Category Archives: Personal

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… :-)

(News) Flash

You should really keep paying attention to the speed limit while pondering why the heck someone flashes their brights at you even though your headlights can’t possibly be broken because you just had the car checked at the garage the previous day.

It turns out that you remember the other reason why some drivers flash their brights at you in Germany a few seconds later when a blinding red flash indicates that you have just been photographed by the police: The driver was trying to tell you that there’s a speed trap around the corner.

This is what happens if you’re taking the scenic route through the Rhine valley instead of using the autobahn for your way home from work as usual. At least I was only going a little bit over the speed limit; we shall see if I get a ticket or not.

(Related: Why did you flash your brights at me tonight?, Headlight Vocabulary.)

Seven Years

Seven years and almost 3500 posts ago I signed up for a Manila weblog at www.editthispage.com. I honestly never thought that I would keep this up for such a long time, but even though my posting frequency has decreased quite a bit because I don’t have as much time as I used to have it is still a lot of fun.

There are two main reasons for me to keep this weblog: First of all, it is an excellent way for me to organize links to interesting websites in a way that I’m able to find them again, even years later (if the pages have not disappeared in the interim). And second of all, I’ve met and continue to meet interesting people from different countries, of different ages, with different jobs and backgrounds, most of which I would not have met otherwise.

I tend to think that I have few long-time readers, most of which I know (waving hello to the people who started out at ETP as well!), but sometimes I hear from people who have read my weblog for some time without me knowing them, like LuCaS, a fellow physics teacher from Belgium, who noted this weblog’s anniversary a day in advance. Hi Lucas!

Thank you all for reading!

P.S.: I know that National Delurking Week was the second week of January, but if you’ve been lurking here, why don’t you consider this the delurking posting for Serendipita and leave a comment? Thanks!

The next morning

Well, the power went out less than five minutes after my posting last night, came back one for a few minutes half an hour later but than went back out again. It turns out that there’s not much to do without power. Reading by candlelight is not much fun, so we watched a movie on André’s laptop (which had a full battery) and went to bed early. We woke up around 11:30 pm when the power – and the lights – went back on.

Right now, it’s still quite windy, and it has just started to rain. It’s not light outside yet, but it seems like we made it through the storm okay. The trees are still standing, the house wasn’t damaged, and the only thing left to do seems to be setting the clocks on some appliances.

Windy!

A storm warning for the entire country has been issued here in Germany, even an extreme storm warning for some parts.

“Der Deutsche Wetterdienst (DWD) gibt wegen des verheerenden Sturms für die Mittelgebirge, Teile der Bundesländer Baden-Württemberg, Bayern, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Hessen, Thüringen, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Rheinland-Pfalz und das Saarland eine extreme Unwetterwarnung heraus. Für die anderen Regionen galt eine Unwetterwarnung.” (Quelle: Spiegel online)

Take a look at this map at the Deutsche Wetterdienst: Warnsituation.

It has been very windy here since last night, but not too bad. Even though the storm had not started in earnest yet, we ended classes early today like many other schools so the kids were able to go home safely. When I came home from school later in ther afternoon (there’s a lot of extra work at school at the moment because of the imminent report cards), two neighbouring towns had power outages and almost noone was out on the roads. As you can see, we still have electricity, but the light already flickered a few times…

But I’m not really worried that anything really serious could happen. There are no big old trees that could fall onto our house, so we should be quite safe here.