LEGO Donkey Kong (with Mario for scale).

Then I built my niece a Lego jewelry box.

This left my youngest nephew (the middle kid) feeling a bit left out.

I had to build him something and it damn well better be impressive.

No ideas for months.

So I came up with the idea of a Lego globe (like of the Earth).

Not very original but I figured I would make up for it by having the top removable and put something cool stuff inside (someone recommend liqueur but I ain’t sharing and certainly not with a kid).

Plan was to put a support wall down the middle, have a ship wreck/island scene on one side and on the other a jungle temple or a Lego version of hell ( not the best idea for a 12 year old (or well I think he’s 12 it’s hard to keep up with such things) but seemed funny to me).

To make up for the unoriginal idea I figured I would do it from scratch without looking up how others had done it.

Several nights of trying to work out the scale, where the continents would go etc I had nothing and I was tired.

I found some nice instructions and got to work (lazy can’t find the link right now but very nice instructions).

The instructions were for a hollow globe (no internal support) but I wanted to make sure it was sturdy so I was going to add “beams” of Lego running through the bottom half (I apparently don’t have or am too lazy to look for a picture of these) and the top and bottom halves would be built separately so I construct the fancy scenes in the bottom and the top would be a removable to reveal them.

Lego Globe - The Start

Lego Globe - Make Progress

Lego Globe - Half Way?

The half way point wasn’t reached before I was pretty much out of blue and tan Lego. So several orders were placed on BrickLink.

At this point in time I was already tired of the damn thing but I figured I should finish what I started (unlike my first go or three at college).

Lego Globe - Done?

So there we have it.

A Lego globe of the Earth built with someone else’s instructions (once again very nice ones) and some of my own changes: internal support in bottom half, the poles were white (like ice), a opening left in the bottom in case I wanted to mount it on a stand ( the idea of the scenes died as I went along, not as much room as I had hoped and I wanted done with it).

All I had to do was stick the top and the bottom together and I was free of it.

Just a bit of gentle gentle pressure to get the bricks stuck together.

Just a smidgen, not too much.

Just a tad.

Lego Globe - Really Really Done

Too much pressure and not enough structural integrity (remember kids to always use sound engineering).

All I could do was chuckle.

It seemed fitting that this thing I had poured more hours and Lego into then I wanted to think about, this thing I had really come to despise, was in pieces.

It could have been fixed, couple of hours more, not much compared to how much time I had already spent.

Instead, being me (who is a fan of using commas and line breaks more frequently then needed), it was broken down into it’s base parts, sorted (by color and size of course), and I was left with nothing for my nephew except for some photos and a crap load of blue bricks.

So I needed a new idea and it better be blue.

So I have finished and “launched” Opiate Media. The site where I will review the wonderful media of this world.

Original and awesome I know.

Just to be unnecessarily redundent I will probably post here a link to anything I do there.

Doing this reminded me of an important life lesson I have tried to stick by as of late.

Don’t reinvent the wheel.

I am programmer. I love doing it. I love the challenge of it. I love building stuff. 

This unfortunately often gets in the way of actually getting anything done. At an actual job (that thing with the paycheck) this is generally not a problem, but when doing my own stuff it always is.

I am not the only one with this problem, I know plenty of other programmers who get caught up in building a better wheel. While it’s a fun pursuit, most will get board and find something else shiny to play with never getting done what they started out to do.

Sure there is sometimes need for a better wheel but in general you can reach the goal with the wheel you have ( OK beat to death the wheel thing ).

The goal was to get a site up. I could have written my own blog software (have in the past) and done my own site design. Neither of these was really the goal though and would have taken time and energy away from what I really wanted to do. 

So use what is already available. When I am doing a java project that needs a DB I use hibernate, I don’t write my own DB layer. In this case there is plenty of easy to setup and use blog software (WordPress in this case) that come with good quality themes.

So I used someone else’s wheel and reached the goal. 

To summarize: Avoid shiny objects and don’t forget what you’re actually trying to do.