Category: Events

LEGO Events

In Chicago for BrickWorld

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.

Oops, I forgot to blog about Maker Faire

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.

BayLUG at Maker Faire 2009

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.

Letters

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:

ABCDEAttributionFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

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:

High School CreationsHigh School Creations

Bricks by the Bay Facebook event created

Bricks by the Bay now has an event on Facebook. Please RSVP there if you’re a Facebook user, and join our Facebook group. (If you want to be my Facebook friend, visit my public profile.)

We created a group a while ago, but I had to wait until May 1st to create the event since Facebook doesn’t have a “year” field for events – 12 months is the limit. In other words, the convention is less than a year away!

Bricks by the Bay is also on Twitter, so follow us there. We also have mailing list for announcements as well as people helping with planning at our site, bricksbythebay.com.

BrickWorld here I come

I just made my flight and hotel reservations and signed up for BrickWorld (in Chicago, June 18-21)! Hope to see you there…

Anyone want to share a room? I’m currently signed up for a room at $119 but they only had king-bed rooms available, but I put a request in the “special requests” box for a 2-bed room. But if you have a 2-bed room and want to share the cost, I might cancel mine.

BayLUG Meeting, April 4, 2009

Today we had a meeting of Bay Area LEGO Users Group at Johannes’s church in San Leandro.

BayLUG Meeting, April 4, 2009I brought the 10181 Eiffel Tower that I won as a door prize at BrickFest last weekend. I also took along my LOVE and LEGO sculptures, so that if you look at the tower as a letter “I” it would spell out the same message as seen on my car’s license plate. I also brought the motor yacht for display, but that doesn’t spell anything…

Johannes brought along a great 30″x60″ castle scene, with just about every square inch taken up with minifigs, horses, and other medieval stuff either defending or storming the castle. Charles and Adrienne brought some Bionicle models some cars, and checkers/chess sets they’ve been working on, including a chess set for the blind that Charles is donating to a charity auction to benefit Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco. Paul brought an “oriental hall” he was working on, and a four story apartment building with a fully detailed interior, as well as some sets for sale. Bruce had his usual minifigs, mini train engines, and jeeps for sale, along with random $1 baggies of parts.

We had a great discussion of Mindstorms developments and Maker Faire plans with Steve Putz of Robotics Learning. Maybe we’ll start having more robotics activity in the club…?

BrickFest Photo Roundup

Man, did I take a lot of photos at BrickFest last weekend! I uploaded them all to Flickr from the hotel, but I’m still going through to add titles and descriptions. I also shot almost 3 hours of video which I haven’t even looked at yet.

The hotel net connection was spotty. I use the Flickr Uploadr program to upload files, and it apparently has some sort of bug that when the net connection drops during an upload, it uploads files again. I ended up with five copies of some of the photos! I had to manually delete the extras, and luckily I did it quickly before anyone had posted comments in all but one case – and that one case was a comment that was redundant anyway (the same observation had already been made on another photo).

The photos are organized into four sets: one for each day, and one for all the photos. Here are the links:

Enjoy!