Category: Miscellaneous

We had an ice storm today, which is to say we had an extended period of freezing rain that covered everything in an impressive slick of ice.

Freezing Rain is rain that freezes as soon as it hits the ground (or the trees, homes, cars, etc.). It occurs every now and then during winter, but is rarely sustained. Today it lasted several hours and a nice coating of ice formed on everything. I drove to school to fill the liquid nitrogen at our lab, and whilst the roads were ok, the paths at school were downright treacherous. I regretted not bringing my camera, since the large evergreens were beautiful bowing down under the additional weight of their unwanted silvery coats.

When I got home I went out and took some shots, in the hope that those of you who have never seen this can get an idea of what it is like…

< Grass < A shrub in our backyard < Detail of the above < Solar light and holly < Seed pod on the tree out front Some branches came down, although none larger than about an inch in diameter. I just went out now (about 4pm) to collect them up and assess any damage (luckily, there was none) and noticed much of the ice has melted away as the day had warmed slightly. I'm glad I took the photos, since the beauty of this morning now seems lost.

So I had so much fun building that Lego crane the other weekend I went up into the attic this pasy weekend and dug out my meagre collection of Lego. I quickly realised I had no instructions, and onld a dim recollection of what sort of kits I owned (for instance, I knew I bought two small Lego Star Wars kits when Episode 1 came out). Here’s a shot of all the Lego, as I found it in the attic:

< What goes where? It didn't take me long to find a few spectacular archives of Lego instructions online. I spent many hours sorting through them, trying to recognise kits I may own and assemblind them. Brickfactory was particularly helpful. Eventually my memory was spent and I was left with a smaller pile of bricks with no idea what they made. Then I turned to Peeron, which is a database of Lego pieces, cross-referenced to kits. I had, for instance, in my pile of bricks a white surfboard. I simply searched for Lego surfboards on Peeron, and from there browsed every kit that contained only one white board and easily found the one I was looking for.

Even though I didn’t have a great deal of kits, the Lego-sleuthing and assembling of what I had took many enjoyable hours this past Sunday. Here’s a shot of everything put together:

< Assembled And here's where the story descends from "Oh no, he's now getting into Lego..." to "Oh my god, the man is insane." Suffice to say I made some purchases yesterday…

< Look at the size of it! Details will surely follow :)

One of the many items (see last entry) I received for Christmas was this Lego technic crane set:

I opened it the other day. I was going to build it during the downtime between waiting for World of Warcraft PvP battlegrounds to start. But it was immediately obvious this model would require more than occasional attention, so I put it aside for a while.

Yesterday I built it. It took more than five hours, during which we watched the marathon of Cash In The Attic on BBC America (a great show, BTW). Here are a few shots of the in-construction and finished product:

The crane has three independent adjustable cables, which adjust the height of the ‘hook’, the angle between the primary and secondary boom and the angle of the entire trio of booms (with respect to the cab). I particularly like how these are engineered in such a way that they click when turned – a trick achieved via use of rubber pieces!

The finished crane is massive. In the rightmost picture, the height is about 60cm, and it is about that long as well. The cab can rotate 360 on the tracks, and clever counterweight pieces (I suspect they are normal lego bricks filled with metal) prevent the crane from tipping over.

A very impressive kit indeed 🙂