I started this blog about three years back with the intention of using it to blog about design and related stuff but I actually ended up way too busy designing to have any time to keep it updated.

Things have improved steadily for me and my family since then so now I can take a little spare time to pop in the odd post, what I want to do is use it more for personal stuff that does not have a place in my main intellectual property development company or its growing portfolio of project companies.

One of the things that took a lot of my spare time for a year or so was a legal case we had to bring against an ex business partner Luc Laforest, he turned out not to be an honest or truthful person as we found out, and he was even less honest or truthful about were he got the assets from that he used to pay his way in to the old project company, we found some extremely serious financial irregularities due to software that he copied from his ex employer’s with out their autherisation and then added to the inventory of the project company at its full market value of $38500 cad.

As you can imagine this came as a blow to us at the time and effectively he ended up destroying a very promising company through his dishonest actions, we won that case and the attorney recovered what he could financially from it, not a lot but enough to make it worthwhile and we moved on, emotionally we had already moved on but to put it behind us we had to wait until the end played out in court, by that time of course it was just boring the hell out of us.

The real point in that win was it allowed us to put a full stop on a particular time in our life and move on to a new one, the fact that the ex partner only got to keep a prototype that would never work and he would never be able to get it to work is just one of life’s funny moments, the real intellectual property was never asked for as part of the settlement so I still own it outright.

I had spent my time from when we stopped working on the failed project to come up with a new game plan for us and what we would do in the future, effectively I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and spent six months to write down 10 new possible inventions that might be worth developing.

We also decided we would start a new family owned company to administer the projects and act as our portfolio company, hence Gauthier Collins inc was born at around the same time as we launched the law suit against the scum bag and his cronies.

What actually happened in that six month research time was that I ended up writing down 12 possible projects, this made the next step easier as we then chose three projects to develop over the following two-year period, we now have two projects in play with a third about to take off.

From now on I will try to add a little as time goes by and things catch my eye and write a bit more about the projects.

I have been asked a few times about were the header picture was taken, it’s on the road running from Lac-saint-jean to Quebec city near what’s called the “little park”, it’s a three and a half hour drive so forgive me if I don’t give you the exact location but just say its about half way.

The winter scene looks nice but this is Quebec province and winter can be some times pretty and some times not so pretty, if you drive this road in the winter then the locals will warn you to be very careful, this road does have a bit of a reputation it seems and a lot of moose that like to wonder across it on their time table not yours.

Yes just a plain old house brick, its twice as long as it is wide but only half as high.

There are some people who would attempt to blind and confuse you with explanations of the required skill involved in building a wall from some thing as simple as a brick, the years it takes as a lowly apprentice to learn an age old trade, the constant striving to one day to become a master bricklayer.

At the end of this mystery shrouded process we end up with a master craftsman capable of stacking bricks one a top the other in such a manner to achieve a wall or enclosure of given size.

This is were it gets a bit icky! the workman like act of placing bricks arranged in geometric patterns is generally considered to be a craft! some would argue artful but it is not art, but it can be art when it is done or caused to be done by an artist, what’s the difference?

Very little some would argue! for instance two walls built using a nice execution of the Flemish wall bond will needless to say involve the careful stacking of bricks on top of each other in a prearranged pattern, in this case a pattern called Flemish wall bond, both will be structurally sound and look little different to each other.

Now one is the supporting wall of your house and costs a small proportion of what ever you paid for the entire building, the other is a peace of art in a gallery (or corporate foyer) and doubtless meaningfully juxtaposed with a broken mannequin and the contents of a sheep stomach solidified in a secret wax process, here the value of the art is two or three times the cost of your house!

Why? what is the difference between art and craft? the purpose of this blog is to examine the differences between some one who is trained to stacks bricks and some one who thought of stacking the bricks in the first place.

Its about understanding the difference between the cost of building a wall and the intrinsic value of a work of art encompassing a wall.