James Jessiman Memorial Award for 2013 awarded to Magnus Forsberg

[Willy Tschager]

The LDraw.org Steering Committee is pleased to announce that the 2013 James Jessiman Memorial Award (JJMA) recipient is Magnus Forsberg.

Just as last year the LDraw Steering Committee was keen to award one of what it called: "The unsung heros of the PT " - in short, people who have worked hard to keep LDraw alive. What does add more value to LDraw and keeps it alive than new parts?
Though Magnus Forsberg has joined the LDraw team only at the end of 2009 and could be considered a youngster among LDraw part authors, he has authored 238 official parts and made changes (improvements) to a further 256 official parts. This workload places him among the top 10 of the part authors. Browsing the activity log a the Parts Tracker you'll hardly find a day where Magnus didn't leave his trace. Patterns, highly sophisticated parts, corrections and shortcuts there seams to be no type of parts Magnus cannot master and the LDraw library wouldn't be what it is today without the contribution and dedication of this year's James Jessiman Memorial Award: Magnus Forsberg!

More information on the JJMA can be found at: http://www.ldraw.org/article/222.html

Willy Tschager
On behalf of the LDraw.org Steering Committee

[Philippe Hurbain]

A well deserved award!!! Congratulations, Magnus!

[Michael Heidemann]

Congratulation Magnus

[Orion Pobursky]

Congrats to Magnus and a hearty thank-you from me for dealing with the somewhat cryptic parts creation process and continuing to make LDraw better.

[Steffen]

Congratulations, Magnus, this is so very well deserved.
Thanks for all your effort and dedication you put into LDRAW.

[Magnus Forsberg]

Thank you all.
I've been sitting, just looking at the screen, for an hour now, trying to grasp this.
I feel very honoured and can't stop smiling.

Thanks to the SteerCo.

Thanks to all fellow authors for teaching me how to make better parts.

Thank you, James.

[Max Martin Richter]

Congratulations from my side as well!
It's always a pleasure for me to work with you on PT and also sharing some thoughts about specific parts via mail.

BTW: Now should you think about creating an entry in the people area of the LDraw wiki. ;-)

[Santeri Piippo]

Well deserved indeed, congratulations.

[Magnus Forsberg]

Hi,

I feel that I must at least try to write some sort of intruduction here.

I was born in January 1964 and turned 50 in the week prior to the announcement of this award. What a week. I work and live in Södertälje, 35 km south of Stockholm. Today I work as a test vehicle coordinator at Scania Technical Center. There is a very strong, but not obvious, connection between Scania trucks and LEGO. Both companies stand very strongly on the idea of modularization. Think for a minute about the fact that every new Scania truck you have seen during the last twenty years, all have an identical windscreen, regardless of the size or shape of the cab.

I enjoy listening to progressive metal, like Dream Theater or Arjen Lucassen, or spanish/hispanic music, like Los Lobos.
Ich verstehe deutch, aber nur ein bisschen, und, no hablo español, pero comprendo un poco.

My first set was probably the towtruck 372. I remember it very strongly. I have a younger brother and remember us building cars and houses on the floor in his room way up in my upper teens. I came out of my dark ages when I found a 8458 Silver Champion in the local toystore, at half the original price. It still stands inside my livingroom table.

I found LDraw after reading about the TLG reaction to the fact that LDD had been hacked, and that they didn't object.
I started tinkering with the pallettes and the translation file ldraw.xml, but soon decided to learn how to make all the missing parts that wasn't found in LDraw. I have no programming skills, but have always been very curious on how things work.

As an employee, working in research and development for more than 20 years now, I'm quite used to things beeing almost finished, but I have also learned that I should never be satisfied, and allways strive to learn something new, and that things can allways be made better. After all, you never fail untill you stop trying, and only dead fish follow the stream. ;-)

/
Magnus

p.s.
I can't figure out how to add a page to the wiki, and it would be OK if someone wanted to move this text to that place.

[Willy Tschager]

Thanks for sharing. I added a stub to the wiki:

http://wiki.ldraw.org/index.php?title=Me...s_Forsberg

I'll do some more editing, once I've got a nice pic. :-D

w.