Brickley's Words

Burning Up

RoscoHead — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 02:17:30 +0000

Burning Up

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.

There weren’t very many people not affected by the tragedy, even a couple of local AFOLs had family or friends directly affected. In the end, there were 173 dead, over 7000 homeless, and countless injured and grieving.

I never thought I’d build a LEGO vignette, but weird things happen during times like that. This one was built in the days following what would become known as “Black Saturday”, but I only felt like sharing it with my closest friends. Since then, it has been placed on my desk at home, and occasionally it would catch my eye and bring back the memories.

Now, after the 1st anniversary was recently commemorated across the state, I feel I would like to share it with the rest of you. It contains lots of thoughts & memories; it means a lot to me, I hope you get something from it too.

To see more about Black Saturday, I recommend the ABC documentary “Inside the Firestorm”.

OK that was insane

RoscoHead — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:02:32 +0000

Insane? Make up your own mind!

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.

Back again! Again!

RoscoHead — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 05:47:40 +0000

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.

This is it then

RoscoHead — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:51:38 +0000

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.

Instructions disabled again

Administrator — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:22:06 +0000

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.

NXT 2.0 launches at Dick Smith

RoscoHead — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:17:07 +0000

NXT 2.0 has been available at some Dick Smith stores recently, but this weekend is the official launch, and I will be at Tricky Dicky’s Macarthur Square in Campbelltown, NSW this Saturday 3rd October from around 11am-3pm to demonstrate the new set and answer any questions.

Don’t expect anything fancy, but your kids might like to see how LEGO robots work!

Click here for a map to the store.

Instruction Cross-reference table updated

RoscoHead — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:07:25 +0000

Another update to my LEGO instructions cross-reference, find them here. Highlights include:

BrickMaster: Indy’s Jeep, AT-TE Walker
Creator: Highway Transport
Games: Lots of fun!
Mindstorms: NXT 2.0
Sculptures: Grand Carousel

And a few other goodies

Added: 95
Updated: 6
Deleted: 0

Thanks for corrections to:

Peeron.com

M>ltc at Caulfield AMRA train show

RoscoHead — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:45:00 +0000

Last weekend (Aug 22-23), M>ltc displayed a small layout at the Caulfield train show. A big thanks to Teunis, Peter, Ryan and Phillip for helping out. You can see some pics here (after moderation).

Train Music!!

RoscoHead — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 01:50:45 +0000

This is probably my longest lasting MOC project to date. Back in 2001, I realised that the 6 speeds of the LEGO train controller driving a standard 9V motor produced the first 6 overtones, ie: the notes available to most valve-less brass instruments. I didn’t do anything more on it until yesterday, when for some obscure reason I decided to finish the project.

So here it is for your enjoyment (or otherwise).

They’re back!

Administrator — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:56:37 +0000

The instruction search page is now back. I think the problems have all been solved, so hopefully it won’t need to disappear again for a while.

You can find it here.