Brickley's
Words

February 7th 2009. After a fairly mild summer Melbourne was in the middle of a heat wave, and that Saturday pushed the mercury past 46C in the city, the hottest day on record. It was of course a day of total fire ban, with strong unpredictable winds, and during the day there were reports of several large bushfires around Melbourne’s outer suburbs. The full toll wasn’t known to most though, until the next day. With fires still burning, people were already counting the cost. The final toll would not be known for many days.
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No, not Travis (well OK maybe a little bit…). This weekend saw Brickvention 2010 reach new heights, with registrations up from 41 last year to 69. We even ran out of various items for the registration packs because we didn’t anticipate such a huge jump

But the big one was public day on Sunday. We should have felt the omen when people started arriving at 10am when our official opening time was 11am. But we figured it’ll only be a few early birds, right???? Five hours and somewhere around 2500 visitors later (we haven’t counted them up yet), we closed the doors and started packing up. Yep, you heard right, 2500. That’s more than 100% increase over last year’s event, and you could tell we didn’t anticipate it – at one stage, the admission line stretched all the way back to Elizabeth Street! But we managed to survive, thanks to the herculean efforts of the organisers, I won’t mention them all here, but Derek deserves special mention for emergency crowd control.

Anyway, suffice to say we have some big decisions to make in the next few weeks regarding next year’s event – while Vic Uni has been a great venue, we have definitely outgrown it, so keep your eyes peeled for announcements about next year’s venue.

And thanks to everyone who contributed, from the smallest MOC to the busiest committee member, we all managed to get it together for another great event, and I for one am looking forward to next year (after a suitable LEGO break of course…). More pics here.

Well, I’m happy to say that Brickley’s Words is back again. At least all those old links won’t be dead forever. But the instructions page is now permanently offline – hopefully that will keep traffic here to a dull roar, and keep my hosting company happy. Meanwhile, if you’re searching for instructions, please use Brickset, as Huw has now added links to the instructions at LEGO.com.

Oh, and happy new year.

Well, my host has given me 72 hours to fix the problem, or be shut down. I can’t afford non-shared hosting, and it’s unlikely anything I can do will fix the issue, so unless something amazing happens in the next 3 days, this is it for Brickley’s words. The main site may stay, along with the gallery if it doesn’t cause the CPU limit to be exceeded, but the LEGO instruction search will be shut down. It’s a pity it came to this, but that’s just the way things go sometimes. Maybe someone else will take over.

Due to generating high CPU usage. If this continues to happen, I will be shutting the page down permanently, so if there’s someone out there trying to scrape data from the page, PLEASE DON’T, you’re just screwing it up for everyone else. Write a script to scrape the lego.com site instead, like I did. They have bandwidth and server CPU to burn.