This brings my total number of LEGO bricks to 13,301, with 7,925 in whole sets and 5,376 as loose parts.

Regarding my next big LEGO project, that I alluded to when writing of the Gay Deceiver, it shall be a LEGO-man-scale version of the Belafonte from The Life Aquatic.

I was being a tiny bit secretive as no-one has yet made such a model, the closest so far being the submarine and the crew themselves. So I vaguely wanted to be first, to not let anyone get in there ahead of me…

But that seems a little silly. A few years ago, I had all kinds of plans and sketches and writings detailing the “perfect” ebook reader (electronic ink display, touchscreen interface, clockwork powered, always-on-internet connection) and I was going to make a website out of it, with the intention that, if I would never make it myself, it would put the idea out there for someone else to. Of course, many other people were thinking along similar lines, and the Kindle is pretty close, only without the touchscreen or clockwork (I’ve since learnt that clockwork provides nowhere near enough juice).

So anyway, if someone else makes the Belafonte before me that doesn’t matter too much. If it is exactly what I wanted to build, then I can simply follow their instructions, and if it’s not then I still have my mighty plans…

I’m writing to Eric Anderson to ask if he has any sketches/drawings I may see, and when I’m next in London I’m going to visit the National Maritime Museum in order to get some plans of the Ton class minesweeper, which is the kind of boat the Belafonte was.

So, that’s one of my future LEGO schemes. Right now I’m in Aschaffenburg, have a few assignments to work on over the coming weeks, an interview for an internship with Nintendo too.

Ooh, I am a published writer now, with an article on pages 12 and 13 of the current issue of my university’s student magazine, The Courier. You can download a PDF of the issue (59.4) from the Archive and a more in depth version of my piece is online too. Sure, it’s just the post I wrote last November, but now… published!

Ooh ooh, I also finished Guitar Hero III in Expert mode on Wednesday 12th March! After drinking some booze and playing some multiplayer, I was so very much in the zone that I beat the devil first try. Hoo-hah. Now, to play through it all again on the new Xbox 360 Kitty and I will be buying tomorrow…

The cataloguing of all my old LEGO bricks has picked up steam due to me finding Peeron.com. 1928 pieces have been logged so far, or 392 different colour/type combinations. Still at least double that amount more to go.

For Christmas I was given a lobster, a chess set and a Martian. Ooh, and Kitty and I built the Café Corner we’d been hungering for since summer.

Yesterday, thanks to a tip-off, I bought one huge Batmobile as it was reduced from £50 to £25. It took five hours to build and I listened to the last five episodes of This American Life whilst I did that, so now, in my mind, it is linked with murderous superintendents and Cambodia too.

These last few days I’ve also been watching some films, including The Royal Tenenbaums, The Big Lebowski and The Butterfly Effect. I would also watch No Country for Old Men, Aliens vs Predator 2 and Sweeney Todd, cinemas permitting, and maybe also The Darjeeling Limited again.

Guitar Hero III is nearly finished on Expert, just two songs left; Raining Blood and One. Mike and I also completed the game in co-op career mode, he on Hard and I on Expert, and that made the Metallica song doable. However, it would seem that Through the Fire and Flames doesn’t get unlocked until the game is completed in single player mode, so though I played it over the holidays, I’ve not been able to since getting back to Aber.

There are other things to do, so I would go sleep now.

1 – ASUS Eee PC and associated accessories
2 – Nintendo DS R4 shenanigans
3 – Photos of Hong Kong
4 – Fake LEGO
5 – And a wedding too

And probably a few more bits and bobs, we shall see. Now, to finish that Java…

The roads from the airport to where we are staying were eerily familiar, looking far too much like those in the UK, with identical road markings and street signs (English plus Chinese), not to mention road-side architecture. There are British style plug sockets too.

We (myself, Kitty, Kitty’s mum and grandfather, Elton (Kitty’s brother) and Food (Kitty’s tiniest uncle)) went to a ginormous restaurant with Kitty’s “fifth” uncle, her aunt and other uncle, cousins Ada and Kevin, and Kevin’s fiancé Cissy. There was much tasty food, so much that I could not eat more than one pudding, and then hundreds of terrifyingly huge fishies looking glum waiting to be eaten the next day.

Sweet sweet sleep came at last, around 1am, and now I am up again and go play outside. Photos were taken last night and when I get them off folk I shall post some here.

Update:

From left to right; Simon, Ada, Kitty and Elton.

Clockwise from left; Elton, Kitty’s “fifth” uncle, Kevin, Cissy, Kitty’s mum, Kitty’s aunt and other uncle, her grandfather, Food, Ada, Simon and Kitty.

So, to mark our fifth anniversary, I had the idea of recreating the room we did said hooking up in, the living room of that first house. But not just any old recreation, ho no; I would build it out of LEGO!

The first thing to do was to craft a maquette of said living room. In addition to my memory, I had two whole photographs to go on:

These being the photos that Kitty sent me in that very first email on 15th September 2002, telling me about a house that she and a couple other people needed, “ONE, just ONE person,” for…

So, after about a month, I had finished the sketch model, complete with firemen stand-ins for Kitty and myself:

The next step was to construct a 3D LDraw model. As I’ve written before, Bricksmith is my weapon of choice for doing this on the Mac, but there is plenty of other software for other platforms.

Using my maquette as a starting point, I worked out the actual bricks I’d use to build the final model, which included the obligatory unofficial ones:

30179: Door 1 x 4 x 6 Frame

30178c01: Door 1 x 4 x 6 with 3 Panes

If you like, you can even play with the LDraw file I produced.

Unfortunately, LEGO only ever produced the door itself in grey, black, yellow and blue, not the white I needed, so I went with the closest of the four. Also, I initially wanted to use a grooveless grey tile on the PlayStation, so that it would look more like the real thing. However, as such a part has not been sold since 1981, the one I got in the post was very scuffed and discoloured, so in the end I decided to use a shiny new grooved one instead.

Speaking of parts, I bought most of them from 17 different BrickLink sellers from all over the world:

Additionally, I got what I could from the LEGO Factory and also a few bricks from the Milton Keynes LEGO store.

So, once I had all the pieces and could build it for real, the next step was to produce a printed instruction manual in the same style as one you would get when buying a LEGO set in the shop.

The instruction rendering stage was far more convoluted than you might imagine but can be briefly summed up as; I used Bricksmith’s “Export Steps…” facility, ran the .ldr files produced through L3P Launcher and then added a few lines of text to each of the resulting .pov files to add appropriate lighting and outlines. Finally, I used version 0.7 of MegaPov to render the final images. Allen Smith, the creator of Bricksmith, was of great help during this process, and without his advice I would not have been able to produce such fine quality images.

As well as the individual steps of the living room itself, I rendered instructions for the furniture and roof, and also each piece all by itself so that I could produce inventory pages. I originally planned to produce box art as well, but as I could not find anywhere that would print on the card stock I required, in the end I decided to use a simple gift box. I managed to find one exactly the right size too, which was nice.

The copy shop in the union of my university was able to print the manual itself just how I liked it:

Following in the style of recent LEGO models, I split the building process into three distinct stages and put the pieces for each stage in appropriately numbered bags:

Two final comments on the manual itself. First, the LEGO logo on the front cover is courtesy of brandsoftheworld.com. Second, throughout all my painstaking work, I somehow managed to miss that I had written November instead of October in my message on the back cover…

I didn’t spot this until I actually gave the present to Kitty. I felt rather sheepish but happily she was simply bemused by my mistake, almost certainly on account of all the rest being so very mighty. I’ve updated the online version of the pages that is soon to follow, but left the model number on the front cover as 2511 (instead of changing it to 2510) as a reminder of my own foolishness.

Finally, here are the instructions themselves:

And last of all, finally finally, some more photos of the actual model once built:

Finally finally finally, I bought enough bricks that I could build two models and got two instruction manuals printed and bought two boxes and stencilled numbers on two sets of plastic bags so that… both Kitty and I have a version of this LEGO set! And when, on our actual anniversary, we could not be together on account of her being in Germany and I being in Wales? We used Skype and an EyeToy connected to her PowerBook and a video camera connected to my MacBook and we built it together, watching each other play with LEGO… it was mighty.

65% for Software Development was expected as I didn’t do so well in the second Java project. For the first project I got 79%, for the in-class test 84%… meaning 66% for the final exam. Not stellar, but a reasonable 2:1.

75% for Communications & Telematics was all down to one multiple-choice exam. As I answered 48 out of 56 questions, and because it was negatively marked, that meant the highest I could possibly get was 86% and the lowest was 49%… 44 correct out of 48 answered equals “Hoo-hah!”

83% for Web Programming was thanks to three projects worth a total of 40% of the module; I got 100% for both the first and third, and 93% for the second. Means I got 73% for the exam, which was a written one this time around; whilst I can make websites go good, I need to memorise more facts.

64% for Professional & Personal Development is the weird one. I was led to believe that this was a Mickey Mouse course; that you could get near to 100% simply by turning up to lectures and tutorials, giving a couple of presentations and handing in a CV. So I did all that. But I guess at some stage it was actually marked? Oh well.

Because I got over 60% in every module I can, if I want, change my course into a five year MEng… However, whilst that was looking tempting just a month ago, I think it more likely that I will not. I want a Masters, but I would much rather do it in interface/interaction design. Plus, I shall wait and see what happens during my year in industry; may hook myself up with a sweet career straight away, not do a Masters at all.

Anyway, twelve more weeks of summer holiday? I can totally learn Java in that time…

( Read 23 Page Comic (10.7MB) )

It makes much use of my beloved portmanteau and is a sad story too. Here is a handy quote from Wikipedia:

“Moore’s run also included several references to obscure or forgotten comic characters (Phantom Stranger, Cain and Abel, & Floronic Man) but none so prominent as in issue 32, when he broke with the serious and moody storyline for a single issue. In the story “Pog,” we see Walt Kelly’s funny animal comic character Pogo (created in 1943) and all of his woodland friends show up as costumed visitors from another planet, looking for an unspoiled world after their own utopia had been overrun by brutal monkeys. More than a simple homage to Kelly, the story is a commentary on the lost innocence of the old comics, the cruelty of humans (who are referred to as “the loneliest animal of all”), and the destruction of a natural beauty that can never be reclaimed.”

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp_Thing#Alan_Moore
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Kelly

I now have the graphic novel version of The Fountain too, and to read it whilst listening to the soundtrack is almost more glorious than the film itself.

Tonight, after seeing the mighty Hot Fuzz again, we turned said LEGO into something magical:

Not only that, I have made up some LDraw instructions, viewable in Bricksmith on a Mac and some other software on a PC. Here is a preview:

The file to download is but 4KB. You know you want it.

We was Kim, Anita, Tim and myself, hence the cunning acronym of KATS.

So… damn… cunning… I may just burst.

Also, for photos from Germany (though mostly France) from a few weeks ago:

- http://www.flickr.com/photos/89153937@N00/sets/72157600158472923
- http://s161.photobucket.com/albums/t212/WendyR_photos/Strassbourg/
- http://timsymons.com/wp-gallery2.php?g2_itemId=3202

One project down, one Java beast to go.

Hoo-hah.

LEGO goes good, but I hold off a bit here for a while. Too much, you know?

Soon, details on the £30 PowerBook G3 and some other non-LEGO related geekery I’ve had going on of late.

I would post a picture, yo:

Back from inside of early February, when it was snowing here.

Sleep. Ooh, but 158 in Mario Kart Double Dash, mirror mode. Maybe 160 soon? Who can say.

It is everything LEGO’s own Digital Designer promises to be, before it crushes your hopes and dreams in its hideously-sluggish, limited-inventory, unintuitive-interface maw. In the few years I’ve had Digital Designer on my computer I have designed exactly zero models with it.

With Bricksmith, in just one evening I have completed the instructions for a model I’ve been thinking about for the last few months, and I now have a full list of the 295 pieces required to make it a reality. I shall post more details soon, once I have bought the parts.

The only thing that could possibly make it better would be if you could click a button and it would automatically source said parts off BrickLink, total it up and let you pay for them right then and there. As it is, I shall do some hunting tomorrow.

Love you, Bricksmith, love you!