Bill Ward’s Brickpile

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?

I finally got around to creating an “About Me” page. It tells the story of how LEGO came in and out of my life. Hope you find it interesting, and if you have small kids, I urge you to encourage them to be creative with LEGO. I attribute a lot of my mathematical, scientific, and computer programming skills to my childhood obsession with LEGO.

What prompted me to write this finally? I came across an article on “Delivering the Best Customer Experience” on erica.biz, one of my favorite inspirational business blogs, where she said:

Have an About page that talks about you, not just your company. One of the first pages I click on on any website is the “About Us” page. I want to put a face to the name. Why are you doing what you’re doing?
If your blog doesn’t have an About page, I won’t subscribe. It leaves me feeling “empty” — even if the content is fantastic, I have nothing to anchor that to.

I don’t expect Erica to subscribe to a LEGO blog, but I think the sentiment is important, so I wrote one….

I finally joined Facebook. If you want to add me, here’s my public search page.

My Track Layout Geometry page has been translated into Italian!

A few days ago I received an email from Alex Cordero of ITLUG (Italian LEGO® Users Group) saying that they were interested in translating the page into Italian. He just contacted me to let me know that it was done; you can view the finished page on the ITLUG Web site (EDIT 9/15/2008: updated URL).

This is the first time something I’ve written has been translated into another language, and I’m very flattered and pleased that it was deemed worthy for this treatment.

I don’t speak a word of Italian – though I do have some Spanish – so I don’t know how accurate the translation is, but I hope that it proves useful to Italian-speaking LEGO fans everywhere!

I’ve signed up this blog for Feedblitz, as an experiment. If you don’t use a feed reader (such as Bloglines, My Yahoo, etc.) to subscribe, you might want to try reading my blog by email using Feedblitz. To get started, enter your email address in the box on the left side of the page.

Please let me know if you have any questions or problems or whatever…

My birthday was Thursday, and we met last night with my mother for dinner to celebrate at the Willow St. Pizza in Los Gatos. Now as you might guess from the content of this blog, the thing I have always wanted most for birthday/Christmas/whatever gifts has always been LEGO. The fact that I’m now 35 years old doesn’t change that! My mother got me several sets that are full of great parts.

After Holly and I got home she presented me with my cake. We were both looking forward very much to the lemon cake with lemon butter cream frosting that she had ordered from the Buttery in Santa Cruz. But alas, they messed up the order and used whipped-cream frosting which we had specifically asked them not to do. The cake itself seems to be just white cake, and the frosting is just basic white frosting with a tiny trace of lemon zest. We had the same problem with Holly’s birthday cake a few months ago from a different bakery. I had high hopes for the Buttery – when we lived in Santa Cruz they seemed like a quality operation. What does it take to find a decent bakery nowadays?