Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks
The owner of LEGO, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, visited Brickworld today and I got to meet him!
I took a bunch of pictures documenting his visit to the event. He seemed very happy to see all the things that LEGO fans had come up with. I’ll post more about the weekend later when I have some time but I wanted to get this out quickly. I’m about to head over to dinner at Claim Jumper…
Well, we’re halfway through Brickworld here in Chicago! Time flies so fast…. but tomorrow the big excitement begins as the doors open to the public. If you’re in the area, come on down and see the exhibits! I even have a free pass I can give to one lucky person.
I’ve taken hundreds of photos and uploaded them to Flickr. They’re organized into several sets, but all can be found under the Brickworld 2009 collection on Flickr.
(Note: I’ll be uploading plenty more photos in the next two days, so these numbers are as of Friday night at bedtime….)
I arrived late tonight (2am local time) in Chicago after a quite pleasant, if quite full, flight from San Francisco. Our flight was about 1/2 hour late, but that’s no big deal. Got a taxi from the airport and arrived at the hotel, checked in, showered, and am now waiting for my hair to dry so I can go to bed.
Tomorrow, the event begins. I’ll have to check out of my hotel room since I’ve arranged for a roommate for the rest of the weekend. Look for me or twitter @williamward if you want to meet up.
Maker Faire happened on May 30-31, and here it is almost three weeks later and I haven’t posted anything! We (BayLUG) had a 2,000 square foot display featuring a train layout, 8-foot-long battleship, amusement park & goofy train area, giant Technic cranes, robotics demos, and lots of models of all types on display. We even had emiko oye‘s jewelry artwork made out of LEGO, fresh from tours of art museums around the country.
I posted the pictures on Flickr right away after the Faire ended but i never got around to posting anything here about it. Click the photo to view the whole gallery or try the slideshow.
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.
When I heard that LEGO was opening a store in Frisco, TX I asked my friend Sylvia who lives there if she could stop by the grand opening and try to score one of these bucking bronco sets. They were given out to the first 300 customers at the new store. But Sylvia is not one to do things halfway – she was third in line to get into the store, and first to check out. That’s right, this is the first ever bucking bronco given out at that store! Check the timestamp on the receipt…
Portland’s KATU Channel 2 recently featured Steve Barile (organizer of BrickFest) on a TV interview. Aside from the fact that they kept using the term “Legos” they did a really good job of showing the AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) hobby in a respectful, positive way. It’s nice and long, too, with plenty of great shots of Steve’s LEGO collection and models. Steve seemed very relaxed and comfortable in front of the camera, which is a great feat in itself. Go Steve!
You can watch the video on KATU’s Web site.
One of my pictures has been used by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on their Web site to illustrate a radio story about the relative merits of buying versus renting a home. You can see it on the ABC News homepage as a small thumbnail on the right hand side, and if you click the “Best of abc.net.au” link it takes you to a “best of” page where that story is featured with a larger version of the image at the top of the page. Here’s the photo they used (from their Web server):
My photos are published with a Creative Commons attribution license, so I’m not mad that they used the photo, but they (as far as I can tell) failed to credit the photo which I think is in pretty poor taste. (If you like the models, I have posted the LDraw instructions online.) Here’s the original photo, linked to its page on Flickr:
You can really see the blurriness created when they cropped it and re-saved the JPEG (probably with a high level of compression). Thanks to Stephen Calder, aka aussiechef67 for pointing it out via a comment on Flickr.
A couple of weeks ago, I was a guest speaker at Cypress High School in Santa Cruz, CA. A friend of mine is a math teacher there and she invited me in to give a LEGO presentation. I decided to focus my talk on the art of lettering in LEGO, so I brought along my LOVE and LEGO Robert Indiana style sculptures, and the Blackburn Hotel. I also built some lettering out of LEGO parts as a study of different ways to model the alphabet. I came up with a set of five clear baseplates with the letters A through Z, each letter in a different style:
I also made some more basic lettering examples. The students then had about 15 minutes (I meant to give them more time, but between my rambling on, and their incessant questions, the presentation part took a lot longer than planned) to play with some bulk LEGO that I had brought, to try to build their names or other text… Here’s some of what they came up with:
