Ed Bilodeau

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This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Man on the bridge : I wasn't going to write about it, but I've come across the story a few times, and since this guy already wasted 30 minutes of my life, I might as well give him 30 minutes more, and hope that something might come out of it.

In a nutshell, yesterday morning at around 6am, some guy climbed up the superstructure of one of the bridges to the South Shore. The bridge was shut down for twelve hours while police tried to get him down, resulting in a messy morning and evening rush hour as traffic was diverted to our other bridges.

Why did the guy do this? To raise awareness for Fathers-4-Justice, an organization that supports the father's right to raise his children.

Okay.

(Go ahead, ask me if I or any of the thousands of people affected by his stunt are feeling particularly sympathetic towards him?)

"Vas-y, saute!" a crié hier matin un automobiliste qui circulait près du pont Jacques-Cartier.

According to the news item linked above, the police are still deciding if they are going to press charges. WTF!?!

If it were up to me (and thank God it never is), I would sentence this fellow to the following: (1) He must serve time in prison equal to the time he stole from everyone stuck in traffic. Let's be conservative and guess that 50,000 people lost about an hour each. That's about 5 years. Sounds good. (2) Fine him for an amount equal to the amount of extra gas that was consumed by those cars. Again, let’s make a wild estimate: 50,000 cars idling for 1 hour, which based on some data I dug up, works out to about 82,000 liters of gas wasted. At $1.30/liter, that's just over $100,000. Hmm. Not too impressive, but I guess it will do.

So there you go: five years and a $100,000 fine.

What do you think? Am I being too harsh? Should he be charged at all?