Sodaplay

Remember the Soda Constructor? They have now added a Soda Zoo with many cool pre-made… um… things. There even is a mad cow, but I was really amused by the mobile home. Or how about this jellyfish? This ball is also cool.

Google

Yay, Google has re-indexed my site! (It was de-indexed a while ago.) I had seen the occasional referrer from a Google search in the last few weeks, but whenever I searched for my URL or name on Google, it found nothing.

The search engine for Manila sites is fine, but it only searches stories and (former) homepages, not discussion group messages. If I want to search the whole site including the DG messages, I can now use Google again. Cool!

Update: This is strange: When I posted the above nine hours ago, a search for “Andrea’s Weblog” had this very page on the first page of results. I just searched again in order to find out when Google’s crawler came by, and I can’t find it any more. Is it just me, or does anyone else experience something like this?

Google also claims that no information for andrea.editthispage.com is available if I search for the URL, but if I do a search for any word and add “site:andrea.editthispage.com”, it turns up the proper pages of my site. It’s confusing.

Update, another two hours later: Okay, now it’s back. And here is Google’s cache for my home page. June 2nd? That was three weeks ago!

Solar Eclipse

Sheila has some interesting solar eclipse links today, especially this one: Science@NASA: Eclipse Safari. (The eclipse occured last Thursday and was visible in Africa.)

Sunday

It’s Sunday, and – as the name suggests – the sun is shining. And it’s warm and feels like summer, as it should a couple of days after summer solstice. Sunshine always puts me in a good mood. Hope you’re all enjoying your weekend as well!

And Scott, don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get some sunshine by tomorrow. I’ll send some over to you!

Mit dem Rad reisen

Bikefreaks beinhaltet “alles rund um das Reisen mit dem Fahrrad”. Vor allem lesens- und sehenswert sind die Reiseberichte:

Und dann gibt’s noch einige Verrückte, die mit dem Rad gleich die ganze Welt umrunden wollen:

Klaus Benning und Harald Kamp sind unterwegs auf der Mammut-Bicycle-Tour.

Paola und Dietmar Zimmermann sind seit März auf Grenzenlos-Weltumradelung.

Home alone

Since André is spending the weekend in Leipzig visiting a friend, I’m home alone. And it’s probably going to be a pretty uneventful and quiet weekend. I have lots of work to do, but if the weather gets better, I might venture into the Kottenforst, a huge forest south and west of Bonn, by bike. Or maybe I’ll ride along the Rhine instead?

Letter to God

“A little boy wanted $100.00 badly and prayed for two weeks but nothing happened. Then he decided to write God a letter to request the $100…”

Heh.

Internal

I just went over all the prefs of my site and replaced color names by hex codes. Now the pages should look right in Opera and other browsers that do not support all colour names. Please let me know if you find something looking weird.

Community

Happy fourth wedding anniversary, Audrey and Hal!

Applied Physics

Kirby Palm invented a fishie hi-rise that enables the fish in his pond to enjoy the view from above the surface. The page also explains the physics behind it.

Link via Narilka.

Mathematics

It’s Archimedes day over at BookNotes today. Many interesting links, especially this one: The Sunday Times – The Sum God, about the discovery of a lost Archimedes text:

“What has not been known until the examination of this book was that Archimedes was even ahead of Newton in the 17th century. Whereas Newton guessed at numbers and volumes, Archimedes, like mathematicians are able to today, precisely calculated them.”

Photos

Have you been to Ireland yesterday?

Also, Garret has a cool photo of a lightning (scroll down).

Thanks, Hal, Craig, John, Garret, Sheila, Susan, Al (cool song!), Jörg, Jeff (Hey, send your sunshine over to us if you don’t want it!), Helena, Martin, Jan-Willem (Dank je well!) for the birthday wishes. And thanks for all the monsters, Garret!

Ireland

More photos from Ireland at SpicyNoodles today!

Escher

Jan-Willem had this wonderful Escher link today: Escher Web Sketch. Great fun!

(I think I need to collect all my Escher links on one page…)

New toy computer

Since Duncan has let the cat out of the bag: yes, it’s my birthday, and you can see what I got on the pictures to the right. After more than six years, I thought it was high time for a new computer, so I’ve bought this one. And yes, I like it a lot!

I had planned for André and me to go on a little bike tour today, but since the weather is not cooperating, I’ll spend a lazy day at home. Maybe a friend is going to drop by tonight.

But don’t forget it’s not only my birthday today:

Happy Birthday to you, Sheila!!!

Have a wonderful day!

Photos

André’s got more pictures from his trip: Ireland, day three.