Monday, June 25, 2012

Cuban E-Mail

I receive many e-mails in connection with my electronic designs. This morning I received one from Cuba. This is unusual, as e-mails in Cuba are intricately monitored, and ordinary citizens do not have access to international e-mail. This one was routed through the Federacion de Radioaficionados de Cuba -- some questions (in Spanish) on metal detector design. In this regard, an excellent place to look is Geotech.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Lutheran Church


Being on leave, I attended St. Martini Lutheran Church in the city today -- where the minister was also on leave. We received a warm welcome from Alby (the photo on the right). Her husband Jan (left) preached with conviction on (my personal summary): "Busyness is sin -- if through it you lose your true priorities." It was a wet, wintry day, with modest attendance, yet a thorough mix of old and young. The service was partly in German, partly in English. You may click on the photos to enlarge to 80k. OBSERVATION: Something that struck me was that this Church's collections are much less than ours (which we think are modest).

Friday, June 22, 2012

Domestic Scene

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This one's just a pretty picture. It is my fiancée E. (on the right) with her mother, in her mother's kitchen. I took the photo during New Year's festivities this year. It is a small cottage on a remote farm. You may click on the photo for VGA.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Spawning Bots

My hobby is/was electronic design. Eight years ago, I designed a Programmable Robot, which used one of the world's first high-level (easily) programmable chips, by Revolution Education. Electronics journalist Alan Winstanley gave me some as a "take-a-look-at-these" gift. Then Revolution Education put a programmable robot into production -- the Microbot -- which looked uncannily like mine. Now, more recently, two competing designs have gone into production -- the Minibot and the Scribbler. OBSERVATION: Are these designs still related to my original? Personally, I think so.

Friday, June 15, 2012

A Coincidence?

 
The photo was taken twenty years ago. It shows son M. two months before his seventh birthday, standing next to an elephant cranium. Today he is doing a doctorate on elephant bones. A coincidence? I asked him, and he says merely that he remembers this moment.

Three Wheels vs. Four

An enormous and immediately noticeable difference between my three wheels (a Mahindra) and my "new" four wheels (a VW) is that the VW chews up R100 of fuel driving once around the city, while the Mahindra seems to go on forever. In fact the Mahindra uses about one-third as much fuel as the average car/automobile. The photo shows my Mahindra on the Suuranys Pass, en route to my fiancée's childhood home.