Serious Lego

A little while ago, when I was doing some Lego Mindstorming as part of a mentoring project here at Sun, I went to this site for inspiration. There are some truly amazing creations here. My particular favorite is the Rubix Cube solver

I was lucky enough to be working for ICL Dataskil in Reading, England in September 1979 in the same group as Colin Cairns and Dave Griffiths at the time they generated one of the first solutions to the cube, published as "Teach Yourself cube-bashing". I still have the three photo-copied pages showing the three types of moves you needed to memorise (the Jelly Roll Morton was my favorite). I used to be able to solve the cube in 10-15 minutes. No records broken here, but it felt good!

Finding that the cube can now be solved using Lego and a couple of Mindstorm RCX bricks is very deflating to the ego.

[Technorati Tag: Lego]

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( Jul 09 2004, 05:51:51 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

Capitola Visit

The plan for today was to go to Capitola, a seaside resort near Santa Cruz in Northern California, and to do some fossil collecting. Daddy was looking forward to it, but our son Duncan was lethargic about the whole thing. I'd done a bit of research. I'd looked at the pictures ( [1] [2] [3] [4]), so I'd have a rough idea where exactly to go, what to look out for and be able to recognize a fossil if I tripped over it. It was the first time I've ever taken a hammer and chisle to the beach. Or a 3 inch paintbrush for that matter, but I was ready!

I'd never been to Capitola. My wife thinks she might have been here maybe 25-30 years ago, but hardly remembers it. I googled about to try to find out more about it and came across these great shots of Capitola when El Nino was hitting them in 1998. Here's a photo of the brightly colored "beach houses" right on the sea-front. Here's some awesome panaramas.

I looked up when it was low tide today for the Santa Cruz, Monterey Bay area and we arrived just before. Obviously not low enough to get across to where the fossils were though without getting our feet wet and having doubts whether we'd get back at all.

I suggested we just have some breakfast at the restaurant at the end of the pier, then play on the beach and then look around the city centre. The restaurant comes complete with pigeons that have absolutely no fear of humans and happily peck away under your tables as you eat, picking up any crumbs you drop. The beach had lots of interesting rocks, seaweed, shells and such stuff. Enough to fill the Ziplock bag I'd bought for the fossil collection.

In short, I was a tad disappointed that we didn't go fossil hunting but our son had a great time. We can always tell when we've achieved success as he'll crash within 5-10 minutes of getting in the car. By the time we were on highway 17, and heading home he was snoring away in the back seat.

I will continue to dream of finding fossils...

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( Jul 09 2004, 03:20:30 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink