Subject:
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BrickFest 2003: Surfing the Bathtub
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto
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Date:
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Mon, 11 Aug 2003 19:56:45 GMT
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Viewed:
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898 times
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Hey folks,
Thursday: We took off from Etobicoke bright and early as John Guerquin came by my house. Note, I had asked John to remind me to take the pipe glue and extra elbows out of the garage. Shortly before we picked up Dave Astolfo in Burlington, John remind me to get the pipe glue and extra elbows from the garage. Sigh. We then grabbed Greg Hyland in Hamilton and proceeded to hurtle down towards the border.
Needless to say our progress was hampered by yogourt parfait, American Toys R Us
and Walmarts. By halfway through the day, I think Greg was sick of me talking
about the new car (look, it's got folding seats!)
Side note: I took the liberty of borrowing a GPS receiver from the office,
which works with Microsoft MapPoint. As reassuring as this was, the GPS will
always tell you where you are, but MapPoint often won't tell you where you need
to go correctly. Hence, the amusing detour across Arlington, and no less than
four trips across the Potomac River. At least the GPS lets you figure out a new
course to correct for mistakes almost immediately. Eventually, I started to
realize Greg was the only one who knew where to go.
We found the hotel, then George Mason University, where we found Christina Hitchcock, BrickFest organizer extraordinaire, working feverishly with her dedicated team to get the show ready and our first car compatriots: We unloaded our car of encoder hardware for the web broadcast.
Side Note: Christina found a tripod for me for the broadcast-none other than a
Manfrotto 028/3063-the same industrial model I use at home. Yay!
There was lots of club/LTC participation all over: John Barnes (LUCNY) was
setting up Technic and Mindstorms, Larry Pieniazek was organizing a complex
train layout from many LTCs and a variety of speakers from all over came to talk
about everything from Building Big to LDraw to LDCC.
Lots of rtlToronto participation this year: Ben Medinets ran the Castle Room,
Jeff Van Winden aided Christina, Greg was doing sketches in the Brick Bazaar,
everyone was helping out moving stuff around and of course, we had hundreds of
miles of plastic pipe in Jeff's car for Pipe Racers.
After dinner, we found ourselves at the hotel with a squishy bath tub. Ie, the
tub actually seemed to be filled with water, underneath the lining. As I was
taking a shower, I couldn't figure out if this was a bug or a feature.
Friday: Friday began with looking for the vaunted Denny's some eight miles away
from the hotel. This quickly detoured to a nearby International House of
Pancakes.
Serious irony note: The IHOP had a "Red White and Blueberry" special where you
could order a rather patriotic set of pancakes with strawberries, whipped cream
and blueberries striped on top. Little did they know that's the French flag,
home of "Freedom Fries" and common sense when it comes to starting wars.
The general consensus Friday morning, after everyone had a chance to try the
shower, was that the bathtub liner was a feature, not a bug.
We floored it to Potomac Mills Mall, where the Lego Outlet (Think Bricks and
Blocks with official Lego logos and better lighting but no perky St Jacobs
cashier) had BrickFest specials for us including 30% off of everything.
Obviously we weren't about to buy anything normal--us Canadians have it too good
for average Lego, but some items were hard to pass up. I got:
RCX1.0 with AC Plug ($49 USD)
RCX Remote ($10.50 USD)
Grey Train Windows ($1 a bag)
Red Roof Peaks (0.25 cents a bag)
I think John got some SW Technic and an RCX, Dave got a Williams Racer etc, but
what we got was positively miniscule in comparison to others. Maybe we have
much better Lego prices in Canada, or maybe we're not half as crazy.
It was getting stupid (people using pallet jacks to take out Lego purchases)
when we drove back to GMU, so I could give a talk on how people can get into
building robots (hire Iain Hendry to build it). The rest of the day was spent
visiting the displays and fretting about setting up the webcast hardware.
Dave and Kai Broderson helped me pull some cable and setup our headend in the
auditorium. Kevin Loch, omnipresent around the show, helped with our network
run and hub. By about 4PM we were ready to roll, all servers up and running and
with a little time for finesse like a BrickFest title card. Unfortunately while
I had multiple capture cards and cameras, Windows Media takes forever to switch
sources due to high compression lag. Not enough to take to reaction shots and
question prompts.
(Our headend was a single DV camcorder feeding analog video into an Osprey100
PCI capture board hosted on a small 1.1Ghz Duron PC and Windows 2000. Audio
came from wireless microphones, feeding the GMU cabinet. I took a submix off of
their mixer for streaming. Our workstation ran Windows Media Encoder, which was
streamed to a pair of Dell PCs in Toronto running NT4 Server and Windows Media
Services and VNC. Users connected to Peach, our Solaris webserver, and launched
their Media Player off of one of the two Media Servers. From VNC consoles, I
could watch the two servers performance and active connections, while also
monitoring our actual distributed stream back down from Toronto, on a second
laptop)
Meanwhile, Greg was up in the Brick Bazaar drawing people's creations, doing custom sketches and selling prints and originals of Lego comics. Around him were folks selling custom minifig weaponry, auctioning off models, trading parts and the like.
As with the previous BrickFest, the first evening meeting was chaotic with
people chanting "Space!" and general commotion until Brad Justus came onstage to
answer questions and reveal a new Star Wars playset. (Somewhat of a
disappointment for me, personally). As always, like at previous BrickFests,
Larry had an excellent play by play news posting.
Watching our server performance monitoring, we probably had at peak about 50
viewers, 20-35 of which stayed to the bitter end. A few even continued to watch
the blank logo title card I put up for half an hour later!
Some crude analysis showed (typing netstat |more) connections from Brazil,
Australia, Canada and Japan. One of those viewers was Tormod Askildsen from
Lego, who was watching from Denmark!
Next time around, I figure we'll use a lower bitrate stream, as many people
(including our QA backhaul check) had stuttering video (and maybe audio). We'll
also set up two microphone points for people to ask questions from, which
conveniently allows us to capture their audio AND force them to stay in one
place for questions. I'll make Christina buy a switcher too.
After the keynote presentation, the always cheery Todd Thuma presented several
Lego animations entered in the festival. One of them was from Paul
Hollingsworth, a Toronto native, who entered in a Avril Lavigne music video of
Star Wars figures. It later won an award the next evening.
We headed on over to Car Pool/Rockland's for dinner/drinks. This was where the
infamous Route 66 journey happened. At least the Rockland's social was nice-got
to meet Simon Bennett from the UK based Brickish Association, TJ Avery from
TEXLUG and Robin Werner from GFLTC.
The guys in Room 223 (ie, Jeff's car) confirmed that the bathtub was in fact,
broken and leaking. Aaaargh! Proceeded to feel like I was surfing on the uneven
water filled liner while taking shower.
Saturday:
On the way to the IHOP yesterday, we saw a Home Depot. Since we'd be running
Pipe Racers 1.0 today, we went back to the IHOP for breakfast (I ventured to
have my drapeau francais pancakes today minus blueberries) and over to buy glue.
Unfortunately Home Depot doesn't carry ABS pipe, so we got some PVC joints to
finish the racetrack and sped back to GMU. (Trivia for Chris: The Home Depot
looked awfully familiar-because it was the one where the Beltway sniper shot
people down at!)
Setup of the Pipe Racers track was easy becauase John Barnes lent us four table
clamps to affix the pipe to tables below. At 1PM, we found ourselves with five
competitors for pipe racing:
Dave Astolfo
John Guerquin
Steve Hassenplug
Gabriel Petrut
Derek Raycraft
Pipe Racing requires a lot of testing and better track design. Build the track
too steep and you let gravity based robots win by crudeness: Their weight slams
down on their opponent. Build too shallow, and you don't give enough challenge
to other robots climbing up.
After two rounds, we found Steve victorious, with John not far behind. Pipe
Racers is a difficult event. Note for Pipe Racers Pro (Project Y) in January:
Improve pipe track construction methods!
At 3PM, I gave a talk about organizing robotics challenges. There was a bit of
an audience as I told them about guys who debate about loopholes and quiet
geniuses who say little but build lots and how to deal with them.
Around 4PM after the talk, ten of us gathered in a small room to attempt the ISD timed build challenge, which after 1 hour, 14 minutes, shaved three minutes off the German ISD time. The event was a lot of fun, despite constant critique from the peanut gallery surrounding the event. Eric Sophie on the other hand, helped by cheering us on.
Jeff figures we can do even better, so I just have to go find us an ISD to build
in record time first: After being labelled the "American team" later in the
evening, I think it's damned time we did a Team Canada attempt here in the land
of federally mandated healthcare, SARS, and helicopters that fall out of the
sky.
Saturday evening's announcements began around 5:30PM, but minus Tormod, who was
delayed en route. Nonetheless, awards were presented, the word "space" was
chanted, and OnDrew Hartigan was incredibly generous-offering to share the ISD
he won after building the model in the challenge.
Videos for the home movie festival were presented right afterwards. I've always
found that people should stay for those videos-ie, make it part of the actual
awards presentations and all-they're so short anyways.
We had dinner at a Ruby Tuesday's, which made me fear for the "minimum 24 pieces
of flair on your uniform" type of waitress. Although she was remarkably slow at
getting us our orders (as everyone in DC is, apparently) she did bring Greg
three glasses of Diet Coke plus a full pitcher. I think at some point we
realized no one could finish all that Coke, even after giving it away, and Greg
ended up trying to drink from all four containers at once.
We had dinner with fellow Canadians including Pierre Normadin from MonLUG and
Jean-Marc Detraz from NovaLUG. It's like meeting Canadians while in Europe. Or
like meeting Jason Krish of NALUG last year from Alberta, it's nice to meet up
with fellow countrymen, especially those who like Lego too!
Sunday:
Megan Sneary had probably the most difficult, but important job-she was out
front at registration, welcoming attendees and the general public and being both
firm (asking people not to touch models) but enthusiastic and encouraging.
Today would be open house for the general public.
We checked out of the Days Inn, with a quiet Canadian-esque comment about the
leaky bathtub.
Sunday started with dropping Greg off at GMU to continue with artwork and
sketches while the lot of us drove out to the outlet for continued Lego
purchases.
By now we were very good with the GPS-turn it on when approaching a difficult
waypoint (ie, changing highways), track our progress through the waypoint, then
turn it back off again. Dave Astolfo ran the GPS, while Greg and John double
checked with paper maps. The cool thing is you don't have to slow down while
navigating with GPS. We could even figure out where the next gas station or
McDonalds was by overlaying datasets onto our maps.
This time around, I actually returned stuff, while buying little else. The
store gave out little scraps with numbers on them, and took a draw for large
damaged sets--if your number was called, you'd get . I got a Movie Maker set
for a friend's son.
We had breakfast by navigating to a McDonalds, which featured a frightening
mannequin dressed like Ray Charles playing the piano with a moon shaped head.
The rest of the restaurant was decorated like a 50's diner, but with extra gamma
adjustment from excessive chrome and checkerboard patterns everywhere. I had a
breakfast burrito, which, despite it's outside appearance, was pretty good.
Upon returning to GMU, we found Greg was doing good business upstairs as people
asked him for drawings of their favourite characters and had amassed cool retro
Pirates and Town sets from other vendors on the second floor.
We left BrickFest around 3:40PM and headed back to Toronto. Amidst fog and
darkness, eating Apple Dippers, Yogourt Parfaits and charging the GPS/laptop in
a McDonalds, we managed to find a pretty efficient route, hitting the border
just after midnight.
All in all, it wasn't a bad trip. If anything, it was good to meet with
friends, hear more about the changing face of Lego enthusiasts, and see what
other people were up to. Things like meeting KK Quah, who runs GFLTC in Florida
and is now organizing a Mindstorms event; or seeing the Moonbase Project, which
was amazing and awe inspiring (I think I'd like to build Space again!).
Thanks to Christina and crew for organizing yet another succesful event!
Calum
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