Tuesday, March 11, 2008

NCLUG January February Meeting

EDIT 4/13/2008: Why didn't anyone tell me that I had the wrong month on here? This was the FEBRUARY meeting. There was no "real" meeting in January, just the previously-blogged-about dinner.

I have posted a Brickshelf gallery of photos from the January NCLUG Meeting. They're of varying quality, but I tried to get all the models I could and I let a few other people take photos with it too. More photos of everything mentioned below can be seen in that gallery, but I'm really hoping that more of the models shown will get their own pages online eventually.

Highlights:
  • The DGXPO show I mentioned previously was announced by Carin Proctor. She's also booking the tables (apparently a specific layout of tables is already set-in-stone)

  • Team Joe brought back goodies from the NYC Toy Fair, which they covered for BrickJournal Magazine. They had a number of pamphlets directed towards retailers, as well as a limited edition promo collector's item featuring Han Solo and Indiana Jones (and no, they don't want to know how much it sells for on eBay).
  • The walker mechanism that showed up at the NCLUG Christmas party was revealed to be part of a very surprising model - a large steampunk airship with wings that flap in several places. There were a ton of great details here, but I tried to get most of them in photos - and missed quite a bit. If only I rememberd that there's a video feature on my camera...
  • Matthew brought an apartment building built out of three Beach House sets, and also brought a train maintenance building that had been robbed.
  • Sandy brought a few exciting creations - I forget what the big black one's going to end up being (but it has some great details that I didn't get any shots of) - a to-scale passenger bus and a large boat.
  • I brought the beginnings of a few displays I'm putting together for future shows - a Star Wars droid display, a Bionicle display, and a large robotics/bionicle project that I'm keeping fairly secret for now (I intend to debut it next February at LEGOPalooza). I also brought in a music box mechanism that I wasn't able to run because I forgot to bring a power source.
  • Joe Meno brought in the first print issue of BrickJournal - I didn't get past the first few pages, but it looks great so far!
  • An interesting temple showed up near the end. It shows off some fancy parts and techniques, but I'm pretty sure that it's not based on any existing temples out there.
  • I returned the extra parts I had after LEGOPalooza. Carin's planning on making the sign bigger before the next show (I thought it looked great already, but bigger can't hurt). I also brought my laptop along to show the awful ABC 11 report on LEGOPalooza (seriously, where do they find these local news teams? Are they actually trying to make fools of themselves?)

It was an exciting meeting overall - we were at that library in north Cary for a few hours but it went by rather quickly because there was so much to discuss.