Bryan Zug did an awesome job as usual making videos out of all the ignite talks. For those of you “dying” to hear my Lego talk, it’s now posted for your enjoyment.

I went to my first Brickfest, and even displayed my first MOC. I won’t get into it much as it’s not quite done and ready for photography. Hopefully soon. That said, I did have fun with an old friend Ben, as well as some new friends Jeff, Chris, Daniel, and David. I had a super fun time even though somehow I didn’t manage to capture pictures of them all. I suppose I was too busy shooting food and Lego all weekend. Some shots of the drunk build as well. Everyone was drunk on Lego excitement.

S decided to use up every white (and not so white) brick that we had at the time by building a hangar for a spaceship. Some details from S: The gun was a late addition to the ship. The hangar features an airlock/forcefield to keep the air in the hangar. The back left corner features a shop. It sells tools for spaceship repair. In the back right corner is a weapons shop. The guy in the red suit is a knight.

Oh, I have no idea what “Salstonia” is.

S had a bunch of white parts and started going to town on a spaceship. He built this a few weeks ago so I forget all the features, but trust me there were plenty.

S saw that I had gotten a bucket full of black 4×4 roll cages at Brickcon. Much to my surprise, instead of seeing in them a car or a spaceship, he saw an Ostrich. A robotic one at that (not that it does more than sit there currently.) The kid has an eye.

B built a race. I love the stands and the letters spelling out Lego (she’s been reading and spelling up a storm lately). My favorite innovation is her using two clear panels to show one of her runners jumping mid-air. I realize this isn’t exactly new, but I know she’d never seen anyone do it, and after all, she’s only five!

Two years ago I left my job to found a startup with two friends. We make stuff for the web. Last year, when we marked one year of startupping, we got some cool commemorative fountain pens. This year, Recently we celebrated our second anniversary and I had to come up with a new gift. Lego of course. I spent a few sessions in Lego Digital Designer and put together a vignette starring the three of us doing what we do at work on a replica of the user interface for the first website we built. It’s a little abstract, but the pictures should help.

The first website we built is a virtual flower site. On the home page the flowers scroll by. My partner Walter who writes all our code is pulling the flowers to animate them across the screen. My partner Jenny who designs all our software is climbing the ladder to arrange the flowers in the display. And since I do all the business stuff, I am sitting at my desk using my laptop (surfing the web while Jenny and Walter do actual work).

As part of the gift we did a group build. I had hoped we could see who would guess what the finished model would look like first. Jenny guessed in 10 seconds so that didn’t quite work out. Also, the printed instructions from LDD are horrible. I tried making my own printed instructions from screenshots but they were only marginally better.

Couple of other notes. That’s a “2″ in front (not a Z thank you very much) to commemorate our second anniversary. And the only part seen here that’s not in the LDD standard complement is Jenny’s black hair. All they had was brown. (And the string Walter’s using to pull the flowers.)