‘Tis the season of gift giving, right? So it’s kinda hard not to be thinking about gifts. Gifts you are going to give, gifts you are hoping to get, gifts you can only dream of, and maybe, gifts that you’ve already given?
After a late night of wrapping presents with my wife and getting them under the tree so our kids can have a full day of guessing and anticipating what is awaiting them under the decorative paper for tomorrow, I thought about a particularly special gift I gave this year.
This year marks my tenth year as OWC’s resident web monkey – a fact I wear very proudly. I’m proud of not only what I have accomplished during my tenure, but what we have done as a company during this time. The strides we’ve made to lower our environmental impact while raising our level of service and customer satisfaction. The innovative new products we engineer. These are things that fill me with pride in OWC.
This year also marked a big milestone for us as OWC celebrated its 25th anniversary (you may recall a few blog posts about this, some give-a-ways, or maybe our Charity Water fund raiser that raised over $75,000?).
That’s why when I saw this custom Lego build of the original Apple Macintosh from Chris McVeigh, I knew right away that it was the perfect gift to give to our CEO Larry O’Connor to mark the accomplishment.
I must not have been the only one filled with Apple nostalgia at the sight of the little beauty as it spread out over web, because the kit was a near instant sell out. Chris’ designs sometimes use pieces that are rare and hard to source in large quantities, or at all. So he has to sell them as limited edition kits.
Never defeated, I wasn’t going to let a “Sold Out” button stop me. So I sent him a friendly tweet asking if he thought there would be more available and he replied that he was working on it and to stay tuned. To which later he followed up with a time slot where a few more kits would be released.
After successfully securing the purchase of the kit I sent Chris a message about how great the design was and how it was the perfect gift and who I was giving it to, and lo and behold – Chris is an OWC Customer! A repeat customer, in fact. It was another drop in my “OWC Pride Bucket”. It’s great to meet others at random and find out they are a new or long time OWC Customer.
Building the kit was a great joy, too. Chris offers step-by-step PDFs on how to build all his kits as well a parts list if you want to source out your own Legos – or maybe pull out the bin or two you have in your house already.
I affixed the kit (including its little keyboard and mouse) to a standard Lego board and added some OWC bling and it was ready to gift away.
Needless to say, it was a hit with Larry – though he did say that he could only wish that the original Macintosh had such an easy removable circuit board as it’s Lego representation does.
To be honest, nowadays I don’t get the opportunities much to sit down and build something with Lego blocks – just like I don’t get to piece together my own computer systems any more. Besides installing OWC memory and a Data Doubler with an SSD upgrade for my MacBook Pro, I haven’t really cracked open a computer case in more than a few years. So it felt really great to build this gift.
If you are looking for something to do this winter break, or anytime your hands don’t feel like being idle, take a look at Chris’ guides or kits and build something. He just wrapped up an excellent 12 days of Christmas themed series of builds. Also, check out his Flickr or Instagram feed for great Lego portraits and other blocky goodness.
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