BayLUG October 2014 Meeting

Last month the Bay Area LEGO Users Group (BayLUG) had its annual Anniversary meeting on October 11th at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto. We had a presentation by Russell Clark and myself on using the wiki pages to plan member participation in club events, a Halloween-themed contest, bulk LEGO for sale, and members brought a variety of their creations to display. Check out all the photos I took on Flickr (slideshow).

February 2012 BayLUG Meeting

Last Saturday was the February 2012 meeting of BayLUG (Bay Area LEGO Users Group) at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto.

I wasn’t able to stay for the whole meeting, but I did bring a couple of things I’d been working on – a gas station and the head of Kermit the Frog. I entered the latter in our contest, whose theme was “Movies,” and won the adult category! There were lots of members with minifigs, parts, and sets for sale, and a few people bringing their latest projects. For the kids, there was an activity where they could build things to make up a town layout. And of course our vendor Angel was there with his bulk LEGO which was as popular as always.

You can see photos of the meeting on my Flickr account.

BayLUG January 2012 Meeting @ Dave Porter’s

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?

BayLUG April 2011 Meeting

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:

BayLUG September 2010 Meeting

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.

BayLUG January 2010 Meeting at Dave Porter’s house

On January 24, Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group (BayLUG) had our annual meeting at Dave Porter’s house in Woodside, CA. Battleship Yamato on display at Dave Porter's houseDave 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.

WIRED photo gallery now online

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.

Billl Ward photo on WIRED.com

See you this weekend at Maker Faire!

Special BayLUG meeting for WIRED interview & photo shoot

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:

BayLUG photo op for Wired

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.