Okay, this was going to be part of a larger post or something later, but i couldn’t contain myself anymore. Lego has jumped into a new universe and i needed to release some pent-up excitement before my head explodes!

Of course, i’m talking about the Lego Digital Designer. A 9MB download, for PC and Mac (have a i mentioned that i love these people?) gets you a 3D development environment and access to a limited - but still extensive - catalog of Lego parts. Once you select a rough genre (car, house, animal, robot) you can browse everything from basic 2×4 flats to windshields, tires, and trees and even hinges, antenna and Technix-style gears and axles. The build environment is smart enough to allow you to connect bricks in any way that’s realistically possible, including at odd angles to each other if the “bumps” match up that way. You can easily color-swap if the brick you’re using comes in other shades, and are nearly as free to dream up anything you want as when you dump your bucket of Lego bricks all over the carpet. It does miss the satisfying tactile feel of snapping the bricks together, but that is more than compensated for by saving you from rifling through your parts pile for an hour looking for the “other one of these.” In general, it’s a blast to build with virtual Legos.

Once built, your design can be stepped through from beginning to end, and an assembly manual automatically built, or the construction process can be summed up in an exploding parts animation. Happy with it? Want to share? Upload it to the Lego Factory Gallery so someone else can download it, pick it apart, improve on it, and resubmit.

Pretty slick, huh? Baby, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Once a design is uploaded to the Factory, the “Check Price” button will calculate the cost of all the parts needed to build it, and they will package them up and ship you exactly the bits you need, complete with the assembly manual inside and your screenshot on top of the box! Are you grasping the gravity of this announcement? It is now possible to build your own Lego sets with exactly what you want in the box! The imaginative possibilities presented in a box of Legos, once vast, are now positively infinite and there is a whole new reason to be absolutely in awe of the people at Lego and their commitment to putting the building blocks (pun intended) in your hands and letting you create your own path. Absolutely excellent, i wish i was still a kid. Screw that, i’m going to build something anyway!

Confirmed itinerary: Delta Song flight 2010 nonstop SEA to JFK oct 18th. Returning on Delta Song flight 2053 nonstop JFK to SEA oct 24th. !

Stopping at the kirkland marina for provisions. Sean and Julia’s new boat RULES!

One of my fav managers just stopped me in the hall, about a position on his web front end team that he has me in mind for - sweet!