Helium Party Balloons

Every now and then, GeekDad gets a nice e-mail from a reader who has done something really cool. And this is really cool!

Mark Anderson is a Chicago cartoonist who spent two years designing and building a Lego spaceship for each letter of the alphabet (inspired, of course, by the X-Wing Fighter).

He says on his Andertoons blog:

When I was a kid growing up on Star Wars, I thought the X-wing was the best spaceship I’d ever seen. Of course the Millennium Falcon was great, and goodness knows the good old NCC-1701 was awesome, but the X-wing and its letter inspired brethren the Y-wing and A-wing (what the hell was with the B-wing?! It looked nothing like a B!) were just the coolest.

So later on as I got back into LEGO and was building spaceships I thought revisiting the idea of alphabet shaped ships would be fun.

It’s taken me almost two years (I have kids and a job after all), but now I’ve done all 26 letters of the alphabet in glorious spacey LEGO.

Check out Lego Alphabet Spaceships at Anderson’s Flickr site.

CC Licensed Image by AMagill

On April 23rd, a hundred or more robot geeks will descend upon Boulder Colorado for the 3rd Annual Autonomous Vehicle Competition hosted by our friends at SparkFun.

Last year’s event saw over 20 teams with upwards of 400 spectators. This year looks to double that with over 40 teams registered. The competition is evolving from its roots of simply “circumnavigate the SparkFun building” to include more challenges, obstacles, and awards.

For more information about the 2011 AVC check out the 2011 AVC competition page on SparkFun’s site and watch the news for any updates.

More information about the last two events, including winners, can be found here:

SparkFun AVC 2009
SparkFun AVC 2010

Kids and parents are everywhere this weekend at PAX East, the humongous (70,000 person) gaming exposition in Boston! And over 300 of them had to be turned away from the GeekParenting panel featuring GeekDad Managing Editor Matt Blum, writers Doug Cornelius, Dave Banks, Curtis Silver, Michael Harrison, Natania Barron, Corrina Lawson and me, along with GeekMom writer Kay Holt.

Natania and Michael were even featured in a story in today’s Boston Herald. (What, no photo of the uberGeek couple?) Natania said the reporter told her geek parenting is going to be the “next big thing.” We think it already is!