www.nickhodge.com

In Toy Stor­ies, James Maybuilt a life-size house out of Lego. It was awe­some. On the DVD of the TV series, he skulks around the base­ment stor­age of Lego HQ where there is a box set of every box set Lego has ever made. He pops open 1973 and shows this Lon­don Bus set, which he details as “the most per­fect Lego set”. Someone gave me this set in 1973.

I remem­ber this set well as it acci­dently ended up at the pawn/second hand shop in Lobethal, South Aus­tralia. Being of a tender age, I had care­fully packed my Lego with other items I thought were going on a trip. Nope: they were old items what we no longer needed. My treas­ured Lego bus was gone! Thank­fully, some brave adult retrieved the bus. I remem­ber the incid­ent, and this kit well.

http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/02/i-for-one-welco.html

I have some­thing to do! A remote con­trolled cat-chasing LEGO bot!

Run­down of a week in Seattle, and sadly a week too soon.

Halo 3 ships this week world-wide, and I missed it. How­ever did buy some Halo 3 T-Shirts for the family.

Meet­ing up with my fel­low Enthu­si­ast Evan­gel­ists, prod­ding VP’s and see­ing all sorts of cool things almost made up for the lack of Halo 3. Almost.

Full flight to LAX, and I think I slept most of the way. Two Arrigo-nauts col­lec­ted me at SEATAC and dropped me off at the hotel in one of the new Arrigo-mobiles. Cost: two jars of Vegem­ite. Goes well on bagels, evidently.

Sunday: a quick shop and eat with Paul Foster. I can has iCat! Lego store Bellevue!

Monday morn­ing on-campus. Nic Filling­ham and I jumped on those shuttle buses, build­ing to build­ing and gen­er­ally found ourselves lost on cam­pus. Microsoft is big.

On the Monday after­noon before the internal meet­ing, Nic, Paul and I vis­ited Best Buy, Cir­cuit City and Fry’s (Renton). Retail ther­apy works on men, too. As long as it is a quick visit, quick brows­ing and imme­di­ate pur­chas­ing. All hunt­ing, no gath­er­ing. Fry’s had a col­lec­tion of WiFi anten­nas that will aug­ment the home net­work through 100 year old walls. Halo 3 advert­ising everywhere.

Second only to Halo3 in Seattle are Star­bucks. I lost count of how many I saw dur­ing the week. Star­bucks is so ubi­quit­ous, it is tough to find/get real strength coffee.

This week, it’s OJ on CNN and FOX News early in the week, drift­ing to Jena and Ahmad­ine­jad in lat­ter part of the week. It seems that these chan­nels have hyper-competed them­selves into a corner. At least CNBC and Bloomberg seem to have cool stuff on. Even a Microsoftie in Japan talk­ing Halo 3. I knew I went to the wrong coun­try! Oh, and the His­tory Chan­nel is just like Australia.

Internal meet­ings are usu­ally “not my thing”. I either go postal/have a brain fart (this time I reserved this for a VP) or start thump­ing the table. This 3 day meet­ing, I man­aged to get that out all on the first day. And seem to be keep­ing my job.

I have not watched Iron Chef, but did see a cook-off show in Japan. There is a res­taur­ant in Seattle where it is a battle of the bands. Our team of EE’s lost due to the use of a former pro­fes­sional chef (Miel) on the other team. I must admit, the steak was almost as per­fect as my mashed potatoes.

Thank­fully, the Pop­Fly, Visual Stu­dio Express, Pho­to­synth and Win­dows Home Server guys all had chats with us on Days 2 and 3. The volume of cool look­ing and work­ing things at Microsoft is increasing.

I have note worked out the story as Ben­jamin is being cagey: frogz.fr?

News: Aus­tralia is one of the largest mar­kets for Win­dows Home Server. Time to Pimp My Server, too.

High­light of the week: Microsoft’s Home of the Future.  Flora escor­ted and presen­ted many con­cepts that will appear in future homes. Hav­ing been setup for some time, does the Home of the Future really fore­tell the future? Well, ori­gin­ally the Home con­tained a microwave oven that could scan bar­codes. That product now exists on the mar­ket in the US$170. My feel­ing is that tech­no­logy will slide into the home’s we live in today. Less Jet­sons and more Smiths/Jones.

The next 6 months is going to be a little of a con­sol­id­a­tion of my first 6 months of work. More hints/tips/howto and a fewer inter­view style videos.

Inter­est­ingly, I could get my phone data-synching in LAX ok via T-Mobile but AT&T in Seattle sucked. The con­nec­tion kept tim­ing out, so I was releg­ated to SMS/TXT. How 1997. Due to roam­ing costs, Win­dows Mobile 6.0 smartly does not auto­mat­ic­ally synch and prompts you prior to con­nect­ing. The last thing I need is an angry cost centre owner ask­ing why my bill is thousands.

Cashed in all my QFF points and upgraded myself home. Prob­ably not the best use of points, but I needed the sleep.

Next trip to the US: MIX08 in Las Vegas.

Other stuff I missed out on:

Microsoft Wire­less Enter­tain­ment Key­board 8000 ships this week in the US. iPod Touch not in stock at the Apple Store, Bel­levue. Yes, I believe I am going to buy one as the WiFi and form-factor for brows­ing is intruiging.

Rock on Halo3. I’m sorry I missed you!

… oh, and I missed my cats, cars, TV and fam­ily too.

And now to lose these 2kgs I’ve seem to put on. Even eat­ing 50% of nor­mal volume.

I’ve had a long, long love with Lego. As a Geek, this love is not unique.

Thank­fully, most of my Lego sur­vived my child­hood and I passed the thou­sands of well-worn, well-loved bricks to Liam. Each brick had a second life with Liam as he build planes, trains and more planes.

In a rush of blood to my head, I pur­chased a Lego Mind­storms NXT from Australia’s Brick­Net. And added a 1360-piece 1:10 Fer­rari Enzo to the order for Avril. She’s always loved Ferraris.

Within two nights, the Fer­rari is complete:

I’ve learnt some­thing today: thanks to the new Geek­Dad blog. The ori­gin of the phrase “Mindstorms”

Leg­o­mind­storm­sauto­fab­rik

I won­der how far we are away from a von Neu­mann Uni­ver­sal Con­structor?

This is prob­ably indi­cit­ive of my Christ­mas plans, but I have always been a major fan of Lego. Today I found a list of build­ing block toys on the web.

My post­ings of late have noth­ing to do with Adobe at all. Sorry.