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 I'm not sure why I didn't blog this earlier - it' s a bit overdue. Several months back, my boss started encouraging me to change up my office LEGO display a bit. I had brought in a set (a dump truck) and filled the back of it with a series of tubes (an obvious Ted Stevens joke that works that much better at a network company). Around Thanksgiving, I built a LEGO version of a favorite XKCD comic strip that mentioned some programming skills I'd learned on the job and enjoy using at work. The photos have been up on flickr for a bit, but I changed out my display again around Christmas break (yep, I'm still using college lingo for vacation days) and I've since brought in even more LEGO (a set of magnets that spell out a slogan). My coworkers are fairly split between people who like LEGO and people who aren't familiar with it, but nobody else is as crazy as I am. I mean, seriously, how devoted do you have to be to have this sort of working collection of sand blue bricks, Technic sets, and DUPLO parts on hand?
So anyway, here are the photos that I apparently uploaded in December but have neglected to post until now. For those of you unfamiliar with XKCD, the comic I used is Regular Expressions.
First, some link action (flickr tags are fun!) - you might find it easier to just browse these photos on flickr :
All photos from that office display
Just the XKCD photos
Or you can click on these photos below for more info (I wrote a description for each photo when I uploaded them):
It's a series of tubes!
The truck, inside the DUPLO "table" I built to let me show the truck and the comic at the same time (the Perl books in the background here and in the other photos just happens to enhance the theme - they're really in the office all the time):
Stand Back - I Know Regular Expressions!
The sufficiently panicked minifigures:
Here's how the whip and Indiana Jones' position works:
Here's a close-up of some LEGO trickery - levers positioned just right to make a sign stay in place. Oh, and I used Technic pins with studs on the end to flip the studs upside-down under the letter bricks.
Look! Coincidences!
Here's an overview shot of the entire thing (Truck, table, comic, and some office miscellanea):
This final shot of the comic seems like a good one to zoom in on to look at the details (OK, so it's a fairly simple scene, but you can have another look):
Sadly, my perl/regex related day-saving does not involve a whip...yet.
For more on this topic, check out my LMOTD round-up of XKCD comic strips built in LEGO to minifig scale.
To follow up on this post from earlier this year (in which I said that dealing with repair people related to our water damage problem was a project in it's own right), here's what's going on with that now.
I have moved back into my regular bedroom. We ended up changing out the carpet, hanging up some new shelves, but leaving other things unresolved (the closet door doesn't shut anymore and we still haven't fixed the doorstop). The kitchen has taken longer than anyone has expected - there are some patches of floor that need to be redone (the whole floor has been done once now, but some spots didn't take the way they should have), most of the cabinet doors still need work, and there were some delays caused by our decision to modernize the kitchen a bit while we had the room torn up (we have a new stove/oven, an additional sink, an additional dishwasher, and a few embarrassingly expensive features my parents thought would add to the house's resale value down the road). The extra expense of handling the kitchen wasn't budgeted for, but we were able to take the hit (and the insurance company seems to be properly paying for their share - replacement costs of furniture/flooring/appliances ruined by the original flooding and the various repairmen's actions).
There were some issues with moving my stuff around that are yet to be resolved. It can be a bit hard to communicate my neurotic sorting habits to people who don't share my hobbies - for example, there were several stacks of CD's arranged in various spots in my room. One stack was all items I had listed for sale on Amazon, another was put on a shelf somewhat decoratively to show off a complete discography of my favorite band ( Over the Rhine, thanks for asking), another was a stack of CD's I haven't listened to yet (OK, so I actually had 3 separate stacks like this on various shelves - I've caught myself buying collections in bulk a few times when the price has been dirt cheap), and yet another was a set of bootlegs and mixtapes I had received from friends. I'm sure you can see where this is going - Mom decides to "help" and put them all in the same box, requiring sorting again later. Multiply that scenario times quite a few sorting-intensive hobbies and the size of "stockpile" I keep around, and I'm sure you can imagine how obnoxious this got to be. The initial insanity seems to be over but small surprises continue to pop up, leaving me feeling like I still need to spend most of my weekends tidying up (which, to be fair, is also worthwhile towards the goal of moving out if/when I get final word about if/where the office may be moving).
Besides not documenting a few smaller projects of mine (primarily of the more light-hearted LEGO variety - my boss has asked me to periodically swap out my "ironic" display at work), that about wraps up 2009. Any reader questions out there? I like to think that I've covered it, but I'm open to feedback here. Was there anything you wanted to hear more about?
This Google Adwords support thread accurately describes (give or take a few typos) the situation I just found myself in. You know, I don't even feel a great need to use search-based advertising. It was something I was willing to try because I was given this "free" promo offer. It's not "free" if it costs $10, sorry ($10 is the "minimum" amount that it's asking me to pay before I can try this "free" offer). I'm generally a happy subscriber to the cult of Google (you'll notice I'm writing this in Blogger, and that I also make heavy use of Reader, GMail, Google Calendar, AdSense, Google Alerts, Search, etc...) - but I have to draw the line here. This is a pretty scammy promotion, and frankly, I think it violates their motto of "Don't Be Evil". Why am I posting this here? I think I may be persuaded into spending the $10 to use advertising yet, and I'm still holding out hope that this coupon may be salvageable some other way. Until either of those possibilities happen, I'm going to ignore AdWords. Of course, the really bad thing about this is that they went through all that effort to try to get people to try this service, and all they've done is turn me against AdWords (it was a difficult and time-consuming experience to find out that they weren't going to give me the "Free", "No Risk. No Obligation" offer without me spending money).
 I recently built and installed a display for the Raleigh, NC LEGO store. My display, titled "LEGO Castle Through the Years", will be visible in the Window Into the Community (a special store window at LEGO stores that features creations by local builders - in this case it's in the back of the store, to your left as you look at the Pick-A-Brick wall) through the end of the month. For those of you who haven't been into LEGO Castle sets from the 1970's to today, the layout uses a variety of popular sets and minifigs from over the years - the landscaping and overall layout is an original design (as is the mill building styled similarly to the 10193 Medieval Market Village set), but most of the layout closely follows popular LEGO sets from over the years. Notable sets here include 375 Yellow Castle, 6066 Camouflaged Outpost, and 6038 Wolfpack Renegades. A few classic minifigs from various LEGO Castle lines show up as well - see if you can spot Majisto. The tree from 10193 Medieval Market Village makes an appearance too, but I decided to use an original mill building (which, of course, has a working water wheel and grindstone) to represent peasants instead of using a building from the current set (as a current high-ticket item, 10193 is already displayed in the store for sales purposes). Matthew (Brickapolis) was at the swap-out and got some set-up photos. These are mostly for seeing me set up my display, but you can also get a glimpse of my tree technique. You can see the rest of Matthew's photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/brickapolis/tags/nov/My photos can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/tags/november/ . I may add more photos later - I've been surprised to see how some details have come out in the end. A cave that I was afraid would be hidden turned out to actually be perfectly visible from a child's eye level, but appears to be covered by the large tree in the front when looking at it from an adult eye level. That's the only highlight that the brightly-lit display area has brought to my attention so far, but there may be others. I'd also like to try getting some photos with less glare - we'll have to see if I can get my camera back in there soon.
If you've ever discussed LEGO blogging with me for any serious amount of time, you've probably heard me mention how difficult it is to find interesting things to say about other people's models. There are only so many complimentary words in the English language, and inevitably we end up repeating common phrases, descriptions, techniques, etc. Over at The Living Brick, they've taken on one cliche I use regularly - "instantly recognizable". I would have linked to this over at LMOTD, but since that's supposed to be all kid-friendly and the link above used the word "testicle", it's off-limits there - so it shows up here instead. Don't worry too much about this blog becoming an addendum to LMOTD - I'm working on some slightly longer-term projects lately, but I will post about some of them soon (most notably: Castle Window In the Community display and some updates on the still-unnamed robotic LEGO band).
I may get around to writing a "journal" of sorts about BrickFair (I attended quite a few seminars and games there that won't get too much attention elsewhere), but for now I'm just posting general commentary over at LMOTD.
Just to follow-up appropriately to the previous post, I have made an announcement over at LMOTD. We'll be becoming a community-oriented site with contests in the near future. I didn't think it appropriate to mention over there, but we've also been dealing with some water damage in the house. Our water heater is in the attic, and when it burst the weekend before all the big school projects were due, it apparently left far more damage than we had previously believed. Note how I made that post on Sunday and didn't even mention how the heater had burst early Saturday morning. Not to give away too much personal info, but my bedroom is the room directly below the heater. I slept terribly and took a bit too long to realize that the "thunderstorm" wasn't the predicted sunny weather for the day, and was actually happening entirely in my wall. While we originally thought that the damage in my room was minor and that the kitchen below that had been dried out fairly well by us on Saturday morning, the various people we've dealt with from the insurance company felt otherwise. Of course, they started making my life a living hell the Wednesday of Posters and Pies - I got back that evening not knowing where I'd be sleeping, and eventually wound up in a makeshift bed in the room down the hall. We'd been preparing that room for a planned visit from Grandma in June, so the space was available. We've since had to cancel that visit now that we know that I'll be moving into there so that the insurance company people can redo my ceiling and floor. The various things the insurance company has been doing to try to dry out the insides of walls have been very hard on us - we don't have access to a few major kitchen appliances, and we've been trying as hard as we can to find ways to cook various things in the fridge before they go bad (figures that we stocked up on eggs, bacon, and hash browns JUST before they took out the stovetop - I was able to save Mother's Day by using George Foreman grills to prepare mum's breakfast in bed, though). ...the process of moving [me] out and figuring out if we want to do any repairs while everything is ripped out (about a third of the house's flooring is currently ripped up, in addition to everything related to the kitchen island) is a considerable drain on my time (and the time of the rest of my family), and probably counts as a project in it's own right now. The rest of my time is now occupied by the happier news I slipped into that LMOTD announcement - I got a job :-D. The job is a good one, but it definitely requires me to push myself a bit to make sure things are getting done, that I'm keeping up with the technology which is new to me, and that I stay focused and not do anything that would get me fired ("start up culture" is nice, but my boss has been pretty upfront about firing anyone who isn't contributing enough - I figure I need to "prove myself" for the first month or two before assuming I'm in for the long run). That's the current news for me. I'm hoping to write more sooner than later, but if I don't get the chance, I think you understand why.
As graduation approaches, my four project courses are coming to a close. One of these (for the DBMS course) isn't really exciting to share - no creative skills are used, it's just a matter of struggling with mediocre documentation and figuring out which methods need to be written (and how they should be written). Sometimes I fear that "the real world" of computer coding is more like that than like most of my more enjoyable computer-based projects, but I really hope it is not. Speaking of documentation, that's how the majority of the remaining time for my Senior Design Project will be spent. We have an event this upcoming Wednesday (April 22nd, 2009) called "Posters and Pies" - all are invited to attend, but you must RSVP (at http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/rsvp/posters-pies/) by tomorrow if you plan on coming. I will not be delivering our presentation downstairs, but I will be involved with that as the "clicker" and will be available with my team upstairs for questions. That's actually not the culmination of that project - a final presentation will be given to our sponsor at a later date, and we may have some additional work to do regarding finalizing code and documentation. There is an additional presentation for an "Innovating in Technology" class later that day. I will begin blogging more about that project once a decision has been made on whether or not to continue the project after graduation. This presentation isn't truly open to the public, but I'm allowed to invite anyone I would like - if you would like to attend, send me an e-mail at 316danny@gmail.com My fourth project concludes on Thursday instead of Wednesday, and also may be continued after graduation. As mentioned previously, I'm using some discoveries from my still-unblogged "Robot Rock Band" project in my computer music course. The assignment for this project requires us to compose a piece of music between 5 and 7 minutes in length, however, my desire to experiment with various structural ideas and compositional algorithms means that my piece will take almost the whole 7 minutes, and would be trivial to expand to a longer period of time (at one point, the NXC program controlling the LEGO components had a 10-minute runtime). The current premise of this piece is based on historical approximations of pi. The NXT-based section is based on mappings of historical approximations, and these determine the current structure of the piece. A "performer" (myself) will be playing an electric guitar part alongside the LEGO electronica, and this will be based on a Markov process I am still tinkering with in Java. ...additional compositional algorithms learned in that class will be used in the future for new variations on my "Robot Rock Band" project, some of which will be bland and accessible pop music that my professor would abhor.
 This picture was taken by another NCLUG member, I forget who at the moment. You can see me tweaking the code for guitar-playing robot, though. You can also click on that picture to go to flickr, where there are more photos from LEGOPalooza. Mike Walsh has rounded up some photos and videos from LEGOPalooza over at the NCLUG site. Normally I'd be doing that sort of thing, but I've been very busy these past few weeks - the three days of LEGOPalooza have been surrounded by coursework, homework, a FOSS Fair, a two-day career fair, and a variety of smaller events and BrickLink orders. I had a pretty interesting set-up at Palooza for my robot band (one of several displays I was "running" essentially by myself, and the only one I was able to actually keep an eye on) - a dual monitor set-up much like I got used to working on iTrust last semester (Oops, haven't blogged that yet either). I had originally planned on doing some things with LEGO Vision Command, as the previous post suggests, but I ultimately wound up putting the camera away (after a kid said "he's recording us" I realized that it's actually quite creepy to leave a camera out if you're not doing something with it) and showing off IDE's and code on the monitor facing outward. This lead to an interesting situation - during LEGOPalooza, I spent much of my weekend talking about code, open-source, LEJOS, Bricx CC, NXC, various pbricks, etc, and not much time focusing on LEGO. During Monday (which I had written off as booked due to the FOSS Fair I attended), I wound up going to an amateur robotics meeting and talking LEGO. Not that I mind, but it's certainly unusual. That's not even the worst of the whiplash of the past two weeks. On Saturday at LEGOPalooza, I had kids coming up to me that recognized my robotic band from my most recent appearance on the LAML Radio podcast and was asked some questions by numerous newspaper reporters (only article I've successfully dug up featuring me so far is in the Daily Tar Heel, UNC's student paper). People I'd never met before were acting like I was someone famous, and I guess in the online LEGO community, I sort of am (in spite of how few of my own models I've actually posted). On Thursday, I was at a career fair being asked if anything sets me apart from my classmates (the list of things I can actually put on a resume is surprisingly short). On the bright side, at least I had something to say when people asked if I had any embedded C experience (everybody forgets that NXT programming is technically a form of cross-compiling for an embedded device)... I intend to post a bit more recapping this past week (LEGOPalooza in particular, since I know most people who read this are LEGO people and not software people or graduating Computer Science majors) soon, but that's probably about it for today. One last thing, though: My family has moved suddenly twice now because of work shortly before a LEGO store has opened in our area (we lived in southern New Hampshire shortly before the first store in northern Massachusetts opened, and we moved out of Sammamish, WA, just as the Bellevue store opened minutes away from where I was attending college at the time). I've been joking for a while that Raleigh, NC will get a LEGO store as soon as I have to move away. Although I don't have any serious job offers yet, it's hard not to take the news that we're getting a LEGO store in mid-May as a sign that I'll be working elsewhere shortly after graduation (in early May). We'll see, I guess, and if I don't get something lined up by May, perhaps I'll just apply there - I certainly don't have any issue proving credentials as a LEGO nut. I'm not making any long-term plans, though, just in case I do end up moving out of the Triangle area.
Mostly noting this for personal reference (I'm still rushing to set software up for this weekend's show): I originally tried the approach prescribed at this site: http://www.abs-robotics.com/tips/install/winxp/download.asp to get Vision Command running. All 5 files were ran, but when it came time for the registry update, I ran into a bug because apparently I didn't have RIS 2.0 in the default install directory (RIS 2.0 is on there, of course, and thanks to Cary selling me a new USB IR tower on the cheap, I got it to work again shortly before I started again in trying to install Vision Command). After that failed, I tried following the advice seen on this website (the second result for "vision command xp" on Google): http://www.ntcompatible.com/Vision_Command_Updater_LEGO_t23827.html - so far, so good, but it's rebooting now. We'll all see soon enough if I'm able to successfully launch an air-guitar system before Saturday morning...it's really the last big goal left. Oh, and before anyone starts wondering: Yes, I tried doing the properly nerdy thing and interfacing an NXT with the Logitech SDK. I didn't get very far, and I figured this program could be simple enough just to try in a kid-oriented graphical language. Sure, I don't get to do anything to show off my fancy Computer Science college-learning, but at some level just the novelty of having a working LEGO guitar player controlled by air-guitar playing children is already exciting.
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