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LEGO minifigs, Mike and Wilfo discuss their recent gig at zenbananas.com.

Ah yes... 'a zenbanana a day drives the doctor away'.

It's a site created by 'TOPBanana', a comsci professor of mine in college born out of... wait let him talk about that part. I don't want to get ahead of him

I'm contributing on the 'art' part.

Previous college students of mine, who are still reading this blog... TOPBanana is the person partially responsible for influencing me to do those crazy stuff I inflicted on you during those days... : )

The class singing sessions (late student sings (yes this is a comsci class)), index card at the back info questions, how homework essay projects are scored, open book exams and a lot more of that approach... came from him.

A lot of good things can be scribbled but let's leave those for another post.

Going back to zenbananas.com... go check The Secrets of The Universe post. That is where Mike and Wilfo came in.

And here's the link for a hi-res version of the image above.

I'm not sure if I should be scared by this or this. (via GeekPress)

... and here's Part II.

When I first heard about the LHC (partly this was the reason for the lack of updates in this site for the past few months (my pet tiger and I were building an anti-singularity/anti-spaghettification floating bunker that could withstand a black hole (Yes it is possible (but no we won't be giving out the secret for now (but here's a hint)))).

Let me do that again, too many open and close parentheses already...

When I first heard about the Large Hadron Collider (wikipedia link / msnbc.techscience link / boston big picture (BIG pictures indeed (here we go again with these parentheses)) my first reaction was joy.

Joy.

Yes. Joy.

Joy... not because of the promised crispier Tv screens nor faster internet connection or other potential payoffs in the fields of telecommunications, medicine and energy.

(Though I must admit I'm not rooting for these scientists with their Grid to find 'The God Particle'. Science would be more interesting if after a year or two they'll still be singing U2's song.)

It was joy because of the promise of a possible discovery of alternate dimensions.

Of parallel universes.

For developers like you and me working on several simultaneous projects at once for different clients it is a vision of hope.

Imagine if I can just divide N tasks even to let's say distribute them into N/4 parallel universes, I can divide a month's work into just one Earth week's work of time.

Considering that merging them back together would not cost that much.

But even then if it takes one more week to merge them all together that would still result in two extra weeks.

Two extra weeks of doing the things that I really like. Code-related and non-code related. That includes a time for playing LEGO.

Pretty exciting.

It was the way to go.

These parallel universes.

The hope.

The only hope were all other hope and its derivatives will be measured.

Exciting.

Very exciting.

...

Until that morning just days ago when I met Master Foodahaha(xx).

Don't bother asking me about his name and the extra xx's. (He insisted his name transcends structure.)

But he pointed me out to something more enlightening.

More enlightening than the LHC and their Grid and the Higgs and multi-dimensions.

Something that Master Geoffrey James partially touched on and translated a decade ago but has been existing for centuries in various 'forms'.

That is... The TAO of Programming.

In the beginning was the Tao. The Tao gave birth to Space and Time. Therefore Space and Time are Yin and Yang of programming.

Programmers that do not comprehend the Tao are always running out of time and space for their programs. Programmers that comprehend the Tao always have enough time and space to accomplish their goals.

How could it be otherwise?

- Geoffrey James / The TAO of Programming

Ah... enlightenment.

Partly... the entities above are responsible for hatching this.

HOLY WEEK 2008. Here's a link... The Brick Testament.

YAY! We've made some developments.

Instead of one 'minifig' (that's what you humans call us eh..?) per letter, we're now assigning a set of words per minifig. One minifig can memorize the assigned sequence (we do have good 'memories') and jump from one key to the other faster.

And faster it was.

We hit some problems though.

Like this one with the SHIFT key.

Bob: "Hold the key! This one's a capital letter."
Peter: "Too heavy for me. I can't hold it down that long."
John: "I'll help. I'll help."

The major setback though was when Willard, in charge of the BACKSPACE key, slipped.

Rod: "Double Js some backspace please."
Willard: "MY Backspace!"
Willard: "UGH."
Bob: "Move your arse, Willard. Release the BACKSPACE."
Willard: "My back... my back. He... eelp."

It's the BACKSPACE... so we have to do things all over again.

Willard will be fine. No worries.

HELLO AGAIN.

You have no idea how long it took us to post the previous entry.
But we're getting used to it...
And we're getting a lot faster too.

Yes we're taking over this... this whatever this is.
You see Mr. WildFire moved some of his stuff from his bigger 'puterbox to a smaller movable 'puter and decided to estivate on a cave somewhere to work on 'TheFramework'.

He left this black 'puterbox open to grab some stuff stuff I think. We're still figuring out those things.

We do hope it's pron-related.

To give you how we operate things... here are some pics.

That's me directing the letters for the writing and jumping process.

The Transfer Team.

It took an hour for this team to figure things out. But one blacktron was good with hieroglyphics.

If we can find a mirror we'll show you how we're taking these shots. There's only one camera in here.

We'll find a way to elevate this cam too, to get better angles. For now we can only provide near to the floor shots.

Later.

Oh by the way... my name's Bob.

Hello world.
TEST.

Happy 50th birthday... LEGO!

Deranged knights of the Western Kingdom. They think they have a chance against these clone troopers..?

Brave... loyal... but stupid.

Oh wait.

I stand corrected.

Flickr.com \ search: 'LEGO'

Sort: Most Interesting.

Found some very cool mecha/machine/futuristic-related creations from CHUCKC and Soren.

Also... discovered what Darth and yoda are up to these days.

Just in case you're interested... : ]

Ha-hah!

I wasn't able to resist the force... the mask of light... the Rahkshi... whatever.

In case you're wondering what that nasty-object-that-seem-to-have-spawned-out-of-Giger's-imagination is, it's a Lego Bionicle The Mask of Light: Vorahk 'toy'.

If I'm not mistaken, this model was released May of last year. I did find some species of this kind a year ago but I was still in that can't-justify-the-purchase mode. By the time I was convinced I should buy one... the shop where I found it closed already.

Last Saturday, while looking for a trick or treat basket for Angel's Halloween party, I was lucky to find some of these acquiring dust in one of the Gift Gate stores here in SM.

I've been doing some things with this since then which qs has promised me not to blog about.

I used to play LEGO when I was a boy. It has always been a great source of inspiration and fun. Now I'm hoping that something like this on my desktop could help pump up the coding and creativity neurons. (Of course that's a good excuse... I just want to play with it in between coding)

My two little kids seemed to have developed an affinity for this too. Little Angel even watches the .mov clips (in a mini-CD) that comes with the canister... and I have to practice a little negotiating skills everytime they hostage this Vorahk.

Anyway, here's a good Rahkshi Vorahk Review at BZPower Community.

Some parts of us just refuse to grow old... and if you'd ask me, I think it's good.

It feels good.