n u l l g e l

I’m not sure of the history surrounding this particular set (maybe some of my family members can fill me in) but I’ve found myself deeply intrigued by it’s cousin, the marimba, while visiting my parents’ house for the past month or two. This particular device is a called vibraphone. See how easily I can pretend to be an expert? Last week I asked to borrow the vibraphone and have been “playing” almost every day since then. By “playing,” I mean “hitting the metal bars with the sticks.” It’s a heck of a lot of fun. Where playing my bass requires untangling wires, setting up pedals, and adjusting the amp, playing the vibraphone only requires walking up to it and picking up the mallets. Great laziness factor, Batman! I sometimes begin by trying to figure out a theme song from a cartoon (Futurama, Rugrats, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends done so far) and then start experimenting. The trickiest part has got to be the pedal. The sustain with the pedal released is usually too short and when pressed, too long. Ah well. It’s still fun to try and I only have Gong perfection to strive for.

Dang. I know Slashdot is famous for bringing down webservers after having a link to them placed on it’s front page, but I didn’t realize that Digg can have the same effect. I’m sure most internet junkies would tell me, “Duh!”, but I’ve only stumbled onto Digg a couple of times in my web perusal history and didn’t think much of it.

I don’t know how someone picked up on the LEGO Google logo so quickly, but it was posted on Digg and soon the link succeeded in taking down my server for a good 12 hours. The site stats for this month went nuts and I have to wonder what it would have been like if the server had survived for the entire time it was on the front page.

I was looking for something fun to do that would only take a couple of days and would force me to work hard to get my new office cleaned up and organized. I had been doing just a little work on the room every few days, but we’ve been living in our new place for months and it just wasn’t getting done. There was always something else to fix or set up for the house and, of course, looking at all of the boxes and wires strewn about the room, didn’t exactly call out to me. The LEGO Google logo was the chosen project to get my gears in motion. Amanda and I had quite a time putting this one together. Check out the LEGO projects page for the pictures and process. This is something I have just started doing for my LEGO projects and hope to continue.