Just a quick update on all things happening here – or not happening as the case may be.

It’s 2009 was a crazy summer at the Maruska household with an extensive house remodeling project taking up most of my time; which was inspired by the highly anticipated arrival of our daughter, Madeline; which in-turn has led to a pretty crazy autumn and winter as Jenn and I try our hand at parenthood. (It’s all good, BTW – we’ve been blessed with a well behaved co-operative little one – thank you)

This being the first week in a long while that I’ve gotten any quantity of sleep, I thought it a good time just to say hi and maybe spark anyone’s RSS feeds out there that may still be listening.

I plan on getting some new content posted at some point and re-kindle my relationship with Alias Design.

And speaking of design, it’s been a good year for that too with plenty of awards to be had by Teague – which is fodder for another post, another time.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I have a fascination with Lego and Star Wars and when the two met, out popped another hobby. For the past few months I’ve been noodling away on a studio scale prop replica of the Millennium Falcon. It dawned on me that I should really document some of the process – especially since my product design background lends itself to an entirely different approach to typical fine scale modeling.

So as not to distract from the content of this blog, I started another one. I’ve been frantically populating it with stuff as to try and make-up for lost time so forgive me if the posts thus far don’t seem very organic.

Enjoy,

J.

Last summer, my awesome wife gave me the Ultimate Collector’s Edition Star Wars Millennium Falcon. She’s so awesome!

It was a super fun build and without sounding like a “what I did last summer” essay, it took me a little over 45 hours to put together.

Of course, that included time to organize the parts – which covered our dinning room table with both leaves inserted…

And time for a few ceremonial in-progress photos (although not nearly enough)…

And the final piece!!!

Did I mention how awesome my wife is? She’s pretty awesome – and then she got awesomer!

For Christmas, Santa (a.k.a my awesome wife) brought me the Lego Star Destroyer. This was another super fun build – although it only took me about 19 hours to complete. The parts were pretty well pre-sorted in the box and there are many fewer little details to slow you down than on the Falcon – not to mention the whole Falcon is asymmetric; meaning you can’t build large sections in duplicate like on the Destroyer.

Wading waist deep through Lego Star Wars replica’s got me wondering – If I have this monster Lego Falcon  kit, but wanted a relative scale Star Destroyer to hide it on, how big would that have to be. It turns out, bigger than I could ever build – 178 ft in length!

But what about the other way around? I have a monster Star Destroyer. Could I make a tiny little Falcon to go on it?

Well it’s pretty small. It’s not even an inch in length. So I whipped-up a quick CAD model in Alias and sent it off to our 3D printer at work. The thing is so small it only took 6 minutes to build on the FDM.

Designing it was fun too. I wanted it to be a functional Lego piece and the only way to do so was to make it only one stud big. It has a hole on the underside, just a like a real Lego piece would and a single Lego stud on it’s dome – just in case I ever want to attach any additional Lego to it.

Spending a few hours researching the proper size of the Falcon and building the CAD for the Lego part, I inevitably stumbled upon Tim Ketzer’s site. I was enchanted. I also have a new hobby…

Way back, before the turn of the century; that’s the year 2000, (Yeah, that turn of the century – and only if you believe the 21st century started in 2001) myself and a group of other artists did a super quick project for Pangea Software. Apple was about to refresh the original gumdrop iMac’s with a new graphics processor and need some games to show it off. Brian at Pangea had had some other successes with shipping games directly on the Apple’s platform and was willing to give it another go. Out of the 2 1/2 month effort, came Cro-Mag Rally – a fun little Mario Kart-style game that follows a band of cavemen and women as they race through a variety of tracks each representing a different landmark era in the evolution of civilization.

About a month ago, the game was re-released for the 3G iPhone and it now lives on. Apple, in fact, just made a new ad for the iPhone featuring the game as a center piece. Watch it here.

When I started the project, I was still working at Thomson. When I finished the project I was working at Motorola – I was also newly wed. That was a very busy summer – not unlike this one actually – except without all the job changing and marrying and stuff.

I had taken a trip to Hong Kong right after Brian and I had gotten in touch with each other. So, I took advantage of the 20+ hour flight to do some sketching for the game. Here are some to enjoy. They have always been some of my favorite pencil doodles. The “Caveman Industrial Designer” has become bit of an icon for me.

Enjoy…

I also had the privilege of creating the characters; Brog and Grag. I think that’s cave speak for boy and girl. Anyhow, for some reason they ended-up looking a bit like Neanderthal versions of a certain bride and groom. She married me anyway. Whew…

Cheers,

J.

It’s been a while since I last posted – looks like I’m averaging once a month – a far cry from once a week as my per my original goal. I’ll work on that.

Anyway, you know those lists that people make of the 10 or 20 things they have to do before they die? Well, I don’t have one of those. But if I did, one of the things that would have been on it was to see The Police play live – together.

Maybe one of the reasons I don’t have one of those list is because they they haven’t played since the mid 80′s and what’s the point in having a list with things on it that can never happen – or can they? Maybe I’ll reconsider that list.

Sting and the boys got back together and are touring this summer all over the world. I didn’t have a chance in hell of getting tickets and indeed didn’t have any until the day of the show when a friend of a coworker decided he wasn’t going to make it and I thusly happened upon some tickets. I had tried getting tickets the day they went on sale – but they sold out within minutes.

I went to the show in Seattle and it was fantastic. They sounded wonderful if not a bit rusty – but in a good way. They mixed it up just enough that us old time fans knew what was going on but weren’t bored for a minute. An in a very un-Seattle-like fashion, the crowd stood (yeah, on their feet!) and cheered them on for the entire set.

It seemed like every song went on forever and they entertained us with three encores – although, the intermissions between each were obviously just a ploy for a drink of water and possibly a quick discussion between a few 50-somethings about how nice the hotel bed will feel later.

Great show all in all – and while I won’t blather on about each song (they were all good, BTW) here is the set list from the show for your enjoyment…
It’s been a while since I last posted – looks like I’m averaging once a month – a far cry from once a week as my per my original goal. I’ll work on that.

Anyway, you know those lists that people make of the 10 or 20 things they have to do before they die? Well, I don’t have one of those. But if I did, one of the things that would have been on it was to see The Police play live – together.

Maybe one of the reasons I don’t have one of those list is because they they haven’t played since the mid 80′s and what’s the point in having a list with things on it that can never happen – or can they? Maybe I’ll reconsider that list.

Sting and the boys got back together and are touring this summer all over the world. I didn’t have a chance in hell of getting tickets and indeed didn’t have any until the day of the show when a friend of a coworker decided he wasn’t going to make it and I thusly happened upon some tickets. I had tried getting tickets the day they went on sale – but they sold out within minutes.

I went to the show in Seattle and it was fantastic. They sounded wonderful if not a bit rusty – but in a good way. They mixed it up just enough that us old time fans knew what was going on but weren’t bored for a minute. An in a very un-Seattle-like fashion, the crowd stood (yeah, on their feet!) and cheered them on for the entire set.

It seemed like every song went on forever and they entertained us with three encores – although, the intermissions between each were obviously just a ploy for a drink of water and possibly a quick discussion between a few 50-somethings about how nice the hotel bed will feel later.

Great show all in all – and while I won’t blather on about each song (they were all good, BTW) here is the set list from the show for your enjoyment…