[jacquesm]

I should set it up again and give a live demo one of these days. It's lots of fun to watch it work. At least once every week someone mails me about it. The bulk of these are wantrepreneurs who have suddenly seen the light and want to take the project over, and who think I'm gullible enough to believe their cover stories (5 minutes of Googling usually turns up a commercial operation). Can't blame them for trying to corner the market I guess.

Meanwhile, the consultancy I've been running for the last 12 years is growing up, rapidly. We just named our first CEO (other than me), who will hopefully take it to the next level so who knows, I just might have some free time again in the near future. Here's to hoping.

[sbierwagen]

Did you ever sell any of the sorted Lego?

[jacquesm]

Yes, quite a bit actually, mostly to the United States and to one fellow here in NL that was building a huge castle.

https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1016382615417389057

Amazing accomplishment, he surveyed the building just prior to demolition with a drone and then built the whole thing without a single drawing.

[gus_massa]

For comparison:

Some photos of the castle: https://www.davidbakerphotography.com/location-history/resid... (see in particular one near the bottom)

About the demolition: https://www.byronhartshorn.com/2017/05/31/chateau-de-noisy-i...

[jacquesm]

That would have been one case where 'eminent domain' would have been a good solution.

It's a real pity to see such an iconic building go to waste. The demolition story tries to spin it hard as though the family had no other option, but of course they did: if they were unable to be good stewards of the property then they could have donated it to the Belgian state.

But after looting it for anything valuable it is of course much better to have a white-wash story out there about how those urban explorers violated the privacy of the owners (never mind the fact that it had been abandoned for years and that there was plenty of damage from neglect alone).

[gus_massa]

I made a image search in Google and picked the two that looked more nice/relevant. It's a pity that the building was destroyed.

[bigiain]

I bought some! (Thanks Jacques!!!)

[iRobbery]

Congrats :)

[jacquesm]

Thank you. Doing anything for a long time is hard, I can't wait to be free again to do other stuff. In 2016 when I did this project I still had lots of free time, we did 11 tech due dilligences that year. In 2017 there were 18, in 2018 43 and this year we will likely end up somewhere between 60 and 80 so it long ago surpassed what one person can do.

It is surprisingly hard to scale a one-man show.