craigmoliver

In a city of 5+ million people it can be surprisingly hard to meet new friends. Fortunately we live in the future and there are helpful social tools on the web . Meetup.com has been useful to me in the past for professional networking. Perhaps it could help me meet some new folks that are into the same things as me. With that in mind I started a new group, Atlanta Adult Fans of LEGO.

I was surprised to get 10 people to join in the first weeks and a half. This prompted me to schedule a meetup at Mellow Mushroom in Sandy Springs. Two people joined me and we had a good time talking about LEGO, life, and other subjects while drinking beer and playing trivia. We had a good time and look forward to growing the group. We’ll see how it goes; so far so good.

While poking around on RailBricks I came across a treasure trove of LDraw files for LEGO roads. LDraw is an open format for LEGO Computer Aided Design (CAD) software useful for designing and rendering models. This work is a superb example of on the Studs Not On Top (SNOT) building technique. It includes files all kinds of roads; straight, curved, rail crossings, turn lanes, cul-de-sacs, etc; in addition to intersections with traffic lights and roundabouts. These files allow you to literally inspect the designs brick-by-brick providing an insight into the engineering and design. Building them is made easier because parts lists can be exported and bricks gathered or procured.

I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into these models. If you use them make sure you credit GallagharsArt.com where you can find the LDraw files and download them yourself. Links to the LDraw files can be found in the forum links listed below.

• http://gallaghersart.com/forums/viewthread/12/
• http://gallaghersart.com/forums/viewthread/9/
• http://gallaghersart.com/forums/viewthread/11/

Enjoy!

Lately I rediscovered my love of LEGO and turned it into my hobby. Everyone needs a hobby and, while somewhat expensive, LEGO is as good as any. It seems to stimulate the same part of my brain as coding. My first project was a new Christmas train to ring the Christmas tree in the living room. This new train was to replace my 2 year old Lionel 30068 North Pole Central train which was destine for Ebay. Suzanne and I discussed it and, while more expensive, determined a LEGO Train would be cooler and could evolve over the years. It would also dove-tail with my new LEGO hobby.

The funds for the train came from the sale Lionel 30068 train and the sales of an unopened Transformer from 1984 (that’s another story). The first purchase was a set LEGO started producing in 2009; Emerald Night. This was a great start for the project because of LEGO’s amazing job designing this beautiful train. It’s loosely based on British Flying Scotsman and makes for an innovative example of what is possible with LEGO bricks. The train uses Technic gears as a transmission powered by a LEGO Power Functions motor. The coal tender serves a similar purpose as it’s real life inspiration by housing a lithium-polymer battery powering the motor.

Intrigued by the Emerald Night and I wanted to expand the set. Unfortunately LEGO does not offer any expansion sets, so I knew I was on my own and was going to have to build it myself. I was disappointed after sniffing around on eBay and Google so I decided to asked the experts on the unofficial LEGO StackExchange. They pointed me in the direction of BrickLink, which I had found before, but as a web developer I was turned off by the >10 year old web design. Deciding instead not to judge a book by it’s cover I dove in. BrickLink is cool because it allows you to build a “wanted list” of individual LEGO bricks, specify the quantity, choose the condition, and specify the color. Using the “wanted list” you can find sellers that have some, if not all, of the bricks you need. I made a few “wanted lists” for each of the parts of the train I wanted to build. I ended up buying 1530 bricks from 16 sellers located in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. These bricks combined with parts from the LEGO City Cargo Train #7939 allowed me to assemble my 9 car long (including engines) LEGO Super Emerald Night Christmas Express.

The Assembly Line

The train is lead by the aforementioned Emerald Night engine and tender. This is followed by Christmas cars carrying Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, some toys, and Christmas trees. The next three cars are passenger carriages with Christmas lights decorating and wreaths decorating the exteriors. The next-to-last car is a power car providing supplemental rear power and is dressed up to look like a baggage and crew car. The final car is of course the iconic caboose, based on custom instructions sold by juliochavez1 on Ebay, fitted with rear tail lights. I embedded the Flickr set below, if you don’t have Flash, check it out on Flickr.

Though LEGOs are cool as heck the unfortunately reality is that they are a mess. This issue has become acute the past few weeks while balancing the frustration of mess and disorganization while trying to build stuff. More time can be spent digging through LEGOs as actually building cool stuff with them. Fortunately I found a post on the web that’s helping me, and my patient wife, cope with this issue.

my LEGO mess

An evil mad scientist with a blog goes through pros and cons of several LEGO taxonomic methods designed to mitigate frustration. My personal favorite is 1×1 storage block (below). Hopefully it will help you organize your messy hobby.

LEGO 1x1 storage, capped

I like to keep my user profile file separate from my system drive in case my hard drive crashes or I need to reinstall Windows. This used to be a tedious and difficult process until now. I found a good step-by-step tutorial that explains how to do it. You need to have some advanced knowledge of Windows 7 and it should be no problem for the average Power User, unless you are afraid of the Registry.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/87555-user-profile-change-default-location.html

A couple months ago I was stressed out and needed a hobby. It occurred to me that downstairs, in my garage, was a gigantic tub of Legos. It was a big tub and one night, while my friend Pete was over playing video games, we went downstairs and dragged the tub upstairs. This box was filled over a decade ago as I was moving my stuff out of my parents house. We popped and open and inside were thousands of Legos. I had managed to hold on to my Lego collection that I had accrued as a kid from 4 to ~12 (when Legos became lame). Also inside was a New-in-Box Generation 1 Transformer, but that’s another story.

My kick-ass wife, who volunteered, helped me sort the jumble of Legos into some sense of order. We managed to consume a weekend laboring, sorting the bricks. It actually turned out to be good quality time. There were many themes; the castle, pirate, and boats where eclipsed by the space and town themes. Then occurred to me, it was time to rebuild.

Unfortunately I didn’t save the directions, but thanks to the magical Internet, I found a site, Worldbricks.com, that saved the day. They have Lego instructions going back to at least 1955. Based on my memory and what I think I saw in the piles I identified at least 45 different sets.

Then I got on Ebay and start poking around. The memories from hours of staring at catalogs came flooding back so I picked up several more sets to round out my collection. Ebay is also an excellent place to pick up spare parts.

I didn’t have all the parts, but I had many, and pictures of the ones I rebuilt are below. Notice the big Space Shuttle model. I couldn’t help it so Suzanne and I went to the Lego Store in Lawrenceville and I got a big-boy set with a mere 1204 pieces, definitely my favorite.

There are many tasks developers do over and over again in many projects. One of these for me has been creating a list of countries for a database table. Using the ISO 3166 English country names and code elements I've created a T-SQL script for public consumption. Just change the use statement to your database name and find and replace the table name to your spec. Hopefully this saves you some time.

countries-tsql

CDC has gone viral (no pun intended). Rear Admiral Ali Khan posted on the Public Health Matters blog about a Zombie Apocalypse and how it relates emergency preparedness. As of this posting the site was down presumably because the post has received coverage from hundreds of news outlets such as Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, CNN, and many others. Even the Wikipedia article for "Zombie Apocalypse" was updated citing the reference and it is a trending topic on Twitter.

In my opinion this is an excellent example of the federal government leveraging relevant memes and social media to effectively communicate to the American people. Lets face it, if you are prepared for a Zombie Apocalypse you should be good for anything else.

Read the post >

** UPDATE – 5/19/2011 @ 6:24 PM EST **

Looks like the zombie apocalypse wave has hit Google:

I've been neglecting this blog for the past couple months and its been stressing me out. To alleviate that stress I'm going to be self indulgent and talk about what's going on in my world.

The biggest thing has been assisting my wife startup her party planning business. The current task is locking down the branding and meeting with the designer tasked with designing the website. Earlier this month she threw an awesome sweet 16 party for my niece as a test run. Everyone loved it so we are optimistic.

As if that wasn't enough I've got a few ongoing web development projects that are keeping me busy in the evening and on the weekends. Those projects plus my day job at CDC equal a lot of C# and ASP.NET. This coding will inevitably spawn some new blog posts related to coding so look out for those if that's your bag.

On the fitness front I've been running again since time sprung forward. In the early evenings I like to run along the Chattahoochee River near my home. It's a relatively flat course so I'm going to need to find some routes with hills to get in shape for the Peachtree Road Race in July. Hopefully by then the training plus my reduced beer intake will enable me to loose the 25 lbs I've needing to loose for some time.

Now I'm even more stressed. Writing all this stuff down makes me realize all the crap I have going on. Did I mention I've got my sister's furniture for sale? I need a beer…wait…forget that.

As a web developer, I don’t get very close to the content. In fact, over the years, I’ve become blind to it when coding clients’ websites. It might as well be “lorum ipsum” gibberish like that found on Microsoft Word templates. Granted without this content there would be no websites for me to work on. Well…at least there shouldn't be. There are many sites out there that put the technical effort into the coding and treat the content as an afterthought. Content should in fact come first, before coding. This requires developing a proper content strategy and a plan to implement it.

In Clout, the author Colleen Jones concisely outlines the methods and techniques that will aid the development of a successful Content Strategy. There are numerous real-world examples that support the core principles of context, rhetoric and psychology. She advises content creators to turn off their fire hose of information, suggesting effective, proven tools to reach people. These techniques are proven to filter out the static.

This book is a top resource regarding the implementation of content strategy. Clients who are inexperienced or non-technical usually don’t understand why developers can’t make the gibberish better. Content just isn’t our forte. Clout is a well-researched and authoritative source for developers who want to help their clients make content work.

You can find out more about Colleen Jones at her blog, Winning Content. She also is runs a boutique consultancy, Content Science, that practices what she preaches for clients such as InterContinental Hotels Group, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Footsmart, among others.