Lego Madness Continued

So I had so much fun building that Lego crane the other weekend I went up into the attic this pasy weekend and dug out my meagre collection of Lego. I quickly realised I had no instructions, and onld a dim recollection of what sort of kits I owned (for instance, I knew I bought two small Lego Star Wars kits when Episode 1 came out). Here’s a shot of all the Lego, as I found it in the attic:

Dsc07881.jpg < What goes where? It didn't take me long to find a few spectacular archives of Lego instructions online. I spent many hours sorting through them, trying to recognise kits I may own and assemblind them. Brickfactory was particularly helpful. Eventually my memory was spent and I was left with a smaller pile of bricks with no idea what they made. Then I turned to Peeron, which is a database of Lego pieces, cross-referenced to kits. I had, for instance, in my pile of bricks a white surfboard. I simply searched for Lego surfboards on Peeron, and from there browsed every kit that contained only one white board and easily found the one I was looking for.

Even though I didn’t have a great deal of kits, the Lego-sleuthing and assembling of what I had took many enjoyable hours this past Sunday. Here’s a shot of everything put together:

Dsc07926.jpg < Assembled And here's where the story descends from "Oh no, he's now getting into Lego..." to "Oh my god, the man is insane." Suffice to say I made some purchases yesterday

Dsc07927.jpg < Look at the size of it! Details will surely follow :)

Music Matters

Another item I got for Christmas was an iPod Shuffle. This fabulous little (and I mean little, about as big as a postage stamp) mp3 player has great fidelity and is absurdly portable. ‘m loving it so far.

According to Apple it holds about 240 songs, but this is an optimistic number based on short songs or reduced sampling rates. My estimate is closer to 150-170 songs.

So which songs?

My 60GB iPod Video has 3094 songs on it right now, which I estimate is about 99% of all the CDs we own. There are also quite a few songs obtained from friends CDs and whatnot. How do I pick 150 only for the shuffle?

I want a very diverse and eclectic playlist (ie. I won’t just fill it with Alphaville), so I’m toying with the idea of having no more than 1 (or maybe 2, space permitting) songs by each band I have music from. In some cases this is absolutely trivial (for instance, Dexy’s Midnight Runners) but for others – like Bowie or Nick Cave – how can I pick just one? (Front runners would be Lady Stardust and Sail Away respectively)

I’m no doubt update when I decide. Maybe I’ll find a way to post the complete playlist.

In other music matters I received The Swing by INXS for Christmas. It’s been many, many years since I’d heard this album and it’s every bit as grand as I remembered. This was INXS in their glory, before they ‘sold out’ (insert grin here). The INXS son on the shuffle will certainly come from this album (can you guess which one?)

Mechanik

One of the many items (see last entry) I received for Christmas was this Lego technic crane set:

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I opened it the other day. I was going to build it during the downtime between waiting for World of Warcraft PvP battlegrounds to start. But it was immediately obvious this model would require more than occasional attention, so I put it aside for a while.

Yesterday I built it. It took more than five hours, during which we watched the marathon of Cash In The Attic on BBC America (a great show, BTW). Here are a few shots of the in-construction and finished product:

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The crane has three independent adjustable cables, which adjust the height of the ‘hook’, the angle between the primary and secondary boom and the angle of the entire trio of booms (with respect to the cab). I particularly like how these are engineered in such a way that they click when turned – a trick achieved via use of rubber pieces!

The finished crane is massive. In the rightmost picture, the height is about 60cm, and it is about that long as well. The cab can rotate 360 on the tracks, and clever counterweight pieces (I suspect they are normal lego bricks filled with metal) prevent the crane from tipping over.

A very impressive kit indeed 🙂