Author: Bill Ward

Colors and Sorting

I’ve been recently going through my LEGO collection adjusting some of the organization with respect to color. With all the new colors from the Friends sets coming in, I’ve been really at a loss to find an organization system that is consistent and clear, both while sorting and while looking for parts, and takes into account the vast differences in available parts across the color pallette.

Anyone who’s undertaken to sort LEGO has faced the age-old question – sort by color, or by shape? Like most people, my first attempt at sorting LEGO was by color, and like most people I immediately ran into some major drawbacks to that style of sorting:

  • You can’t find the small pieces easily, which tend to drift to the bottom of the bin
  • It’s a lot easier to find a red 1×4 among a pile of 1×4’s of all colors, than to find a 1×4 among a sea of red
  • Tendency to make monochromatic MOCs, because it’s extra work to get parts of other colors

I didn’t stay with that sorting system for very long. For the past 10 years or so, I’ve been mainly sorting by shape, with color as a secondary sort parameter in some cases. Over the years I’ve evolved the following system:

  • Bricks, plates (1x and 2x only), and tiles (except round ones): each color has its own container, and within that container each size is in a ziploc bag.
  • Slopes: sorted into containers by angle (45, 33, etc.) and then ziploc bags within that container for each color. Corner and peak slopes are separated out from ordinary slopes as well.
  • Everything else: all colors mixed together, sorted by shapes or categories of parts.

This has worked well as long as LEGO’s color pallette was fairly consistent. But in the past few years, especially with Friends coming out, I’ve had a hard time integrating new colors into my sorting system. The problem is that the new pastels, purple, etc. – as well as older colors such as the sand, medium, and dark colors – just don’t exist in the kinds of quantities that mainline/primary colors do. LEGO doesn’t make all sizes and shapes in each color, and I don’t have as many of them. So while it’s not hard to spot a purple part among a sea of same-shape/size parts of all colors, it can still take a fair amount of digging and raking through parts because there are so few of them. And since the new colors only include a small range of shapes/sizes, it’s hard to remember “Did LEGO make one of these in purple?”

So my thinking has evolved toward the conclusion that it’s better to have these rare colors separated out from the general population of my collection. If I’m going to build something out of purple parts, my options are more constrained by “what did LEGO make in this color?” than “can I find a specific part in this color?” anyway.

But then the question became, which colors get this treatment? Obviously colors I don’t have much of, such as Maersk blue or the new colors only found in Friends sets, do. But what about Orange? Lime? Sand green? Dark blue? Dark tan? These colors are a lot more common in recent sets, and LEGO have made a pretty complete pallette of them (at least compared to colors like purple), but still I don’t have that many and in some cases they are easily confused for colors such as grey or black.

I bet you can see where I’m going with this – I came to the realization that there are three types of color of LEGO parts.

  1. Main colors: white, black, light/dark stone grey, red, blue, yellow, tan, brown, dark red, green
  2. Intermediate colors: orange, lime, dark blue, dark green, medium blue, sand green
  3. Rare colors: purple, sand red, sand blue, sand green, Maersk blue, dark brown, dark tan, dark flesh/nougat, bright green, pastels, azure, teal, etc.

Main colors continue to be sorted as described above. I’ve been going through all my bins to pull out any Intermediate or Rare colors, however. The Intermediate colors get placed back in the bins where they were found, but in a separate ziploc bag. So I’m putting all those colors together in one bag in some cases, or where there is a lot of them into separate bags. For bricks and plates and tiles, they still get their own color bins, stored alongside the main color bins. Dark red has reached sufficient ubiquity to be counted as a Main Color, and some of the other dark or sand colors come close but didn’t quite make the cut.

But all the Rare color parts, regardless of what type or shape of part it is, get pulled out of the general population. These will be collected by color, and placed into a Rare Colors bin. All parts of the same color will go into one bag in most cases, except so far only Purple has enough parts to justify its own bin (because I bought a dozen #7591 Construct a Zurg sets on sale, so I have a lot of large purple parts). In most cases the parts are further divided into ziploc bags by type, and then those bags are placed together into a gallon ziploc bag.

I’ve gone through most of my bins and pulled out all the non-Main colors, and I’m feeling good about it so far. But I haven’t tried building anything with the Rare colors yet…

How do you tackle this issue?

Bricks by the Bay 2013

The 2013 edition of the Bricks by the Bay LEGO convention has come and gone. A fabulous time was had by all, as far as I can tell anyway. Here’s a report of my experiences both running and attending the convention…

This was our fourth year, and each time it gets a little easier to run the event, but we keep adding new things each time making things more complicated. This year the theme of the convention was “Brick Technologies” in honor of Silicon Valley where it is held, and we added a lot of technology around running the convention, especially on the website. For example, for the first time, instead of having attendees edit a wiki page, we had a database where people could list the MOCs (“My Own Creations,” our term for custom made models) they are bringing to display. As the only experienced Perl developer on the organizing team, it fell to me to make all these changes, and over the past few months I’d been spending all my spare time working on the registration system for people to sign up their badges, vendor spaces, MOCs, etc.

One piece of technology that never did get finished was a custom iPad app for judging. We had a volunteer, Julian Gomez of Polished Pixels, working hard on an app for us to use. The judges would use iPads to select the models they wanted to vote for and upload their votes and take pictures of the models using this custom app, and we also planned to use the app to scan people’s badges as they enter the evening ceremonies so we wouldn’t call any names of people who weren’t actually present. However, due to some technical issues that came up and issues with Apple’s developer license program (and through no fault of Julian’s), the app wasn’t available. Julian’s work is much appreciated however, and we look forward to having it available for next year.

I arrived at the hotel Thursday afternoon and checked in, and we were able to get in to the ballroom in the early afternoon to measure out the placement of all the tables for hotel staff to set up. I spent most of the afternoon writing code, personally, getting the MOC Card system ready to print out the cards. MOC Cards are the little signs that everyone places by their models to identify the name, description, and builder of each model. Each card has a QR code on it, which goes to a webpage describing the model (and which the iPad app was supposed to use to identify the MOC for voting). I wrote custom Perl code using the PDF::API2 library to generate the cards, and sent the results out to Kinko’s FedEx Office for overnight printing. (We also had a color printer and paper cutter onsite for printing additional cards after the initial batch.) I went to bed around midnight, having told FedEx to email me when it was ready. I had sent out a call for a volunteer to run over to pick up the printouts in the morning, but at 3am I got up to use the bathroom and checked my email, and they said that our job was done. I decided rather than have someone slog through rush hour traffic in the morning, I’d just go in the middle of the night. I drove off to Cupertino to pick it up, and had a hard time finding the place, but eventually I did and brought it back to the hotel, leaving it in our office for the other organizers to pick up in the morning. My plan was to sleep in, but I woke up early anyway so I went ahead and went downstairs having had about 3 hours total sleep.

Friday morning I was a bit of a zombie, but we got all the rest of the setup done and in the afternoon I was able to attend some of the sessions. I ran the 101 Bricks game, which is always a lot of fun. We had some very creative models built, with an eventual winner with the theme “RAINY” going to Donna’s “SNOT Cloud” model. After that, I went to Zonker Harris‘s talk on lighting LEGO models using EL Wire and LEDs. I really like what he’s done with those technologies for his movie theater (EL wire to simulate neon lights) and disco dance floor (flashing lights underneath a translucent LEGO floor). There were a few other light-up models at the convention, and hopefully that trend will continue. BrickCon in Seattle has a section called “The Darker Side” where models are displayed in a tented area so the room lights don’t overwhelm the models’ internal lighting, and BrickWorld goes a bit farther having an hour with the hall lights off so everyone can go around and see the light-up models in the semi-dark. Maybe if we get more light-up models we can do something along those lines at BBTB in the future? After Zonker’s talk I went back down to the ballroom, and spent the afternoon working on administrative stuff and more software for the event website. We had a few walk-ups, mostly people who had registered their child but not themselves or vice-versa. Our policy is to close registration a week before the event, but in the future we need to be better prepared for these situations, as they required a fair amount of manual work to process.

Friday night, we had an awesome keynote presentation by Paul Lee, LEGO artist. He does a lot of work for LEGO, drawing comic books and advertising art for them, and it turns out he’s also an excellent public speaker! In past years, we’ve always had someone from the LEGO Group give the keynote speech, but this year LEGO has been scaling back their support for conventions and weren’t able to send any VIP out to us. We took the lead from BrickCon and reached out to the LEGO fan community, and everyone was very happy with the result. Mariann Asanuma recommended Paul, and he got a standing ovation. There’s a video (hand held iPhone video) of the talk on youtube taken by his wife. Next year maybe we’ll get a professional video crew to document this sort of thing…

After the keynote, I handed out the Scrounge Build packets, then went out to the lobby to run the Wacky Racers and Catapult contests, which are always a lot of fun.

Saturday, I missed most of the activities as I ended up spending a lot of time finishing up some of the things we would need for the website to make the convention run as planned. For example I spent all Saturday afternoon hacking on the voting system so that the judges would be able to submit their votes and pictures of the winners, and generating the PDF for the award ceremony. I just barely got that code finished in time for the ceremony itself; in fact for the first 1/2 of the ceremony I was sitting off to one side in the theater frantically coding the software to generate the slides, while my faithful minions ran around the ballroom taking and uploading pictures of all the models that hadn’t been photographed yet. But eventually they got all the photos uploaded just as I finished work on the code to generate the slides. But then I ran into an unexpected snag: the PDF is 14 megabytes, and it took quite a long time (I didn’t time it, but I think it was about 20 minutes) to download on the slow wifi. So we had to stall a little bit while that downloaded, but eventually it was done and we managed to get it up on the screen to give out the awards. There were two minor issues – photos showing up rotated (my code was ignoring the EXIF Orientation flag, oops) and Overall trophies showing up in the theme trophy sections (it was showing the winners in the theme they were registered under instead of the theme of the trophies). It was funny watching hundreds of people tilt their heads sideways to look at the pictures! As for the trophies showing up at the wrong times, once I figured out what was happening I skipped over those and announced they would be given out Sunday night.

Saturday night we had something new at BBTB: a no-host bar, called “Brick Saloon.” This was an opportunity for the adult attendees to hang out, play some games (I brought Cards against Humanity, and someone brought some LEGO bricks to play a version of Zendo with instead of the more customary Icehouse pyramids). I don’t drink, so the bar wasn’t my cup of tea (DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) but I hung out and played games a bit. I went downstairs to the ballroom after a while to take photos of MOCs until my camera battery died, and then went back up for more games until it was time to close at 2am.

Sunday is the big public show at Bricks by the Bay. Unlike most conventions we just have one public day. the vendors complain every year, but it’s a lot less stressful this way, and we always make enough money to make our budget (Bricks by the Bay is a non-profit) so it’s not necessary to have two days. I have delegated all the public day operations to other people, so I was able to sleep in and get there around 10am just as people were going in to the show. I hung out at the admin desk for a while, answering questions and such, and then in the afternoon went upstairs for the Large Set Parts Draft. Parts drafts are one of my favorite convention activities, and I had to miss the one on Saturday as I had too much work to do (I sent Bruce to draft in my place, and he got some great parts, but I really would rather have been there myself). Almost any LEGO part is useful if you have enough of them, and a parts draft lets you take all of the parts of a particular shape and color from as many as a couple of dozen copies of the same set. The trade-off is that everyone else participating gets to do this too, so you only end up with a few unique pieces, but many of them. We did some trading (e.g., “I’ll give you 8 of these for 4 of those”) after the parts draft for some parts that each of us wanted but other people got.

After the parts draft I went back down to the ballroom, and finally at 4pm we closed up and kicked all the public out. We had a brief closing ceremony where we announced the overall MOC winners and the results of the games that had happened after the Saturday ceremony, and I had a brief Q&A about the next year’s convention. Finally we tore down all the stuff and everyone went home.

I spent the night in the hotel again Sunday night, and Monday morning got together with Bruce and Loren, the other Directors, to tie up loose ends and take all the stuff back to the storage unit. We had lunch from a taqueria and got all the boxes stowed, the storage locked, and we each went home. I took the rest of the day off work, and went back to work Tuesday (working from home all week). It took a few days for me to catch up on my sleep, and I still had a little bit of coding to finish up, but it’s time to put things away for another year.

Come join us next year!! We’re adding 50% more ballroom space, and a full day of workshops on Thursday before the usual convention activities start.

August 7-10, 2014
Hyatt Regency Santa Clara & Santa Clara Convention Center
Thursday : Workshops & Opening Ceremonies
Friday – Saturday : Private Convention
Sunday : Public Exhibition
www.bricksbythebay.com

See all my pictures of MOCs from Bricks by the Bay 2013 by clicking the image above, or click here for a slideshow.

Last chance for Bricks by the Bay convention registration

I just posted this on the Bricks by the Bay site:

The Bricks by the Bay 2013 convention is almost here! I’m so excited – and busy!

If you haven’t registered for the convention yet, please note that we are in our final week of registration. The deadline is this coming Friday at midnight. After that, no badges will be sold! There is no walk-up registration. All our attendees will have custom printed badges made of LEGO bricks and we are doing the final preparations and packaging of the badges and attendee goodies this weekend (let me know if you want to come help out). Badges are currently selling for $70 each and there are 57 (out of 500) remaining as of this writing. Register today!

See the schedule of events for more information about what is going on at the convention.

If you’re not coming to the convention please come to our Public Exhibition, Sunday August 11. Tickets are on sale now for $8 per person (ages 2 and under free). Buy tickets today.

Thank you and hope to see you at the convention or exhibition!

William Ward
President
Bricks by the Bay, Inc.

Set up my room at last!

I moved this past March from Mountain View, CA to El Cerrito (just north of Berkeley). In the process, I had to consolidate my bedroom and my LEGO studio into one room. That’s fine, as the new room is plenty big enough, but there was a small disaster during the move that prevented me from finishing setting up the room until just now.

You see, I keep my LEGO in these “PAX” wardrobe cabinets from IKEA. I have two of the 39 1/4″ x 23 1/2″ x 93 1/8″ wardrobes, with shelves in them that get filled up with plastic bins full of sorted LEGO parts. But because the wardrobes are so tall, the movers couldn’t fit them around the corner into my room, and so I had to disassemble them in the kitchen to be rebuilt in my room. Unfortunately, as I was taking the first one apart, I made the mistake of standing on the floor of the cabinet, which broke under my weight. I did get the other one taken apart and put back together without incident, having learned that lesson… and so, in my bedroom for the past four months, I’ve had one PAX cabinet full of LEGO, with stacks and stacks of plastic bins of parts in front of it, and the remains of the other cabinet leaning against the wall.

I finally got around to fixing the problem this week. Here’s what I did. I bought a new regular shelf from IKEA’s “as-is” department (actually 2 of them, since that’s the only way they sell them) and converted it to be a new floor. I cut pieces off the old floor shelf and used them to make brackets that the new one could sit on, and screwed/glued it all together. (Sadly, I couldn’t use the clever screws that IKEA furniture is normally held together with as that would have required precision drilling to make them fit into the new shelf/floor.) Thanks to my friend Zonker Harris for suggesting this idea, by the way. So yesterday after a few hours of mucking about with power tools and screws and glue, I managed to get the busted PAX put together, if not good as new, then at least good enough, and put all my LEGO bins away finally.

Now, it’s theoretically possible for me to start building again. I don’t know if I’ll get around to it, as I have so much work to do for Bricks by the Bay, but I’m sure I will eventually.

And speaking of Bricks by the Bay, public day tickets are now available (but you can still register for the whole convention). Hope to see you in a couple of weeks at the show!

Love, Legalized

Yesterday the Supreme Court overturned California’s Proposition 8 and the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I created this simple rainbow heart sculpture design to celebrate justice being done at last.
Rainbow Heart
This isn’t an opinion or politics blog, so I won’t go on any more than this, but I just wanted to share this design with the world.

BrickLink under new ownership

The online aftermarket LEGO store BrickLink has new owners! For years this online marketplace has been the best place for buying and selling LEGO parts. It was founded and developed by Daniel Jezek, a Czech-born immigrant to the US who ran the site for many years until his tragic death in 2010. The site has been owned by Dan’s parents since then, and administered ably by Eric Smith of Northstar Computer Systems. This week, the family announced that the site has been sold to the founder of an online game company based in Hong Kong, Jung-Ju “Jay” Kim, who is also a long time LEGO fan. You can read more about this on Mariann Asanuma’s post about the transaction. I wish all the best to Daniel’s family and to the new owners of the site.

Flickr Changes

Have you seen the latest stupid decision from Yahoo? They’ve not only completely redesigned the Flickr user interface, they’re phasing out the Flickr Pro account system. According to this article from Mashable, they’ve stopped selling Pro accounts, and they’ve taken away almost all the advantages that Pro account holders have had. In fact, it would seem that Pro accounts now have a smaller maximum file size than free ones (50MB vs 200MB, 90 seconds vs 3 minutes for video)!

So for those of us who have Pro accounts, the only real advantage that seems to be left is unlimited (vs. 1 TB) storage, and the ability to see view counts and referrer statistics.

Oh yeah, and they royally screwed up the UI. Sigh. Yahoo, what were you thinking?

Should I still upload my Maker Faire photos? I’m tempted to just stop using Flickr altogether… but then I have to figure out where to put my photos, and then there’s all the past posts in the blog to think about.. Ugh.

Looking forward to Maker Faire

This coming weekend, May 18-19, I’ll be joining a bunch of LEGO enthusiasts from BayLUG (Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group) at Maker Faire yet again. This annual event has been going on every year at the San Mateo Event Center (aka Fairgrounds) since 2006 and BayLUG has been a part every year. This year we have a 40′ by 40′ space which will feature robotics demonstrations, a kids’ play area, a working train layout by BayLTC (Bay Area LEGO Train Club), and lots of LEGO models on display. I hope you can come and see the show, and stop by to say hi.

Besides our LEGO exhibit, there are hundreds of amazing exhibitors and vendors offering everything from knitting to welding, from woodworking to electronics. It’s a celebration of all kinds of do-it-yourself hobbies and homebrew activities, and always lots of fun. Many of the art exhibits that you would otherwise have to go to Burning Man to see are there, and there are lots of great hands-on activiites for kids of all ages.

In the meantime, or if you can’t make it, take a look at my photos from previous years’ Maker Faires.