10173 Holiday Train

Posted on October 16, 2006 by Mike Walsh

10173 Holiday TrainThe 10173 Holiday Train is now available from LEGO Shop at Home.

I first saw this train in April of 2005 when I was asked for feedback on it before it was released. It was originally targeted for release for the 2005 Holiday Season but production scheduled prevented it from being released in time so LEGO decided to push it out a year. For the most part, the train which has been released is virtually identical to the prototype I was asked to comment on. About the only thing which is different is the funnel on the locomotive and the presents in the open freight car. The prototype had a teddy bear and two bicycles instead of the trike – I prefer the bikes and the teddy bear would have been nice as they are hard to find. Unfortunately I can’t post the images of the prototype.

I am glad LEGO has finally released a holiday themed train, they should have done this years ago! I would also like to see LEGO sell individual cars to add on to the Holiday Train and hopefully the LEGO Factory will facilitate that.

When images of this set first appears a couple months ago there was a rumor that it was a limited run of 50 or so that were intended as some sort of gift from or to LEGO executives. This was of course not true but my NDA prevented me from posting anything but none the less, it resulted in some rediculous eBay activity with several of these sets selling for close to $500!

Images of this set are starting to come out now, here are links to several galleries:

Posted in LEGO, Shopping | 2 Comments

Updating the NCLTC and NCLUG web sites

Posted on October 12, 2006 by Mike Walsh

I have started working on a looooong overdue task, updating the NCLTC and NCLUG web sites. Both were put in place a while ago and based on PostNuke. What I thought would be pretty easy to maintain and contribute to hasn’t turned out that way. Instead I am deploying WordPress for both and right now, both resemble this Blog very much. Since most of the activity for both NCLTC and NCLUG takes places via Yahoo Groups, I want to make sure that information is part of both sites. I found a WP RSS plugin which works pretty well (although the documentation is all in German) and the last 5 messages are now showing up on the lower portion of the NCLTC site. Long term both sites will have their own color scheme but the layout theme probably won’t change much if at all.

Posted in NCLTC, NCLUG, Web Development | 1 Comment

Judging complete – and the winners are …

Posted on October 11, 2006 by Mike Walsh

This morning I judged the LEGO and K’nex categories at the NC State Fair. This year there were six categories.

  • Age 3-8 Kit
  • Age 9-15 Kit
  • Age 3-8 Original
  • Age 9-15 Original
  • Age 3-8 North Carolina theme
  • Age 9-15 North Carolina theme

Joe Meno was supposed to judge with me but Joe is out of the country so I was on my own. The process was much smoother than last year. The models were spread out and grouped by category so I didn’t have to hunt all over the place to find the ones which should be judged against each other.

Judging kits is tough as you are essentially judging a child’s ability to follow instructions. I primarily considered the age of the child and the presentation of the model for the kit categories. Last year Joe and I had suggested they eliminate the kit category but it showed up again. I think I persuaded the Chair Woman to eliminate it for next year and to possibly add an adult category!

The wording in the Fair Guidebook wasn’t great so the NC theme category didn’t explicitly state that models should be original but that was the intent so I judged it that way. Much to my surprise, there were only 5 entries in each age group. In each group someone had entered the LEGO Wright Flyer set which while impressive, didn’t really capture the intent of the category. I am sure the uninformed public will wonder why those models didn’t win but that fact there are two of them will hopefully allow people to realize they aren’t original creations.

The age 9-15 original category had the bulk of the entries and many of them were very good. In particular, two stood out from the rest, two spaceships together and a large dragon dinosaur. The contruction of the two spaceships was very good and I picked that entry as the winner.

I had to judge my own children’s models which is hard and I did my best to be fair. In my opinion, they all had excellent entries in their categories and ultimately each ended up with a ribbon although none of them were for first place. I had one of the Hobbies and Crafts staff with me and she agreed with my selections and didn’t know until we were done that my children had entered.

We are off to the fair this weekend so the kids will find out how they did once we get there, I am not going to tell!

Posted in LEGO | 2 Comments

ILTCO Site Status

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Mike Walsh

I am still working on the re-write of the ILTCO site. I had hoped to get it done before BrickFest and was making a ton of progress but simply ran out of time. Since BrickFest I haven’t worked on it much as I had neglected some other duties while I was working on it. The fact that I haven’t been traveling much lately has also contributed to the lack of progress – I usually get a lot of work done on the plane.
Right now most of functionality is working on the new site. I need to get it uploaded to http://beta.iltco.org but it requires me to make some changes to the database tables which I have been hesitant to do. I need to get it done though so I just need to bite the bullet.

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Judging LEGO at the 2006 North Carolina State Fair

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Mike Walsh

I have been asked again to judge the LEGO and K’Nex category at the 2006 NC State Fair. Judging takes place tomorrow and should be harder than last year because 3 of my children have entered this year! I have told them I must be objective but somehow I feel that I am going to have to deal with some hurt feelings.

Last year when Joe Meno and I did this, we made a suggestion that the Fair drop the “kit” category as judging someone’s ability to follow directions doesn’t make a lot of sense. We also suggested they add a category for North Carolina themed models with suggestions for lighthouses and other well known landmarks. The Fair added the NC category but didn’t eliminate the kit category. This should be interesting to say the least!

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