Monthly Archives: June 2007

We have internet again!

And a phone connection, too, actually, but our phone got hit by the lightning as well. I ordered a new phone today. Amazingly, our little village of less than 100 houses has an electronics shop, and they said the phone will be here by this time tomorrow.

Other parts of our village have been out of phone service for the past two weeks as well, and it seems that an underground phone cable was hit, so it’s likely that they will have to wait even longer to be connected again because it seems that they have to dig up the cable to find the problem. The telecom guy said that we were the first household in our village that he was able to help right away. Phew!

Kaboom.

Apparently our phone line was struck by lightning yesterday. The ISDN-DSL splitter, NTBA, DSL modem, router and possibly the phone are fried. (Hard to find out about the phone for sure if you haven’t got a working splitter and NTBA any more.)

Fortunately, the powerline was not struck, or the FI circuit breaker worked fast enough, because everything else seems to be fine.

Without a working phone or internet connection it’s really hard to get any work done, to reach other people or be reached by them. I do have a mobile phone, but rarely use it and don’t give out the number to people. And my only internet access at the moment is at work.

Lego

My sister and I played with Lego a lot when we were kids. We had a small playroom, and my dad built a table for our Lego train and roads etc. that took up one whole end of the room.

Brickfactory has got scans of all (?) the Lego sets and the building instructions, starting about 1958. Link via MetaFilter, of course.

I found some of the sets my sister and I had: my favourite house (another photo), because it has hinges in the middle. That way, it was one whole house or two halves in which you could play. We also owned a motor, a police boat (the set is from the seventies, back when the minifigs didn’t have movable arms and legs yet!), a petrol station, a doctor’s car and quite a few sets from the Fabuland series.

We often played with this train, complete with transformator and points (ours were manual though).

We also inherited a lot of bricks from my father. Of course I don’t know the complete sets because his parts came in one big box, but I’m sure he had the letters and numbers and probably some of these houses – left, middle, right – because I remember the plates used for the roofs and the windows and doors. These sets apparently came out in 1958, when my dad was ten years old. It looks like the bricks back then only came in white, red or clear.

Ah, those were fun times… :-)