Blog of Josh Hall

Crazy.  These are just wood shavings beautifully arranged.   These have to take so much vision and time to produce.

http://www.designswan.com/archives/incredible-wooden-chip-artwork-by-sergey-bobkov.html

I’m a part of Steel City LUG, and we’re displaying at LEGO KidsFest this weekend, so I wanted to put together something special for it.  I was imbued by the Batman/Joker of Arthur Gugick, who was inspired by Christopher Doyle’s Dorian Bley.  I originally had a different idea, but it was my wife that came up with the more kid appropriate Harry Potter – Voldemort pairing.  Might still do that other idea eventually…

I used the same planning method as I did with the Pittsburgh Pirates mosaic, where I exported the output from special software to Excel to print of special paint-by-number like instructions for each of the 4 32×32 stud plates.  Every other column corresponds to either Harry or Voldemort, so we placed 4,096 1×1 cheese slopes back to back.  Once all the pieces were placed, it takes a lot of time to critique and manipulate the image to its optimal presentation.

The biggest challenge for this one was scale.  If you look back at Arthur’s, they’re much larger.  With mosaics, the larger they are, or the more pieces you can fit in, the higher the overall resolution, which means the easier it is to get a better looking image.  Of course, the larger it is, the more money you have to spend on pieces.  I decided on this scale because it wasn’t cost prohibitive, but I also felt confident that we’d be able to tweak the images enough to pull off a great display.

It took about 30 labor hours to put this all together over the past month or so.  Jordan Otto, Matt Redfield, Ryan Duchene, and my Wife, Kallie, all were part of the design, time, and tweaking.

Here’s a video of the transition:

This was an award for MAN Growth at a gathering of friends to give each other man awards.  The event focused on all of our unique talents; mine being LEGO creations.

At first, I wanted to do a bonsai tree, but after seeing that a bunch have been done already, I lost some steam.  I also wanted to give the creation away, so 1) I didn’t want to spend $50 in parts and 2) I wanted to make it simple enough that the receiver would enjoy it.

I had recently put together a similar creation of the Fazed.net logo as a thank you gift for helping me win the online LEGO competition.  It got a lot of praise from the members, and some even asked for instructions on how to build their own.  So, I put some together here.

Since I put the instructions out there for that logo, I took the time to create instructions for this man coaster too.  It’s about 175 pieces and you should be able to get all the parts for about $8 or less.  I put this together in a couple of hours and I’m a fan of its weight and size (about 4″ x 4″).  The word “MAN” is written on both sides, so it works well as a display piece/paper weight, or it’s intended purpose as a beer coaster.

My mom didn’t know her biological dad right away. I think it was her teen years, but you’d have to ask her for the details. Anyway, when we were kids, we’d go visit Grandfather Warnick. That’s what we called him. We’d just go over for a few hours on a Saturday and sit around and talk.

In his living room, he had a coffee table with some trays of candy in it. I’m not sure if it was him or his wife Edie that put the candy there. It was always candy corn and circus peanuts. I ate so much of them. to this day, I can barely stomach the smell, or even the thought of eating candy corn or circus peanuts. I can remember the neurotic state that bordered on masochism after eating a few circus peanuts. I felt sick, but I needed to eat more. I NEEDED more. I would sneak more.

Grandfather Warnick passed from cancer in 1992.  He had the same birthday as J’aime, Robbie, Uncle Tom, and I think we knew like half a dozen other people all born on Jul 8th.  complete tangent here, but I did an ice breaker in a class of 30 people once, and the instructor said that statistically at least 2 people will have the same birthday in the room.  We all balked.  Certainly not, we said.  5 people in, we found 2 people with the same birthday.  CRAZY.

Anyway, Grandfather Warnick had a full head of black hair when he passed.  He always had a pretty congenial attitude, but I never remember as very funny, he was just always nice and smiley.  I remember when he was put in the hospital before he passed, they wouldn’t let him work on his model boats because he needed a certain model glue that gave off dangerous fumes.  He was mad about that.  I got 2 of his boats, but I’m embarrassed to admit they both broke eventually.  I’d love to know if Edie’s family still have some.  I do still have a wooden pencil holder with an eagle he carved out of the front though.  It’s not super impressive, but still sentimental.

User education is not an acceptable replacement for quality or good process.

Stop trying to pass it off as if it is.  We’ve all been there, I’m sure.  Someone is trying to sell you something, or give you something they don’t want, but you have to do something special in order to get the thing to work properly.  I see this a lot in my work place, where users can “break” something and the root cause is user error.  There’s certainly a line to draw between writing software that tries to prevent users from themselves, but when things need to be done in a certain way, and the software allows that certain way to be circumvented, that’s a problem with the software.

Some of the stuff I see is just ludicrous.  We bring in 3rd party applications that don’t do what we want, but we pay out the wazoo for them.  We reason that we just need to have a lot of user training to make sure they know how to use the system and know all the quirks.  That’s bad design my friends, and like Hall’s Rule of Social Order #189 says, change will only come when you demand it.

And I’m fine with that.

Honestly, I do feel a huge sense of ‘next chapter’ in my life.  I’m not sure that it was very gradual either.  I’m feeling like I’ve drawn a line in my mind; “Here are the thoughts, actions, desires, and goals of what used to be, and on this side is what I am and what I want to become.”

You can see it in my 30 x 30 list too.  Reading the original post, I knew that I wasn’t going to hit them all, but I didn’t think I’d be that far off.  I’m alright with that.  It’s that sense of satisfaction of just not having the same motivation and goals as before.  Of course, some I just realized through the process at how lofty they were.  For instance, 1 of them was to spend time with all my nieces and nephews – that should be an entry for each of them!  Heck, just updating the list to include all the new additions became a goal I missed!

Some, I overachieved on, like taking another job back in September.  if you’re a stickler for numbers, I’d give myself 19 points out of 30.

The fact is, and just how the original post indicated, these are life long goals.  Yeah, I’d actually still like to be able to dunk.  I’d still like to run races.  I’d still like to spend time with my mother and nieces and nephews.  The great news is, I still have time to do them.

So here I am.  Ready to face another phase of life, lists, and goals.  Would I change anything I’ve done in the past?  Nope.  Will I be the same person 30 years from now?  Probably not.  I can tell you that I’ll enjoy coloring outside of the lines for the rest of my life though.