Author Archives: Andrea

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… :-)

Chernobyl

It’s been a little over 21 years now since the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl blew up. I wrote about it on the 20th anniversary and a few years earlier, but the MetaFilter thread Chernobyl – 20 years later has some new (at least to me) links on the topic.

My Journey to Chernobyl: 20 Years After the Disaster is an article with photos by Mark Resnicoff, who traveled to the contamination zone in June 2006. There also is a discussion about his essay.

Chernobyl Legacy by Paul Fusco:

On April 26th, 1986, Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4 unleashed a thoroughly modern plague that emptied cities, condemned entire regions, and seeped invisibly into the bodies of those exposed to its destructive presence.

Photographer Paul Fusco faces the dark legacy of Chernobyl, focusing on the horrifying human consequences of the event that is now 20 years in the past. Fusco’s work forces us to remember an important nightmare that we would forget at the peril of our morality and our future.

It takes a while for the site to load, but it’s worth the wait. At least look at and listen to “Chernobyl legacy” from the menu.

Karol Lasia has a collection of black-and-white photos from the area. Lasia was born in 1986 and traveled to Chernobyl and Pripyat in the summer of 2006.

Vögel

In unserem Garten haben wir seit Anfang April ein Vogelhaus (welches im Winter auch als Futterstation dienen kann, tolle schwedische Erfindung). Schon nach wenigen Tagen hatten sich Kohlmeisen eingenistet. Nach etwa zwei Wochen Brütens waren die Jungen geschlüpft, man konnte ihr Piepsen aus dem Vogelhäuschen hören – von Tag zu Tag lauter.

Gestern morgen beobachteten wir mal wieder vom Frühstückstisch aus, dass die Jungen immer häufiger aus dem Einflugloch schauten, besonders wenn die Eltern gerade auf Futtersuche waren und zurückerwartet wurden. Wir vermuteten, dass die Jungen innerhalb der nächsten Tagen ausfliegen würden.

Dann gingen wir auf Radtour – und als wir abends zurückkehrten, waren schon alle Vöglein ausgeflogen! Heute haben wir das Dach des Nistkastens abgenommen und einen Blick auf das leere Nest geworfen. Mal sehen, ob die Meisen noch ein zweites Mal Eier legen und Junge großziehen.

Auf der Suche nach Informationen zu Meisen bin ich auf Manfred Boehmels Seite zu Kohlmeisen gestoßen. Er hat einen mit Videokamera und Bewegungssensoren versehenen Nistkasten in seinem Garten und berichtet über den Jahresablauf der Vögel – mit Fotos aus dem Kasten, versteht sich.

Übrigens gibt es über’s Web auch einen Live-Einblick in den Nistkasten, die Meisencam. Da die ersten Jungen am 24.05., also vor drei Tagen, geschlüpft sind, lohnt sich der Blick in den Nistkasten momentan besonders!