Bill Ward’s Brickpile

The last day of BayLUG‘s annual “Living LEGO-cy” show and teardown took place on Sunday, January 15th. My pictures are available online. This is an event we do every year at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA, as a fundraiser for the club and for the museum. This year we had excellent attendance, with a peak of 841 people coming through on the 30th, which was the most people we’ve had in one day since we started keeping track (and charging $2 admission).

Here’s a group photo of club members taken during teardown. Click the photo to see the rest of the images, or view them as a slideshow.

Our next event is the Train Collectors Association Cal-Stewart Spring convention, open to the public on Sunday March 4th, from 10:00am-2pm. It’s a toy train show and one of our favorite events of the year. Two weeks after that is the Bricks by the Bay 2012 convention – the convention runs Friday through Sunday, March 16-18, and is open to the public on Sunday the 18th.

I’m writing this from my new LEGO studio, which is a work in progress that I’m in the process of setting up.

A little backstory: Just under two years ago, my wife Holly and I decided to break up. At first, she stayed in our bedroom, and I moved into the second bedroom. At that time, the second bedroom was a combination office and LEGO room, but to a large extent was really just a storage room. You know how a lot of the time one room in the house becomes the catch-all dumping ground when you need to clean up the rest of the house? That room served that purpose. Anyway, I cleared the junk out of that room, went to IKEA and bought a bed and some other furnishings, and moved into it. In the meantime Holly redecorated what had been our bedroom – I put our queen size bed into storage, and she got a new folding couch/bed and set that room up as her own space. We lived like that for a few months, and then in the spring she had to suddenly move across the country to Pennsylvania to help her mother, who had fallen ill. Although her mother recovered pretty quickly, she stayed there, and rented her own apartment in a nearby town. In the meantime, her room (our old room) was left pretty much as she left it. She flew out to visit once, and stayed in her room, and for a while she was paying me a part of the rent to keep her room available for her.

Eventually it became clear that I should take over the room, but I took a long time to get around to doing it. After living together for 18 years, it was hard for me to make those final steps of moving her out of the house. Finally though, this month, I finished packing up her stuff and putting it into a rented storage unit for her, and in the past few days I’ve been moving my stuff into the room. My LEGO collection had outgrown the two IKEA PAX armoires I was keeping it in, and now having the entire bedroom will allow me to organize things so that everything is easily accessible to me. Moving the LEGO out of my bedroom allowed me to reorganize the room to have a lot more elbow room, and the new LEGO studio is shaping up nicely.

The Advent calendar project, recently finished, was done in the living room until the 22nd day. The last two days were photographed in the studio, and I’ve just finished building my birthday present from Holly – the Battle of Alamut (Set 7573 from the Prince of Persia line). Hopefully with the new studio I will be more active building LEGO. But I have a lot of sorting and organizing to do first…

My Yellow Victorian House MOC (“My Own Creation”) has been featured in an article about the housing boom/bubble in Australia. Since I use the Creative Commons licensing for my photos, that’s just fine with me, and they gave my name (“Bill Ward’s brickpile”) so people can easily Google me and find the rest of my work. That’s what Creative Commons is for!

Thanks to Tim “gambort” Gould for pointing this out to me.

I got an email from Amazon the other day, saying “As you may have heard, California Governor Jerry Brown has signed legislation repealing the law that had forced us to terminate our California Associates. We are pleased to invite all California Associates whose accounts were closed due to the prior legislation to re-enroll in the Associates Program.”

I think it was a low blow for Amazon to pull their California Associates, and really I don’t see anything wrong with charging sales tax for mail order, but I went ahead and added back the Amazon link. So if you like my site, please consider buying something using an Amazon button on this site. Thanks!

I recently wrote (Amazon: You can’t fire me, I quit!) about how Amazon.com is canceling the accounts of California residents because of the state’s attempts to get them to collect sales tax.

Today, I got the monthly report from Amazon describing my earnings. Out of curiosity I clicked the link to see my account balance. Here’s what I saw:

Account Closed

This account is closed and will not generate referrals. Access to this site is for historical purposes only.

Your Payment History		Unpaid Balance: $98.31

…followed by a list of previous commissions I had earned.

I’ve never actually received a check from Amazon. Their policy is to send you payment when you reach $100 in earnings. Which now, I will never do. Damn them.

Update 10/6/2011: They did send me a check after all, after deducting a $15 fee. I changed it to direct deposit so I should get a payment every $10 earned. Now that they’re allowing payments to California residents again, this post is moot.

You might have heard by now that Amazon.com has decided to discontinue the accounts of California residents, such as myself, due to a new California law requiring them to collect sales tax for sales to California residents. If you want to know the details, Google it. The point is, I’ve had Amazon links on my site for a while now, and over the past couple of years have not yet even reached the $100 minimum threshold to get paid for it, and now they’re cutting me off. That annoyed me, but what annoys me even more is that Amazon is trying to interfere with the state’s internal business. They’re even starting a petition to get something on the ballot to reverse it, and that really upsets me. I don’t want to get too political in this blog, but I really don’t think it’s OK for a company that claims it doesn’t have a presence in California to be trying to have a say in the state’s politics.

So I took off all the Amazon links (If I missed any, please let me know). I’m open to participating in other affiliate programs, but I’m done with Amazon.

A while back I posted that I was considering how best to share building instructions for my creations. There were several comments on that post and also a few email exchanges I had with people over this topic, and I’ve also had a chance to discuss it in person with a few people at BrickCon in Seattle this past October. And what I’ve decided on is this:

• I won’t give it away for free. Sorry if that’s disappointing, but although I am a big fan of open source software, the reason that works well is because the users can contribute back to the development of the software by adding features and fixing bugs, and submitting patches to the author. LEGO creations are fundamentally different from that, in that once I’ve created a design I’m really not interested in collaborating with other builders to change it. I might take some feedback and revise it based on that, but I’m not going to accept patches for my models. So the open source model doesn’t really suit my LEGO creations.
• Similarly I am a fan of Creative Commons, but again the main benefit of that is the ability for people to incorporate my work (such as my photos, which are licensed with Creative Commons) into other works without having to jump through a lot of hoops to get approval. Some of my photos have been used by Web sites and even mainstream news sources because of this. But I don’t think that would translate into LEGO model designs.
• I won’t use LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) because you give up too many of your rights when uploading the designs to LEGO’s site. It would be convenient to use Design By Me to create kits from my models, but then it would be LEGO profiting from it instead of me. Is that too selfish? I think if I’m going to go through the effort of creating instructions for a model, as opposed to just photographing it or even creating an LDraw file of it, I’d like to receive something for my efforts. (LDraw is the easy part, it’s making the instructions that’s harder – even though LPub does a lot of the work, there’s still a great deal of manual adjustment of the layout to get it to where I want it).
• Selling kits of my models is something I’ve thought about a lot, and I may do it for one or two models, but the problem is obtaining the parts. It’s rare to find one BrickLink store that has all the parts for a model, so I’d have to order them from several stores – or deplete the parts in my collection, which again means going to BrickLink to replace them.
• What I know I can do is sell PDF or printed copies of the instructions. To that end, I’m planning on setting up a store on Etsy.com and listing the instructions there in both ebook and printed format, and some kits for small and popular models I’ve designed.

So, watch this space for an announcement when I get my Etsy store up, and in the meantime let me know if there are any particular models of mine you’d like to get the instructions for. Prices for smaller models will be around $20. I’m not generally interested in doing custom work, but if the idea grabs my interest I may do it. But in general I would refer you to someone who does that for a living.

Every once in a while I get a request to share building instructions for my models. I am willing to do so, but haven’t quite figured out the best way. I was wondering if people might want to comment and make some suggestions?

Some possibilities for formats are are:

• LDraw files
• PDF of instructions generated using LDraw and LDpub
• Printed instructions in black & white or color

The ugly side of the equation comes when I contemplate compensation.  Do I sell them or just give them away?  I think it depends on how much work I have to put into them.  I won’t go through the trouble of creating printed instructions for free, but I might be willing to share the LDraw files for free (Creative Commons licensed).  The question is, how much would people be willing to pay, and is that enough to justify the work it would take me to prepare nice looking instructions?

Please answer this poll to help me understand more about my readers and what people would like to see on brickpile.com… if you give your email address, you will be entered into a drawing to receive a free No Starch Press book from their extensive LEGO catalog! Choose from:

• The Art of NXT-G Programming Coming Soon!
• FIRST LEGO League: The Unofficial Guide
• Forbidden LEGO
• Getting Started with LEGO Trains
• Jin Sato’s LEGO MINDSTORMS
• The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Adventure Book Coming Soon!
• The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book
• LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT One-Kit Wonders
• LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Thinking Robots Coming Soon!
• The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Zoo!
• The Unofficial LEGO Builder’s Guide
• The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide
• The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Inventor’s Guide Coming Soon!
• Virtual LEGO

Prize provided courtesy of No Starch Press. A winner will be selected at random from all the email addresses provided between now and September 30, 2009.

What are you waiting for? Click here to take the Poll! (Powered by Google Docs).

So I was looking at my RSS feed of incoming links to brickpile.com in Google Reader, and came across one that surprised me: BillWardWriter.com. I’ve always known my name is not that unique – the most famous of my homonyms being a certain musician who was the drummer for Black Sabbath. However, it still caught me by surprise when I saw my name – mine! – attached to other people’s web sites and blogs.

Anyway, Bill Ward (the Writer) has a list of links to Bill Wards around the Internet, and I’m on it. I don’t really feel like I want to add the same to my blogroll – my sidebars are too cluttered as it is – but I wanted to share some link love anyway, so here they are:

• Bill Ward, science fiction writer
• Bill Ward, musician — Black Sabbath
• Bill Ward, naughty cartoonist
• Bill Ward, singer sonwriter
• Bill Ward, Alabama real estate
• Bill Ward, UK actor’s IMDB page

Actually regarding that last one, it turns out there are a lot of entries in IMDB with my name, none of which are me. As of this writing, the list has seventeen entries!

PS: In case you don’t catch the reference of the title of this post, check the Wikipedia page for the song “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt”.

PPS: Sorry about the lack of LEGO content… does this help?