Hurricane Katrina Toy Drive

Posted on October 11, 2005 by Mike Walsh

The LUGNET community (well, really Anthony Sava and Bruce Heitbrink) organized Toy Drive to help the vicitims of Hurricane Katrina. After reading the posting I thought “what a great idea, I should do something!”. Like many LEGO enthusiasts, I am sitting on a collection of older sets, most picked up on clearance at Wal-Mart, Target or K-Mart. My daughter Sophia is in her third year of Indian Princesses and the focus this year is Community Service. This looked like a great opportunity for her and I to work on one of our projects.

Since our move to a new house, all my boxed LEGO is currentlty in storage about 5 miles from home so I couldn’t just run out to the garage or down to the basement to put a box together – we needed to plan a trip to the storage unit! Well, we got busy and had lots of family stuff going on and Sophia and I kept putting off our packing trip. The next thing I knew Anthony Sava posted a note saying the deadline for donations had arrived. I felt pretty bad, I committed to donate and didn’t follow up on it. A short time later Anthony posted a report of his efforts to donate the LEGO he had received. I was thrilled to see him offer to do it again and vowed not to drop the ball a second time.

I didn’t have much time to get a box together before having to go put of town for my sister’s wedding and Sophia had several days of standardized testing, so I went ahead and put together a box without her help. I really have too much LEGO stuff – it didn’t take me long to fill a large cardboard box with a variety of sets from the last 4-5 years. I hope they reach some children who will enjoy them.

I think what Anthony Sava has done is commendable. He really has gone the extra mile to help people who are in pretty dire straights.

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2006 Set Scans

Posted on October 4, 2005 by Mike Walsh

Kind of quiet on the LEGO front lately, I have been busy with the rest of my life! We bought an old house this past spring, moved over the summer and now have a to-do list a mile long! Anyway – got a tip from JT about some new 2006 set scans. A lot of them look pretty good, particularly the airport and hospital sets. Check’em out in this 1000 Steine post. It is tedious to go through them all, I am sure they will appear online in a better presentation soon.

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Bridgewater Mall Pick-A-Brick

Posted on September 21, 2005 by Mike Walsh

I am up in NJ for a two day meeting. Conveniently our office is about 4 miles from Bridgewater Commons where there is a LEGO Store and I actually had some time to stop by.

nullThere were a couple of interesting items in the Pick-A-Brick selection including 1 x 2 x 2 panels in transparent smoke along with white and magenta flower petals. They also had stems but I had picked up quite a few of those a while back so I didn’t buy any of those.

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September NCLUG Meeting

Posted on September 18, 2005 by Mike Walsh

I went to the NCLUG meeting today at the Eva Perry Library along with my son Travis and my nephew Grant. Joe Meno and I had discussed having a theme to each meeting as a possible idea to drive more participation. The theme this months was vehicles so everyone was supposed to bring some sort of a vehicle.
We had lots going on this weekend and I never got around to building anything new (a bad habit lately) so I dusted off a couple of things people hadn’t seen in a while. I took my monster truck versions of the Harry Potter Knight Bus and Flying Anglia. People always get a kick out of them.
NCLUG has really struggled to get an adult flair to it. The meeting was attended by a number of adolescents, some of whom are really good builders. In particular, a boy named Ian had some really clever stuff including a hand cranked pistol which shoots LEGO bullets. It was a riot to watch it work.
We discussed the upcoming State Fair where Joe and I have volunteered to judge the LEGO category. NCLUG will have a small display table at the fair, I need to get cracking if I am going to build something and have it done in time. I have wanted to rebuild my church, this may be the right venue for it.

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ILTCO Web Site re-write

Posted on September 15, 2005 by Mike Walsh

When I first started working on the ILTCO web site I didn’t know much about PHP and MySQL, but had read about them and really wanted to learn more as I believed it would be useful for some projects at work. Like many projects, you really don’t know what you don’t know until you are well into it. Over the past couple of years I have found lots of free PHP resources which would have saved a ton of time had I known about them when I started. Some of these like Gallery, I have been able to fold in, others I have not.

After discovering phpHtmlLib, I realized it how a forms processor which was much more capable than the one I had built on my own. The architecture of phpHtmlLib’s forms processor was such that if I adopted it, I could save a ton of development time and incorporate new features much more quickly. The downside of this meant a re-write of the web site to work within phpHtmlLib’s architecture. This wasn’t something I was ready to undertake at the time but have since decided to do so. Off an on since June I have been working on a re-write. The initial work is now online. I will continue to update the new site, hopefully it will be fully online by the end of the year.

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