Dave’s Blog

This is another post about LEGO, except this time it’s slightly different. You all must be thinking I’ve a slight obsession with LEGO but nope, that’s not the case, I was just going through my old bookmarks and found one I had saved a good while ago. This was Eric Harshbarger’s site containing his portfolio of the LEGO sculptures and mosaics he has done. There are some amazing ones on there, it’s certainly a talent I doubt many have!

Here’s two of my favourites from his portfolio:

Crayola Crayon Box

Bart Simpson and Milhouse Van Houten

Some of you may know I am a big fan of ‘The Apprentice’, it’s always good seeing what some of the self-proclaimed ‘business(wo)men’ do when put through the tasks - sometimes they do well, sometimes they do awful. The boardroom at the end is generally the best bit, hearing them try to justify what they’ve done and see Sir Alan Sugar’s reaction to it all. I discovered a series created by Boleg Bros which covers all the final boardroom sequences, except in LEGO. They’ve managed to recreate everybody so well, I couldn’t imagine it being easy turning them into LEGO characters.

Here are the final two videos:

Week 11 - Lucinda is fired

Week 12 - Lee is hired

They’ve even created a LEGO Apprentice Boardroom Invaders game.

We submitted our entry to round 2 of the Game Development section of the Microsoft Imagine Cup at the start of last month and hoped to do well in the competition. The top 6 teams were announced at the end of last month, unfortunately we never made it into the top 6 to reach the world finals, however I have just found out we did reach the top 20! I’m so happy with this because this is top 20 in the whole world, out of 573 initial entries to round 1 and 105 entries in round 2!

We developed an XNA game to suit the theme ‘Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment’. Our game was called Future Shock and was about a scientest called Denver who invented a time machine after seeing how the world turned out in the future. He wanted to go back in time and prevent the world from ending up how it did.

The top 6 were as follows:

• Team BAAM! Studios - Germany
• Team Drunk Puppy - Belgium
• Team ECOThink - France
• Team Gomz - Korea
• Team Mother Gaia Studio - Brazil
• Team SiSS - Germany

Then the top 20 were as follows:

• Chestnut studios - Bash
• Crystalis - GD_Crystalis-GameEngine
• Elemental - GD_Elemental - IceDome
• Free Radicals - FreeRadicals
• Geeks With Lives - Recycleator
• H2O2 - War-In-Corner - ball
• Mong - VoyagerGameClient_2_0
• Nightin Games - Isles
• Nithro - GarbageTetris
• PiVa - NanoSquad
• Pringle Monkey - Future Shock
• R.A.N.D.O.M - WindowsGame1
• Round Pixel - Tree
• SIT down Games - Splash!
• TeamAwesome - Nebulus
• TeamCTW - C leanTheWorld

Congrats to the top 6, good luck at the finals, and congrats to the rest of the top 20 (especially Team R.A.N.D.O.M - the other team from my university and the team I worked with in the software development section).

Of course I’d also like to say well done to the rest of my team: Niamh Scullion, Richard Paul and James Dempsey, and thanks to our mentor, James Burke, for all your help.

GO TEAM PRINGLE MONKEY!

Here is what kept us going in those development meetings:

And we are:

A friend gave me a link to an article about a man trying to get on a plane at Heathrow’s T5 but was stopped while going through security. What was the reason you may ask? He was wearing a Transformers t-shirt! The t-shirt had a picture of Optimus Prime on it with a gun. Whenever he seen the security chief he was told to remove it or he would be ARRESTED!

You can read the article and see a picture of the t-shirt here.

I would love to see the court case for this one if the guy got arrested:

Judge - “Why did this man pose as a threat to the security of those on the aircraft?”
Prosecutor - “He was wearing a t-shirt with a fictional cartoon character on it holding a gun, Your Honor.”

I could just see everybody starting to laugh in the court room!

Fair enough security needs to be heightened these days, but surely this is taking it a bit too far. As the man said, what was he going to do, use the shirt to pretend he had a gun? How did this really pose as a security threat? I can think of plenty of things security could be doing instead of wasting their time on something stupid like this!

I have just added a new Applications section to the site, this is where I plan to add any applications I develop (you can see where the name for the page came from!).

The first application I have uploaded is EncryptIt. EncryptIt is a Java applet I first started as an assignment for university and decided to fully implement to put online. It can be used to encrypt and decrypt private messages you would like to send to others.

Please send me any comments you may have on it.

You can find EncryptIt here.