Editing drafts of user guides is fairly dreary work. (Writing them is better, but not by much.) I usually listen to music, but every so often I have enough podcasts saved up that I dedicate one day to the musings of people I’ve never met. It’s like a call-in radio show, but without celebrity hosts! Just kidding, just kidding! If you’re actually interested in the subject matter, podcasts can be pretty entertaining.

I finally listened to BimPCast 19 (from a month ago), and listened to my first BrickNebula podcast. Steven Combs of BimPCast says that lots of things are going on in the LEGO Ambassador program, but if he told us he’d have to hunt each of us down and kill us. (He doesn’t actually say that.) The BrickNebula guys talk about Exo-Force, and how they don’t like all the new Star Wars redesigns, which actually came as a surprise to me. I like the music on the BrickNebula podcast — as crazy as it sounds, the western-sounding music really works (I’m clearly influenced by Firefly).

Speaking of podcast music, Sub Pop Records says on their FAQ that you’re free to use the music they’ve posted on their Multimedia page. From The Postal Service and Sleater-Kinney to up-and-coming bands you’ve probably never heard of (yet!), there’s some great stuff on that page.

And music makes a nice segue back into LEGO podcasts, because both BimPCast and the BrickNebula podcast are available via the iTunes Music Store. In iTunes, open the Music Store, click Podcasts, and search for “LEGO.” If you sort your results by relevance, the BrickNebula podcast and BimPCast should be your top two results. Subscribe and enjoy!

SpongeBob SquarePants! First images of our adorable invertebrate Bikini Bottom resident (via EuroBricks and I Love Cute LEGO!):

I know AFOLs everywhere will hate me for saying this, but I love this! I can just hear the foghorn blaring as Mr. SquarePants leaps off his bed yelling “I’m ready!” Off to the Krusty Krab, you!

Catching up on my cuteness fix, I clicked over to Adorablog from Cute Overload and found my Norse gods and goddesses featured in a post earlier this month, along with some great minifigs by fellow LEGO blogger minifig. Here’s the link to the Adorablog post:

http://www.adorablog.org/2006/01/everything_is_b.html

Very cool. It would seem that no matter how fierce you try to make your divine minifigs, little LEGO deities are always just plain adorable.

I blogged previously about BrickWiki, the community-developed LEGO encyclopedia. If you know something about LEGO, or you’re just a good editor or writer, consider contributing to BrickWiki. Here’s the Web address:

http://brickwiki.zapto.org/index.php/Main_Page

One of BrickWiki’s guidelines is that you don’t create content promoting yourself or your own Web site. Given that the best person to describe a LEGO site is its administrator, this guideline (a generally good idea) prevents BrickWiki from having a comprehensive link list of LEGO-related Web sites.

That’s where Wiki-Brick-Links comes in. Started by Klas Schöldström, whose Duplo blog I highlighted previously, Wiki-Brick-Links has the potential to be a more comprehensive link collection than BrickWiki’s list of (major) sites. Here’s the Web address for Wiki-Brick-Links:

http://wiki-brick-links.wikispaces.com/

(A link to W-B-L also appears under “LEGO Resources” in the navigation bar on the right.)

Before we moved into our house back in November, I posted about how I was excited that our new house has a full daylight basement, with a rec room my wife jokingly labeled “the LEGO room.”

With all the painting, rewiring, and appliance installation we’ve been doing, unpacking stuff we don’t really need has taken a bit of a back seat. Taking a break from being a “weekend warrior” today, I tried making some Aztec god minifigs (following up on my Greek and Norse deities; stay tuned). I went downstairs to get the green snake from 4766 Graveyard Duel, and I saw that a bunch of boxes stacked against the far wall were wet near the floor. We’ve spent a good chunk of Sunday unpacking boxes we hadn’t looked in in years. I hadn’t seen my wife’s wedding dress in nine and a half years (fortunately it was wrapped in plastic inside the wet box). A box of photos with all the prints and negatives from her childhood through high school was one of the more damaged boxes.

Stupid 26 consecutive days of rain! Doesn’t matter that it didn’t rain today and the streak is broken, since there aren’t any more breaks in the rain for the foreseeable future.

Well, the good news is that most of the boxes on the bottom were the sturdiest boxes that had containers of LEGO inside. And LEGO, as most people know, is water-proof. We (mostly) dodged a bullet, but now we have to deal with lovely problems like mold. Fun!

Technorati provides various tools for people interested in blogs. Technorati’s main feature is its search capability, and the site indexes more than 23.5 million blogs on the Internet. By “claiming” a blog (Technorati verifies that you’re the blog owner), you get access to more tools, including the ability to apply tags to your blog.

What’s interesting is that Technorati also displays your blog’s rank in the blogosphere, based on the number of incoming links to your blog. As of December 21, 2005, “Dunechaser’s Blocklog” is ranked 243,828. Out of 23.5 million, that’s not too shabby! Woo hoo!