I have always been a huge fan of LEGO. My parents used to get me plenty when I was a small child, and as soon as I started earning a wage, I bought LEGO Technics sets. My children had every single DUPLO set that there was but at that time, we didn't invest in any "grown up" LEGO.
That all changed when I was out collecting milk money one day. One of the houses that I called at mentioned that they were selling there LEGO Technics sets. It turned out that they had all of the big sets and wanted £25 for the lot!
I kept the sets in an immaculately organised box with loads of trays for each type of component. I used to build all sorts of stuff and really enjoyed the creative element of using it, and the problem solving aspect of fitting components into a task that they weren't quite designed for was especially attractive for my anarchistic personality.
When I got divorced, my ex wouldnt let me have the LEGO set, quite petty really but there was nothing I could do about it and there were much bigger fights to fight. Im lucky that my three kids saw how important it was for me though and gradually small amounts of LEGO made their way to my house in a magical way!
Shortly after I re married, I was in a Toys R Us store (cant remember why, possibly looking for a present for my younger children) and I came across the NXT Mindstorms set. As a teacher, we had looked at these sets as a possible way of teaching programming but the idea of controlling all the bricks proved too much of a challenge so we never pursued it. To cut a long story short, I bought a set and began making all sorts of crazy robots!
The Internet is a great place to find building ideas and see videos of various robots that people have built. LEGO produce some very clever software for progamming the NXT brick and also for designing models and its all free.
Yesterday my wife and I went to The LEGO Show in Manchester. It was amazing to see how many people were there and some of the stuff that was on show is really inspiring and must have taken hundreds of hours.
I was very pleased to see the famous and world record holding Cubestormer solve a Rubiks Cube in 3.5s. Here is a video of it in action:

I couldnt resist buying another set and set 8043 looked really interesting. It uses four motors to control six directions of travel (three for the jib, two for the tracks and one to rotate the whole cab). A fourth motor is used to select which of set of functions is used by sliding a form of clutch between two settings. It also uses the same component to transfer power to the tracks. One motor drives a shaft that runs in the centre of the pivot for the cab and another motor uses a concentric tube to power the other track. I must take some more pics but for now here is a timelapse of the whole build process!