casing was in, I was surprised at how fast the the drill went down and how much water came up. This particular drill was one that pounded (like a jackhammer but slower) while constantly spinning. It blew steam and compressed air through the bottom of the drill to blow the broken rock out the top of the well. Here’s a pic from the first hour before hitting bedrock .

I also keep a rough track of the time. The first 30 feet of well & installing the well casing took about an hour & cost about $1500. After that, drilling ran at about $1700/hour (if you don’t include setup and take down time). The actual cost is based on the length of the casing needed & well depth vs time, so that’s just an interesting comparison.

When the drill hits water, they don’t immediately stop. They drill down a bit further to ensure that there is a bit of a reservoir there. On my last trip out, there was a lot more water coming out of the top of the well than there had been in my previous trips. I took that as a good sign. The guy who owns the rig said he’d found water. Then, “I don’t think you’ll be able to pump this one dry.” Later he estimated the flow to be in the range of 12-15 (imperial) gallons per minute. I looked up pumps tonight and they seem to be in the range of 4-6 gallons per minute (so even if the pump ran constantly it couldn’t keep up).

Even though this was an expensive day for us, it was memorable in another way. Well drilling is probably not a popular career choice. There isn’t a lot of fame or fortune in it. I could tell that he was really pleased with the result. Pleased in the sense that he had nailed it. If you’re going to work, you should want to do good work. And, rightly so, should be pleased when you do do good work.

The mulch had decomposed and was full of twitch grass and other weed roots. The side garden had several shrubs and only one of them even looked halfway decent. In the spring two years ago, I ripped all but two of them out. One of the ones I removed was only about 3 feet away from one of the ones I kept. That summer the remaining one grew and looked healthy. Last summer, it blossomed. this year, you can hardly see the leaves for the blossoms:

When I was doing the final prep work on the house in Miramichi I brought two rugosa and two antique rose bushes here. Both are strains are old enough that they have no copyrighted/trademark to restrict natural propagation. Both grow suckers of the same type of rose from the roots, so they are not a product of grafting. Last year I moved a couple of the sucker plants to the side garden. Here’s one getting ready to blossom:

There are a couple other pics in Andrea’s photo stream which you can get to by clicking on either of the images above.

The most worrisome finding is that many people do not seem well informed and knowledgeable about their terms of borrowing; a sizable group does not know the terms of their mortgages or the interest rates they pay on their loans. – via Freakonomics

A week ago I wrote about Financial Planning.

The thing with this financial planning advice is that it isn’t the best use of your money. The Canadian tax system even has incentives built in which make it advantageous in the short term to invest in RRSPs while you have a mortgage. Depending on one’s tax bracket, the short term tax incentive ranges from a one time credit of 25-40% of the funds deposited in a RRSP. That sounds like a really great deal in a financial market where savings interest rates are less than 5%.

Essentially, you are giving the RRSP holder money which is lent back to you as a mortgage at a higher interest rate. The interest rate spread between mortgages & RRSPs over the last few years has been about 3.5%. For the life of a mortgage & RRSP, the mortgage is collecting 3.5% more interest than the RRSP is paying.

When we bought this house, we still had the house (and mortgage) in Miramichi. The only choice we had for a mortgage was 25 years. While we were paying both mortgages, there wasn’t much room for contributing to an RRSP. Once we sold the house in Miramichi and did a bit of planning we switched our mortgage here to bi-weekly payments. Our mortgage allows up to double payments without penalty.

For the last 3 years, we have been paying an extra $42 in each bi-weekly payment. Yesterday, I did the math & those 78 payments of $42 has saved us over $10,000 in interest on the mortgage. The first $42 saved us 24 years of interest at the mortgage rate. In terms of retirement savings, we have gained the 3.5% for 24 years. The next $42 we pay will save us 21 years of mortgage interest and gain 3.5% for 21 years.

There will be a point where the tax incentive makes the RRSP truly more advantageous. In another 5 years or so I’ll probably run some formulas to figure out when we should switch. At a guess, though, I would say the tax incentive only become the best choice in the last 5 years of the mortgage.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about this weekend is how those are all tied together.

Andrea & I had been working at the WordPress MU consulting thing about a year prior to the merge announcement. For about a month after what we spent a quite a bit of time discussing was, “what were we going to do?” There was always the option for me to go back to corporate development, so we never felt that we were out of options.

With all of the time Andrea had put into the WordPress MU support forums, she had interacted with thousands of other people with a wide range of technical skills who were also using MU. So, the second question we pondered was, “what were the other users of MU going to do?”

The third question we discussed was, “what do we want to do?”. This question is what ties together the three disparate things in the first paragraph. Whether we would have discussed this at some point, it was the merge announcement that precipitated that discussion.

Once we were fairly sure of what we wanted to do, we started to work toward those goals by doing three things:

• I volunteered to work on the merge. The worst that could happen was I might have been turned down. You don’t get anywhere if you don’t try or in this case offer. In addition to offering, I went ahead and did some preliminary prototyping work on a merged codebase using the 2.7.1. versions.
• We chose and registered the WP eBooks domain. We had this domain for more than a year before we started developing the site but our goal for the site was established before we chose the domain name.
• I started looking into developing a theme framework for BuddyPress. That work eventually turned into GenesisConnect which currently supports 34 themes.

All of these are done and/or established. This year we’ve been moving toward the other things that we discussed two years ago. Hopefully, we’ll be able to talk about those plans over the next few months.

At the beginning of the post I wrote about three separate things. The way that they are tied together is that twenty-some years ago what I wanted to be doing when I was 45 was working at something *I* wanted to do vs working at something because it paid the bills. When I turned 45, I was primarily working on the merge, a project that I had volunteered for.

Since then I’ve had a year to reflect a bit on that. Without a doubt I was fairly naive back in college. But it’s pretty amazing that I ended up where I wanted to be anyway. If there is a moral to this story, I would say that it’s true that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% what you do about it