Today’s issue of Brickmaster reveals Rotta the Huttlet, Spawn of the infamous Jabba the Hutt.

I was so happy to see this I’m almost ready to forgive Lego for TAKING DOWN the 9′ tall R2 D2 they built at the Lego store here in Arizona.  We got to help make it on Friday and Saturday and then thought that we’d just go see it all finished today, but they had taken it down.  *sigh*

The second part of the Grand Opening was going down and helping to build a 9′ tall R2 D2.

You can see that Dan the Master Builder is roped off in the center with the beginings of the super famous Astromech droid.  All around him are BUCKETS of Bricks, and tables where the kids can work.

Dan had a model of R2 to use as a reference.

Each table had 2 different sizes of bricks and instructions to follow.  You see that the instructions are to make a 4x brick.  I thought that it was quite cleaver that the kids were actually making a scaled up version of the normal Lego brick.

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We had a pretty full day on Friday.  It was the Grand Opening of the first Lego store in Arizona.  My brother came with his two kids and I took my oldest boy.  We got to the store and had to wait in line to get in!  I took this shot as we were leaving and the line had vanished.

On the store front window were some shots of Indiana Jones as a Lego character only to be greeted by a life size Indy inside.  

One of the employees told me that on Thursday some kid actually ripped one of Indy’s fingers off.  The whole sculpture has be epoxy glued together so the employee was impressed with the kid.  There’s a fair amount of detail in this piece.  I mean come on, Indy has teeth and everything!

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These are the last of the 6 card frames that I made for the Clone Wars Sketch cards.

I’m just about done digging the hole to put the trampoline in. 

I absolutely love that so many of us were inspired by Star Wars and other adventures.  I just saw an article on Wired about the ICT Graphics Lab at USC.  They have created a “low-cost volumetric 3-D display that brings every kid’s hologram dreams closer to reality.”  We’ve seen holograms in the past but this is getting pretty cool. It makes perfect sense to show a TIE fighter in your brand new volumetric 3-D display.

Interesting that the article was posted on Wired today, but the video on youTube was posted August of ‘07.

Two more images.

Finally!  Netflix gave us the opportunity to go online, build a virtual library of movies and then have them delivered right to our door.  This brilliant business model was done so well that Blockbuster took notice and then started their own direct DVD delivery system.  But what’s next?  Well, you just have to skip the Disk delivery and have it come through the internet.

Amazon Unbox is trying this now. You can “rent” a movie that streams to your computer.  Pretty cool stuff.  But Netflix wasn’t going to sit by the sidelines on this one.  They too offer streaming videos to your computer.  It’s pretty cool stuff, but I don’t want to sit infront of my computer more that I do already.  So here’s the big news.

Rumor has it that Sony will be announcing at E3 that they will make a movie download service available to US PlayStation 3 owners this summer.  This in conjuction with plans to make tv service also available.  So I have a great video game console, a Blue Ray DVD player, harddrive to store music, photos, and downloaded tv shows, and soon, a way to watch tv and movies.  AWESOME!

I started doing sketch cards to get better at drawing.  The pay per card does not equal the amount of work that goes into each card.  I just figured it was a good way to improve my skills AND they would let me pick 6 of the cards from my set to keep for myself.  I didn’t understand that there is a HUGE fan base that pays pretty good to get their hands on these cards.

For my 6 Clone Wars I get back I decided to try something special.  I made the card the final puzzel piece to a larger illustration.  The cards have not been approved yet and are not allowed to be shown so I’ll just show a couple of the frames.

Every now and again I indulge in a little ego surfing.  I go to Google and type in my name to see what comes up.  Try it out sometime.

I recently joined facebook and I thought, “How many other Spencer Brinkerhoffs are on facebook?”  Answer?  NONE!!!  :D  Spencer the Third is the only ONE!!!  HEHEH

So head on over to facebook and be my friend.