Bill Ward’s Brickpile

Every January for the past several years, BayLUG has had a meeting at the lovely home of member Dave Porter who has a huge personal layout on display. People bring their latest creations to show, and stuff to sell, and we have our annual first meeting of the year. This year we had elections for new club officers. Click the image for the full set of photos, or view them as a slideshow

I brought my 14 Friends sets that I had built for the “Fortnight of Friends” series to display, and people of all ages really enjoyed looking at the new parts and colors in the sets. The animals were particularly popular among the kids … in fact one of the little girls who apparently had not yet learned the meaning of private property had wandered off with the bunny, both kittens, and the hedgehog! When I noticed they were missing I started asking around and finally this little girl was answering very cagily that she thought she had seen them somewhere in Dave’s layout upstairs… I left the room along with her parents and a few minutes later she came back, having “found” them. It was all rather cute once I had resolved the mystery. But my stuff had been handled so much I felt no choice but to wash all the parts when I got them home. They’re drying as I write this, and I look forward to finding uses for all the new parts and colors…

By the way I have a huge backlog of parts to sort. Anyone want to come over and help me work through it?

We had our April meeting of the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group (BayLUG) at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto on April 16, 2011. Lots of people brought models to share and/or stuff to sell, and we had a special activity for the kids where they could build skyscraper towers out of LEGO bricks and then test how they fare on an earthquake simulator table. Click for the pics from the meeting:

On October 30, BayLUG had its October 2010 meeting at the Museum of American Heritage. We had a "Halloween" theme contest at the meeting.

Click the image above to see the pictures or view them as a slideshow.

BayLUG had its September 2010 meeting on Saturday, September 18 at Johannes’s church in San Leandro, CA.  The contest theme was “National Parks” and I put together a model for it in just a couple of hours before leaving home for the meeting.  My model is a Glacier National Park tour bus.  I’ll post more about that with better pictures soon, but you can see it in the photos of the meeting.  Click the image to view the pictures or see them as a slideshow.

On January 24, Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group (BayLUG) had our annual meeting at Dave Porter’s house in Woodside, CA. Dave always sets up a very impressive layout in his loft featuring a huge collection of LEGO sets and his own custom creations, with running trains. He has been inviting the club up to his house every January for the past few years to share his layout and give us a chance to show off what we’ve been up to. Marcello de Cicco brought his Japanese Navy ships to show off, and Brian Thiemer and his wife brought their newest MOC, a baby, to the meeting!

We also had a presentation about Bricks by the Bay, and BayLUG agreed to loan some money to the nonprofit org. that is putting on the convention to help with start-up costs. If you haven’t signed up yet to attend the convention (April 9-11, 2010, in Fremont, CA) please do so soon! Early bird pricing ends February 23.

The photos from the meeting have been online for a while now (slideshow) but I have been neglecting to post about it here.

As I mentioned previously, a reporter and photographer from WIRED met with us on Sunday to document BayLUG‘s plans for Maker Faire. The results are now online, and the photos look great! They have a slide show featuring each of the BayLUG members who were present and at least one of each of our models.

See you this weekend at Maker Faire!

Yesterday, we had a special meeting of BayLUG members so that a reporter and photographer from WIRED could come and take pictures of some of our models and talk to us. About a half-dozen members showed up at MoAH in Palo Alto and set up an assortment of models that we’re bringing to Maker Faire next weekend.

I forgot my camera, but luckily others didn’t. Mark Warren took a bunch of great pictures and posted them on a Picasa folder. Click the image to see the rest of them:

This was for the WIRED.com site, not the print magazine. Hopefully the results will be online in a few days, because the point of the exercise was to talk about what will be on display at Maker Faire. I’ll post a blog entry with a link as soon as it becomes available.

Today we had a meeting of Bay Area LEGO Users Group at Johannes’s church in San Leandro.

I brought the 10181 Eiffel Tower that I won as a door prize at BrickFest last weekend. I also took along my LOVE and LEGO sculptures, so that if you look at the tower as a letter “I” it would spell out the same message as seen on my car’s license plate. I also brought the motor yacht for display, but that doesn’t spell anything…

Johannes brought along a great 30″x60″ castle scene, with just about every square inch taken up with minifigs, horses, and other medieval stuff either defending or storming the castle. Charles and Adrienne brought some Bionicle models some cars, and checkers/chess sets they’ve been working on, including a chess set for the blind that Charles is donating to a charity auction to benefit Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco. Paul brought an “oriental hall” he was working on, and a four story apartment building with a fully detailed interior, as well as some sets for sale. Bruce had his usual minifigs, mini train engines, and jeeps for sale, along with random $1 baggies of parts.

We had a great discussion of Mindstorms developments and Maker Faire plans with Steve Putz of Robotics Learning. Maybe we’ll start having more robotics activity in the club…?

Each year for the past several years, Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group has been invited to hold a meeting at the home of one of our members, Dave Porter, at his house in Woodside, CA. He has a huge LEGO display in his house every year, and we get to see it in person before he takes it down each February.

At the meeting we had a lot of people bring their latest models for display, bulk LEGO shopping in Dave’s home office, and of course viewing of Dave’s home layout (pictured above). We also held a business meeting to plan for the Bricks by the Bay LEGO convention which we are organizing for April 2010.

The next Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group meeting will be April 15, 2007 at Museum of American Heritage. Please come by and see what people have to display, as well as buy/sell/trade.

Don’t know yet what I’ll be displaying, but I’m hoping to build some stuff before then. I’ll probably have stuff for sale too. At the moment, however, I’m on vacation in South Carolina (if you’re in the area and want to meet, let me know!), so I won’t be posting much LEGO stuff for the next week or so at least.