Here's an update on the "Ask a Designer" project...
Of the several thousand questions, I spent many hours finding and removing duplicates. Then I divided them into categories, like "Designer," "Sets," "Colors and Elements," and so on. All told, the boiled-down questions numbered more than 250.
I presented them to the designers, and I could feel the vibration as several jaws hit the floor. I don't think they quite anticipated that many questions.
So we're going to break it down even furt
Last night, one of the largest and most popular LEGO enthusiast websites, BrickShelf, was shut down. By now you've probably heard about the fallout, and seen what it's done to other sites, including BZPower - all the broken image links in avatars, sigs, and especially in the creative forums.
(Having just re-read my previous blog entry, I find this topic eerily appropos.)
First, let me say I can understand Kevin Loch's position. It's difficult to build a major web community (like BZPower or
At long last, BIONICLE.com has been updated.
I'm currently on Christmas vacation, and 5,000 miles away from the action, so I haven't been involved in pushing it live. After some fits and starts, though, it looks like it's getting done. There are the occasional server errors and a few things to clean up, but overall it's looking good.
The process to update the site wasn't as bad as I'd feared; the biggest challenge was making sure the game would be ready. Battle For Power is a game that wil
Just a quick update. I'm working on getting the summer web update ready. I do plan on having BIONICLEstory updated with the latest story info at that time - I've been reaaaaaaal bad about updating that. But it'll happen.
Don't expect a major change in the web site. It'll be more evolutionary than revolutionary. There will be a fairly significant new section for the upcoming movie, and that should have some really fun content on it. Other than that, you'll see the usual downloads, story, etc.
It's been a week since BrickFest ended, and I think I'm finally caught up on sleep. Now my two big priorities are BZP and LEGOFan.
But first, a digression. A few weeks ago, I got the Windows Vista upgrade that I was promised when I bought my new computer last November, so I installed it. Bad move. Half my apps (including the newly-purchased Halo, as well as iTunes) stopped working. Grrrr. So I decided to use the 3 DVD backup they'd forced me to make in order to get my system back to normal. I
Planning for the second half of 2008 is going well, and I’ve got most of the stuff ready. In case you’re interested, here’s a day in the life of a BIONICLE webmaster…
The design has been created, four rounds of reviews later we have a winner. It’s a lot brighter than anything you’ve seen from BIONICLE.com in a long time. The game is coming along just fine, as far as I know. I’ve only seen screenshots, but I have every confidence it’ll rock. It’s being done by the same company that did the Mahr
Just had another fun lunch with the BIONICLE designers. We ran through pretty much all the boiled-down questions I got from the massive thread from last November, and I'll be making sure it gets onto BZP soon. There are three or so more rounds of answers to put up.
At the end, they asked why they couldn't ask questions of you. Which is a really good question. So I'm going to put polls up, starting next week, with questions that the designers want to know from you, the core fans.
We have a
So I got these bricks engraved earlier this year, see, and was going to use them as "extras" for the BZP DVD-ROM project (see an earlier blog entry). But unfortunately, that project got wrapped up in red tape, and doesn't look like it'll get off the ground anytime soon.
But I had the bricks left over.
Some I gave away at BrickFest to BZPower members. I still have most of them left, and I wanted to make sure they went to help BZP. The BrickFest auction and tee shirt sales did OK by us, but
Are you a Premier member? Do you want to let the BIONICLE team know what sets you like best (or, alternately, dislike the most)? Now's your chance!
Go to the Sets Database and vote for as many sets as you like. In a week or so I'll get the full list and present the results to the BIONICLE development team.
Voting is limited to Premier members and staff (and OBZPM), and you can only vote on a set once.
I'd like to be able to present a fan's-eye-view of the entire BIONICLE line. This is a
By now most will have seen the news about the future of BIONICLE sent to BZPower. Before I'm inundated with questions, I just wanted to let you know that there's no additional information I can provide regarding the announcement.
However, I'm still continuing to work on the BIONICLE web site for January, including a game and something else that's pretty cool, and I'm also going to be working on other LEGO web projects, so I'll still be around.
There are endings, and there are beginnings, a
Techie geeky alert.
I've spent some significant time over the last few days trying to get BZP to run faster. After much analysis and trolling technical forums, I may have found something. I knew that repairing and optimizing the database would help, as would regularly flushing the query cache, which I've done by hand on occasion. But it looks like you really get a bang for your buck by optimizing the entire database and not just some tables.
I finally got sick of sitting by the computer at
It's been kind of a rough week, and it's going to get longer...
On Tuesday, my hard drive went out - fortunately, I only lost a few days worth of stuff, nothing I can't recreate. Since I'm paranoid, I back up pretty regularly, so I didn't lose much. Except for two days where I couldn't really do my work.
Right now, I'm in Raleigh, NC doing some communications research with the marketing team. The flight from Billund was brutal - we missed our connection in Washington, DC because the Custom
I think this is the longest I've gone between blog postings, oops...
Been busy, real busy. Got myself a new job in early November, been slaving away at that, although last week hasn't been as bad. Worked 77 hours the week before, though.
And there's been a lot of LEGO-related stuff going on too, of course. I have fun pictures of a couple of things.
First, over the last week I've been incrementally backing up the full BZPower machine, and finally downloaded all the relevant content to my
Attentive readers (both of you) may have noticed a lack of recent entries on the ol' BinkBlog. As you'll likely have deduced, being the intelligent and handsome folks you are, that's due to my recent vacation in Florida, at Walt Disney World in Orlando. Since I know you wait with baited breath for every morsel of BinkNews™, I'm delighted to present a handful of pictures from my nearly two weeks down south.
Besides, I could waste hours writing pithy and insightful stories about my vacation (an
T minus 3 days to departure for NWBC, and still nowhere near ready.
Building, slowly... I'm not a fast builder. I usually get there, but not quickly. In this case, it's something I've had lying around for about 2 years. I finally found some parts to finish the radio dish I've been working on (courtesy of my new NXT), so I'm reconstructing it. Eventually, it'll go on top of a moonbase module.
Here's a sneak peek of what it looks like now.
Now all I've gotta do is get it installed into
Last night I performed scheduled maintenance on the server, at the same time as trying to update some core software. It backfired, and the database server wouldn't load. That's fixed, but now I need to adjust the configuration, and I can't do that at work. So the machine will probably run really sluggishly until I can get home to adjust that.
It's either run it and watch it go up and down, or yank the forums offline and have everybody go into BZP withdrawal. It's an ugly sight, so I'll stress
So, for those of you interested, I'm starting my update of BIONICLEstory. But if you're reading this, you probably already know everything that's going on it.
So far, I've updated:
- Bara Magna (location, in the Universe section)
- Updated Mistika story
- Added Mata Nui Rising story
- Added Bara Magna story
I've also got the character bios and images ready, but those take a long time to enter. So they should be done this week. The good part is, now that I'm in it, I can set up the summ
After some sweating, things seem to be coming together. Saw the graphics for BIONICLE.com's wallpapers, screensavers, building instructions, etc. today - they all look good. Saw the second round of comps for BIONICLEstory.com - much improvement over the first batch, which didn't capture the essence of what we're going for. The new design is much closer to what I expected, and it's very classy to boot. Finalized the new logotype for BIONICLEstory.com. Got most of the content for BIONICLE.com rea
So, it's been almost six years (!) since I started working for LEGO. Yesterday was my last day with the company. So now I can actually post on BZPower again! I'll probably be posting some reminiscences about my life in Denmark, and what I found it to be like to work for one of the best companies in the world. A year and a half in Denmark, four and a half years back in the US, and frequent travel. It was really the most excellent job I've ever had, and the BIONICLE portion of it was by far the
Well, it's been a little over a week, so now the "Ask a Designer" question period has been closed.
Since there are so many duplicate questions, I'm going to collate the questions into groups so the designers don't have the answer the same questions over and over. The repeat questions will be rephrased, but the more unique ones will be just as they were posed in the thread. Then I'll give them to the designers and they will answer them this week. Next week, we'll send the finished answers to t
With an insider like moi at LEGO, deep within the BIONICLE team, you've probably wondered...
"Hey, Binkums, why doncha score us some insider dope, huh? Huh? WELL?"
As always, it's all about you, the fans. So tomorrow, BZP will start a new project. I've convinced some people within LEGO to spend some time answering your burning questions. So look for a news story on BZP shortly with more details about this project.
This was actually something that was discussed back in the summer, but we
I took advantage of BZP downtime to finish shipping all the Commemorative Bricks we sold. That was no mean task... I sold 140 of them (very close to my goal of 150), which was excellent. Thanks to everyone who bought one or two!
The International shipments should get there in a week to 10 days. The domestic US ones should mostly be delivered by now. I feel good about that project - it cost me a couple of hundred out of pocket, but the end result was very cool, and produced something that (app
A few weeks ago, no fewer than three completely separate events converged to bring BZPower to its knees. None of them were bad, per se, but they all occured about the same time so it was difficult to determine just what the bloody heck was going on.
I think we've got it all figured and fixed (mostly).
Regular readers of this blog will remember just how desperate I was to get things stabilized. After much angst and many emails and pathetic whining, the server software was stabilized and upg
UPDATE: See bottom for newest pic.
I rebuilt it, biggerer, betterer, strongerer...
I figure I can get another one and a half stories done with the red tiles I've got. I really should get back to actual real work one of these days...
