Scott Gruby's Blog

After a few false starts putting together my LEGO railroad, I’m finally making progress. My first few starts failed because I kept short circuiting the track and trying to do complex stuff such as running 2 engines at the same time on different loops with 1 controller. I went ahead and ordered a second controller off eBay (still waiting for it) for < $10 shipped (new ones are over $40) so that I could have 2 independent tracks. One track being similar to an elevated (L) train in a city such as Chicago and the other being a freight train. To complicate matters, I wanted to have the freight train track cross my road sections as much as possible at right angles.

So while I still have a lot of work to do (I want to make the upper track go through a building and have to build some stations as well as more buildings and vehicles), I am making progress. I know that I’m crazy as I’m spending lots of time playing with a child’s toy.

Here are some pictures of my mess:

In a post last month, I mentioned that I believed that LEGO was in violation of the Star of Life trademark for their rescue series. I contacted LEGO to inquire about it as it is important to me that this trademark be used for true emergency medical related uses and that when someone sees this mark, they don’t just write it off, but can rely on its meaning. LEGO responded that the trademark was from a government agency and as such, it didn’t have “copyright protection”, according to their legal department. (Trademark and copyright protection are different.) They said, “As long as LEGO Systems Inc. makes an exact replica of the vehicle on which it usually appears, we would not be violating their rights. Therefore the depiction of the Star of Life logo is not in violation of any trademark infringement.”

OK, fine, I didn’t quite believe what they had to say as LEGO was using the trademark on replica buildings as well as replica vehicles. I figured they just thought I was a wacko and basically ignored me. In an interesting twist, I received a followup email from LEGO today indicating that their designers in Denmark weren’t aware of the trademark registration (which was kind of my point, it may have already been diluted too much that people don’t know its proper use) and they’ll research it further. They also said that they’ll discontinue using it if they find they are in violation. Hmmm…I think this means stock up on this year’s rescue sets as they could be gone before you know it, similar to LEGO using a red cross years ago for the rescue series; I’d put money on it that the American/International Red Cross objected to its use. (From what I understand the Red Cross objected to the Boy Scouts using the red cross on a skill award and it was changed to a green cross.)

Yes, I’ll be the first to admit I’m lazy. No, not the kind of lazy where I’d sit around drinking beer and watching football. I’m talking about finding the easy way to do something. In this case, I was looking to build a table to hold my new Lego trains. I designed 2 tables, each being 3.5′ x 7′ with legs and wheels. After going to Home Depot and pricing out the materials, I determined the price would be about $200 and require at least a day or two of building it. Somehow I got the brilliant idea to look at a ping pong (for those that want me to be accurate, table tennis) table. A regulation table is 9′ x 5′ and most of the ones consumers get fold up and have wheels. While not he exact size, this was an excellent solution. I asked one of my neighbors with a pickup truck if he’d help me pick it up and then I put it together when I got home. It is going to work out well and required a minimal amount of effort on my part.

In my searching, I found out that new Legos cost $6.99 per 1/4 pound at Legoland which is $27.96 per pound which seems very high, almost the price of gold :-). On eBay, I’ve found many lots of bulk Lego bricks from various sets. Using the $28 per pound price, I started comparing bulk lots on a per pound basis (including shipping) and only bid up to about $4.50 per pound. I’ve seen some auctions go to several hundred dollars for less than 20 pounds of Lego bricks. These aren’t new bricks and come from random lots. The pictures on the auctions don’t really tell you what you’re getting, so I’m really confused as to why people keep driving up the price. For now, I’ve purchase a total of 21 pounds of Legos (in addition to the 10 or so pounds I bought a few weeks ago). Hopefully this will let me build what I want.

In my obsession for getting Legos, I’ve been following a bunch of auctions on eBay. Some of them are kind of humorous to me because they are priced higher than ordering new direct from Lego or they say “hard to find” when they’re on the Lego website. In addition, I’ve found some other items that are cheaper on a site called BrickLink which is a conglomerate of people selling Lego sets. One reason, I’d guess for not buying direct from Lego is that the regular shipping is via UPS from Connecticut. Since I’m probably the furthest you can get from CT in the continental US (ordering stuff from LL Bean would travel a longer distance), the shipping is slow (the rains last week didn’t help) and frankly, the boxes are not packed well. The outer box and many of the inner boxes were dented, but nothing was broken. It must be hard to break Lego sets short of stepping on them.

OK, that title is not really a concern of mine for this post. I received the Lego trains I ordered and the box said “Caution: 12 V” or something like that, but it said 12V. I ordered the train from lego.com where the site said that it included a 9V speed regulator and a 9V motor. The speed regulator I got says 9V-12V on the hole for the power supply. The power brick says output: 10.8V AC. So, what’s the deal? Did Lego mean to put a 10.8V transformer in there (seems to work fine)? Did the site and the packaging get mislabeled? I don’t think Lego really cares about this type of train anymore as they’re moving to radio controlled trains, which I think is an excellent move for kids as I spent a few hours laying out my track and getting it to work correctly (and I have a BS in engineering). The trick is that the track switches must be in the correct positions, you can’t short circuit the track, and you must have power applied. The layout I put together has 3 concentric loops that allows the train to get to each of the loops. The problems I discovered is that the power must be on the outer loop and the 2 switches for each loop must be in opposite directions; they must also be switched at the same time to keep the train moving when it is on an inner loop. 4 years of college and I can setup a kid’s toy!

It’s amazing to me how many calls I get that are wrong numbers; for having my cell phone number for 7 years and my home number for 2, you’d expect people to be able to give out the right number. I don’t think the calls are misdials as I get a number of different callers calling. One particularly interesting wrong number are calls I get from Children’s Hospital to both my cell phone and to my landline (different area codes). I happen to recognize the caller ID for it as my dad did some work for Children’s for awhile and called me all the time. I’d hope people in healthcare to have current phone numbers of people they’re trying to contact. OK, maybe someone had a wrong emergency contact number.

The other day I got a call twice from someone I knew had a wrong number because the caller ID said payphone and I don’t know anyone that has used a payphone in years. The second time the person called, she argued with me that she had the right number. OK, if you say so.

To top off wrong numbers, I got a voicemail on my cell phone from a teacher saying that Johnny’s (I can’t remember the kid’s name) behavior has gotten out of control. Hello, parents, you might want to put correct contact info in you kid’s file. And teacher, you might want to listen to the name of the person whose voicemail you’re calling to see if it matches a contact name for the kid.

One of the coolest features I had on my phone line when I lived in Portland was the ability to block up to 10 numbers; I had a few people keep calling me with the wrong number, so I entered their numbers and never heard from them again.

On the flip side, I made a call to the right number the other day, but the number had already been recycled. One of my friends dropped his home phone a few years back and I was a bit slow on the uptake (I guess I always called his cell phone). I knew I dialed the right number, apologized for getting the wrong person and then hung up. I checked the number I dialed and it was definitely what I intended to dial. Next step was removing the number from both my cell phone and my desktop address book.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie based on a book until yesterday. I went with my wife to see The Da Vinci Code after having listened to the unabridged version of Dan Brown’s novel on my iPod during my running. I was extremely disappointed in the movie because of this. I really can’t judge the movie in isolation as I kept going back to the novel. The detail in the book allowed me to form my own views of the scenes and I got really engrossed in the detail.

I realize that this isn’t news to avid readers, but it really clouded my view of a movie that was probably decent for those that haven’t read the book or forgot the contents of the book.

I think I’ll stick to audiobooks for awhile; they keep me going while running, almost to the point that I don’t want to stop running.