Things to Discuss with the LUG

This is more of a note-to-self kind of thing, but if any of these ideas catch your attention, feel free to comment.

List of things to discuss with the LUG:

• 12-high stilts for town, DUPLO, PRIMO, and QUATRO versions of these - 5/15 - this will be joined by DUPLO characters!
• Is NCLTC still around? Mike Walsh cleared this up.
• Destroyer Droid parts (trade with Sandy) - apparently most of the parts Sandy wants that I did have extra of aren't available anymore. I hope this photo doesn't leak too much of the stuff I'd like to finish soon. I am taking roofing suggestions, though, if you have any. I suppose I'll also field a few questions after people do the inevitable zoom-in-and-spot-the-parts-and-ideas-game. - 5/15 - we completed the trade, as per the 5/9 post.
• Are the tables at DGXPO really only going to be wide enough to hold just one 32x32 baseplate? That's going to make building a decent town a bit difficult. I misread the original announcement - that's 12 FEET by 30 inches, not 12 inches by 30 inches.
• When is Joe Meno leaving us for WAMALUG? False alarm. Is Team Joe sitting out DGXPO for another event? - 5/15 - Brickworld.
• Am I allowed to "cheat" and use non-LEGO parts in a group layout? I'm interested in using real panes of glass to build a large minifig-scale model (such as a shopping mall or European-style train station). Also, I have some suspicious looking 2x2 trans-dark-blue tiles that may or may not be clone-brand.
• Is anybody else interested in doing Aquazone, Space, Pirates, Batman, Star Wars, Star Wars Technic Droids, Mindstorms (NXT or otherwise), Castle, Rock Raiders, or Great Ball Contraption at DGXPO? Since I'm going to miss a large chunk of the show day, I want to focus on stuff I know that other people are interested in doing (or perhaps arranging to split a table between two themes) so that my stuff still has an eye on it all day. Otherwise, I'll only bring in town stuff, Bionicle sets, and a stripped-down version of the history display (which reminds me, I still owe our visitor from last December an e-mail - and come to think of it, I owe the Apex FLL coach an e-mail still too.)
• Does anyone have any of the sets/people from the LEGO ISLAND video game? That might be a nice theme tie-in. I could have sworn that I had a Brickster minifig, but I could only find a Brickster keychain when I actually went to look for him (of course, I could probably work that in anyway...but I don't actually have a police station for a town either - could we work in a way to put him in a helicopter above the town?)
• We should plan on a one-table Bionicle display - I have enough sets to do a decent one (although I will also likely be parting out my largest Bionicle set into a town building, just to show off ways to make "stupid" parts useful).
• The refurbished Keebler elf will have black shoes instead of brown ones. Deal with it.
• When we say we're "booked" for a show, does that mean there's money involved? If so, who gets it? (Just curious - although I would love to make some money off of the hobby)
• April meeting? (it looks like we're fishing for a location at the moment) I really ought to pick up the phone and see about booking a library.
• Will there be a train yard at DGXPO? Who will build it? I kind of want to try some of the ideas out of the old train idea book (I like the crane and the automatic unloading in particular). Someday, I'd like to see about automated freight loading that makes a "normal" town secretly a giant Great Ball Contraption.
• New slope bricks in Beach House set (visible in this photo - look closely at the difference in texture and the smudges on the 2x2s)
• Alternate beach house platform (probably won't be used)
• I have an extra chassis / remote combo from the first RC Racer set - I'd like to have this out for kids to play with at our events. Anyone want to build something on top of it?

I'll probably edit this as I think of other things / send e-mails to solve some of these. I did a big edit of this on April 26th, for example.`Another May 15th.

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.

DGXPO

NCLUG has been booked for DGXPO. Here's some quick info (there will be more when official announcements are made):
Wikipedia List of LEGO Computer and Video Games
DGXPO website (with countdown!)

I will be reprising my history display (with changes to make it more on-topic), and I'll also be bringing Creator, LEGO Island, Bionicle, and Star Wars themed models. I'll have some schedule stuff to work out (Saturday mornings in June are prime yard sale time) but I should be able to be there for most of our show (and I'll be in to set up as well).

The great thing about this is that it's specialized, but it's still very much a general display. Between fan-released software and videogame mods, and the sheer amount of official LEGO games, CAD software, and robotics kits available, there really isn't much of anything not relevant to the digital gaming theme. The list of video games linked above doesn't include Mindstorms/Cybermaster/LDraw/MLCAD/rendering/Track Designer/From the Vaults/DACTA/etc, so there's even more space to play around with that hasn't been outlined there.

EDIT: This is news from yesterday's NCLUG meeting. I'll post more about the meeting when I get around to uploading the pictures.

LEGOPalooza - Saturday

I was a bit slow getting out of the house on Saturday - I didn't actually get to the Planetarium until nearly noon, even though I had been trying to get there for 10. Fortunately, everything worked well with the Aquazone layout, the history layout, and the plates for the town engine shed. There were also a few more people who pitched in to get the town/city set up. Even though the road layout was just about done and most of the houses and such had been set up, the train layout still needed to be worked out.

At this point, the train was starting to look a bit scary. There were a ton of loose cars and loose parts on the floor, and it wasn't really clear who brought what or what went with what anymore. With only 45 minutes until we opened to the public, we still had to figure out how many trains we could put on the layout and finalize where the track would be going. I wound up setting up trains until about a half hour after we opened to the public. Having extra parts out with little kids around, though, meant that we kept getting asked to get different trains running. Matthew wound up taking requests to get one train at a time going on the outer track while I tried to finalize the inner tracks and figure out which trains to put out. Matthew wound up swapping trains throughout the day, and it went pretty well overall.

I spent a good deal of time manning the Aquazone and history displays. At some point on Friday, a large mosaic of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble went in between the two, so I wound up explaining the PicToBrick software to a few people too. The kids responded pretty well to both displays, but I had to explain what Aquazone was to most people. I guess "failed LEGO themes of the 1990s" isn't taught in schools these days. I did have one kid who had obviously read up on the topic come up to me and ask me where my bad guys were. That was embarrassing - I had been hoping that the little kids didn't know my sets well enough to spot the missing parts (although I had wound up not putting out the Crystal Scavenger set for similar reasons, which are a bit embarrassing to put in writing). Even though most people didn't "get" the theme (quite a few people didn't even get the "Finding Nemo" bit or the "Octopus' Garden" either), everybody seemed to like the light up cave, lit-up base, and lit up ships. There was even one kid taking video of my motorized sub.

The strangest part of manning Aquazone and history came when some kids got out of one the Planetarium's paid courses and saw Aquazone first. I explained that the Aquazone sets were from the 90's, and since these kids didn't realize yet that my other display was mostly based on stuff from the 60's, the kids were saying "so that's OLD!". Their parents found this as funny as I did.

Quite a few people were surprised by my lamp in the history display. Apparently most of them hadn't seen the Sopwith Camel set before, either (to be fair though, it is a rather-impressive looking set). I wasn't sure how many people would really stick around to read the poster, but quite a few actually did - maybe a third of the people who came by. I had to take a few parts out of my LEGO logo mosaic at one point to convince people that it was really built and not printed on. Several parents recognized some of the older sets and parts on display, and quite a few kids seemed really interested in it. The people who stuck around the longest were people who didn't really have any clue about this stuff though - we had quite a few people come in who were obviously just curious UNC students. I got the impression that they didn't realize that it had been 50 years since the LEGO brick had been patented. Now that i think about it, though, I'm not sure that anybody commented on my "50" sign or the slice of birthday cake.

I was surprised by how excited the kids got about some of the newer sets. Once I realized how much attention the three Bionicle sets I brought were getting, I decided to grab some more for Sunday (naturally, I have two or three whole collections of Bionicle that I've bought at yard sales, so grabbing an impressive-looking pile of sets is pretty trivial).

A few people complained about the lack of non-Star Wars space sets this year (I get the impression that people thought I'd be a safe guy to complain to since the sign and poster looked a bit "official" - and besides, what fan of LEGO history doesn't love Classic Space?). I decided to bring in a small spaceship for Sunday too. I did have a few people who were wondering about whether or not their kid could join NCLUG too (I tried to dodge the question, mostly - I didn't really know what the rules were on kids joining NCLUG until we sorted it out online the week after Palooza). The coach of the Apex FIRST LEGO League team gave me his business card too - apparently they're interested in doing a display too (I need to get back to him and let him know what he needs to about joining the group, though).

I was going back-and-forth between town and history/Aquazone for most of the day. I did get some pictures in, but Joe insisted I use his camera instead once he saw me having a hard time getting good shots. I only got in a few dozen shots, though, before I was needed to keep an eye on some displays again. We were pretty busy for most of the day, and every time paid courses got out, we had another wave of people come in (I probably noticed this more than most because I had the wall directly outside the part of the ballroom where the "challenge courses" were going on).

After closing on Saturday, most of us went to a pub in Durham. I didn't particularly care for the place, to be honest. It was a bit hard to follow the conversation, too, and we had a large enough group that it made sense to switch ends of the table a few times to try to catch everything that was going on. After dinner, everybody raced to Target and Toys'R'Us to browse the LEGO selection. I didn't buy anything (and I even got lost on the way to TRU!), but that was fun.

That was a bit of a long night though, and I was planning on being there as early as I could on Sunday to set up a Bionicle display (and believe it or not, we still had a few town things we wanted to fix).

LEGOPalooza - Setup on Friday

When Friday, February 1st rolled around, I still wasn't entirely ready for LEGOPalooza. Most of the poster still had to be done. Carin stepped in to build the NCLUG sign (I know I should have made a little sign to credit her as the builder for that - sorry. That's her sign in all of the photos of my display), which freed me up from a rather large project that I wouldn't have been able to have ready in time. I had been hoping to start heading out towards Chapel Hill fairly early in the day, but that wound up not happening because of how long the poster took to finish. I wound up eating lunch before I left in the afternoon.

Oh, and did I mention that I had to get gas on the way out? Mom's car had been in the shop (so I had to pick that up on Thursday) and because mum had been out-of-commission since falling in the garage the previous weekend, I had to pick the car up and get fresh gas in it to take it to Palooza. Of course, we had drizzle outside on Friday too, so suddenly I had to find coverings for all of the open-top containers that I had packed.

Things got better once I finally got on the road. I was able to get to the Planetarium without any problems thanks to some new directions from Google Maps (last time I went up to the Planetarium parking lot at UNC was for a Nickel Creek concert in 2006, and I got lost on the way there).

Unloading went pretty well. I had a really light load compared to some of the more seasoned NCLUG members, so I was able to get to setting up fairly quickly. There's a bit of a twisty route between the parking lot and the ballroom where LEGOPalooza is held, but everything got in just fine. Joe Meno (editor of BrickJournal magazine, who we're lucky enough to have as an NCLUG member right now) was there setting up the tables and he helped me bring stuff in.

Joe Meno had brought a few things for the history display too - and they were all great additions that caught a lot of attention. He had a large wooden box with a variety of vintage pieces from the early 60s. I didn't really have a chance to look through it until Saturday, but there were a ton of easy-to-spot signs in there, as well as parts from the first Esso Station set and the very first lighting elements (which were missing the battery box, so we have no idea if they still work or not). Joe also had an awesome Formula 1 set from 1975 and a helicopter from the early 70s that was apparently very popular back in the day (quite a few parents told me that they had that one when they were little). Joe also had some official history of LEGO literature that he picked up last time he was in Billund, and he brought some print versions of earlier issues of BrickJournal too (BrickJournal was an online-only publication when it was first launched and is only now going into print).

There was plenty of other exciting stuff getting set up around the room, too. Joe Meno had gotten us the new Green Grocer set (which comes out in March and is a must-have kit with a ton of great details - I could probably write a small book just about all the neat ideas and parts in that set). The Green Grocer was a mere rumour at the beginning of that week - the first photo of it was leaked on Tuesday, and apparently NCLUG and another group doing a show that weekend in Belgium were the first to display it publicly. I'm a bit behind on the impressive newer town sets (they're great sets but they are a bit expensive, even if they are actually cheaper-per-part than the smaller sets are), so I also had my first chance to get a good look at the Cafe Corner set on Friday too.

Set-up at my display was fairly uneventful. It took a while to get the electricity hooked up (I had brought my lamp, and I also needed enough cable set up behind my display to reach the various electric things in the Aquazone layout). Once the electricity stuff was done, I set up my history table. I used one of my Coke trays as a riser, but besides that I was able to squeeze everything onto just one table (Of course, I had moved on to one-and-a-half tables by the time we opened on Saturday, and I took up two full tables by the time we opened on Sunday...) Somewhere along the way, Joe Cool lent me a build-in-a-bag for the history display too.

Setting up the Aquazone stuff proved a little bit more complicated. Joe Cool and Joe Meno were both bringing Aquazone stuff too, and everyone built more than they had originally expected too. At one point, I had dry-ran all of my pre-built sets and original models as a separate layout, but shortly after that we settled on putting the Neptune Discovery Lab set on one side of Team Joe's layout and setting up the rest of my sets and models on the other side. This looked great, but it did present a new electrical challenge that wasn't resolved until the next morning - I had added lights to both the Neptune Discovery Lab and the Shark's Crystal Cave (the latter required hollowing out most of the original set so that the lights would show through windows in what were originally separate chambers). I had brought one train speed regulator for all of my electrical needs in the Aquazone layout (which included those two sets and an original Aquashark sub that I rigged with motorized propellers and a fiber optic unit), so I had to bring in some extra cables on Saturday to get the whole thing going. I'll post more later about the lighting process, the motorized sub, and the other original sub I came up with (it could take months for me to get around to writing all that, though, and I doubt that as many people will find it interesting).

With the Aquazone stuff ready, I moved on to Harry Potter. Even though I'm not a Harry Potter fan, I actually have a decent-sized collection of it by now because of two HP collections that I bought at yard sales this past summer (which had about 8 sets total in them (including the castle), 5 of which were complete (the rest I'll use for parts)). I had modified a pair of Hogwarts Express cars to look "runnable", and those went towards Jen's displays (Jen builds dioramas of scenes from the books and movies). She only wound up using one, but it still came out pretty well. I put four other sets over in the display that Sabrina's mom (sorry, I didn't catch her name!) was doing, too, but it turned out that we both had brought those sets (so next year I should probably leave mine at home).

You'd think things would slow down once I had prepared all the displays that I was "really" contributing to, but things actually got busier for the rest of the night. It took me a few minutes to get my Carribean Clipper ready for the Pirates display (I know that I have a ton of other (and later) Pirates sets too, but that was the only one I had ready). After that, I went to put some of my road plates in the town/city, which was already starting to shape up (the Cafe Corner-Market Street-Green Grocer trifecta had already been snapped in and a few other sets and original models were out too). Sabrina's mom had built an awesome fire station from scratch - I'll have to find some more photos of it somewhere, though, because I don't have any good pictures of the interiors (which were extremely detailed). I was just about done putting roads in front of houses and such when Matthew came in with a few city blocks pre-built. The city blocks looked good and worked into the layout easily enough.

The next big change was that Matthew had brought in a spectacular train station of his own design. On the Yahoo! group, nobody had expressed interest in doing a train, so I had assumed that all of the train stuff that I was bringing "just in case" wouldn't be used - but once you have a great train station, you kind of have to set up some train track. Once I started taking track out, train sets, buildings, etc. just started coming out of the woodwork. Matthew (who doesn't even own any 9V trains of his own) somehow wound up in charge of setting up several trains in a much larger layout than anyone was expecting. I wound up being a sort of "train guru", and I was over there helping out quite a bit on all three days. By the end of the night, we had two rounds of track set up, completely encompassing the town layout, the Spongebob Squarepants layout, and Sandy's Eastern architecture-themed models (which, by the way, are also really good, but required a hefty amount of special-parts-ordering). I wound up setting up my Train Engine Shed, but we ran into some trouble because I hadn't brought the baseplates for that set (I brought them in on Saturday, though). We actually didn't finish setting up the town layout on Friday - but a big part of that was because we were waiting for Carin to show up (and somehow, none of us knew quite what she was bringing).

Carin showed up with a few pre-assembled models for the town and a large pile of unopened sets that needed to be built. She had the new 50th Anniversary Town Plan set assembled too, which was exciting to see (that's also on my list of current-sets-I-have-to-get). We wound up using the table that was set aside for Mindstorms displays to do a group build - I think most of us got to build at least one set there. I got to build one of the newer train stations (which was nice enough, but I still prefer my Metro Station set that's still packed away somewhere) and I also built two of the new fire/rescue sets. The group build lasted well into the night. I didn't actually have a chance to stop and eat - I just started building with one hand and eating pizza with the other. I was surprised at how good I got at opening the boxes and bags with just my left hand.

By the time that the end of the night rolled around, I had a small list of little things that needed to be brought in for Saturday. I still had to make the smaller signs for my history display, and there were a few little things (like the wires and baseplates I mentioned earlier) that I needed to add for town and Aquazone. A few people were worried about the way that my history poster was hanging off of the table a bit, so we decided that I'd have to reorganize my table on Saturday morning too.

The Planetarium more-or-less kicked us out on Friday night, leaving plenty of work left to do for Saturday morning before the crowds showed up. That's another post, though.