Arctangential

You know, I forgot to write about the LEGO convention. I feel a right ass.

So, it was pretty fun. Technically it was 4 days, Thursday – Sunday, but Thursday was just 100% setup, and Friday they got started kind of late, and Sunday they ended a little early, so it was really more like 2.5 days. But, it was fun.

There were 3 different kinds of activities going on most of the time:

1) Exhibition — People brought a lot of MOC (My Own Creation, basically meaning LEGO creations invented by the person, and not sets designed by the LEGO Company) sets to the convention, and they set them up all over. There were rooms set aside for different themes — a castle theme, a space theme, a gigantic LEGO train setup, sculpture, stuff like that. There was a lot of very impressive stuff on display there. I’ll post links at the bottom here.

2) Bartering — There was a big area reserved on the 2nd floor of the building called the “Brick Bazaar” where a ton of people set up tables where they bought / sold / traded LEGO bricks and pieces. Some people had pieces they made themselves, some people had really huge selections of stuff, some people just had various sets they had picked up on clearance at Target or K-Mart and were hoping to unload them for a profit (and generally succeeding). One fellow had a big maybe 20 gallon tub filled with various LEGO pieces, LEGO mini-figures, instruction booklets, crazy stuff like that. He said he’d bought it at a yard sale, and was planning to separate all of the pieces into the sets they were originally in, and selling them independently. And then he got way too bored. So he was selling the whole thing for $150. I talked him down to $110, and took it home. So far I’ve built about 30 different sets from it, and I have maybe another 25-30 to go. Total value of the sets I’ve put together now is probably around $250, so it was certainly a good deal. And, it is fun rooting around looking for the pieces to make the sets.

3) Education — There were a fair number of talks on various LEGO related topics. I went to one about LDraw, a CAD-like program for designing LEGO models, a talk given by Eric Harshbarger, who makes very very cool LEGO sculpture and mosaic. There was also a talk given by Thomas Avery who talked, as you might imagine from his web site, about building big LEGO models. There was also some cool stuff about doing LEGO robotics, including some robotics challenges.

4) There was also a big socialization aspect to the whole thing, but we all I know I didn’t participate in that at all.

Overall, it was a lot of fun. I am for sure going to go next year.

Here are some links to people’s photo albums of the event. There’s some pretty neat stuff in there.

So, conference report.

Let me start before the con itself — Thursday morning. I woke up and felt a little funny. It didn’t seem that bad, though, so I got out of bed, stood up, and promptly fell over. I had no sense of balance whatsoever. Whenever I moved my head it felt like there was a big wet ball rolling around inside. “Damnit,” I thought. I crawled back over to my bed and went back to sleep, eventually waking back up around 1pm or so. My head felt a little bit better, and I was able to carefully make it to the bathroom, where I took a shower, and to the kitchen, where I drank a large quantity of juice. Either or both of these things helped to some degree, and after resting a bit more I decided that I was actually OK to make the trip. I think the problem was really just dehydration, so on the drive there I stopped at every rest area and food plaza and such to pick up (and drop off, not coincidentally) water. I still had a pretty bad headache by the time I got in to my hotel, but the drive wasn’t SO bad.

There was a 24-hour IHOP across the street from the hotel! It was totally awesome. I ate there about 5 times in 3 days. I think my favorite dish they had was a corned beef hash & cheddar omelet, but I love everything there because it comes with pancakes and you get to put BUTTER PECAN SYRUP on it. Yum!

I have to get back to work now, so I will write about the actual convention tomorrow.

Two entries in as many days. Scary.

Anyways, there is news afoot and it’s exciting. As you all probably know, I am a big Lego fan. I always have been, really, but I didn’t have my Legos for a long time. Recently when my parents moved house, they found my old LegoTub and they were going to throw it out! The horror! I convinced them to mail the contents to me, and I’ve been banging away at the lego ever since (it was about a year ago or so). I’ve amassed a bit of a collection, some sets reconstructed from the pieces my parents sent to me, others purchased new or recreated from parts bought online. It has been fun, and not too incredibly expensive.

This weekend is BrickFest, a medium-sized gathering of AFOL (Adult Fans of Lego — that is, no kids) in Arlington, VA. There are going to be contests, and displays, talks on various Lego-related subjects. I think it’s going to be very fun. Eric Harshbarger will be there, as will the good folks who run Peeron, and some other people whom I know from the LEGO online communities.

I am excited.

Fun printer hack story from work.

Higher-end HP laser printers have a small LCD letter display on the front, that they use to display status messages, etc. This morning, I heard about a way to change this message to any arbitrary string, using a very short piece of perl code. Now, I am too much of an upstanding citizen to actually make use of this knowledge. However, I am not so well-behaved as to not send the information to someone who would make use of it — the office’s resident bitter sys admin.

He took the news with quite a bit of relish. (I heard him from about 5 cubes away exclaim, “Oh goody!”)

For a while this morning the printer said “GRAPE JAM”. After that it said “PRESS ESC TO CONTINUE”. When I left the office it was saying “MY MIND IS GOING I CAN FEEL IT”. He claims he’ll be changing it about once a day from now on.

It’s confusing the hell out of sales. I approve.