As I briefly mentioned yesterday, the snow has finally arrived. For me, this meant a three hour drive home on a Friday night, so I wasn’t best pleased. Some people, however, thought it was great.
After some climbing and a bit of low speed sledging (the drive is steep enough for Macsen to launch himself, but not long enough for him to really pick up speed), we started looking for more fun things to do in the snow. Luckily, I had a broom.
… and it’s late. Again.
I have to say that the weather has been terribly disorganised since they privatised it. Going home on a Friday night is not the ideal day to be facing snow related delays.
On a more positive note, I have made a massive dent in my podcast queue.
Last week, a lot of the tech press was full of the news that a pair of enterprising Canadian students had managed to send a Lego minifig into space. Now Captain Barry Wiszniowski, chairman of the Air Canada Pilots Association’s safety division, has whined that launching Legonauts could represent a “concern to aviation”.
Wiszniowski said: “I think in the 25 years that I’ve been flying I’ve seen two weather balloons that passed on one side of the aircraft or the other.”
Not exactly a major threat to air traffic, then…
The students, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, do appear to have been reasonably diligent in ensuring that they weren’t doing anything dangerous or illegal and University of Toronto astrophysics professor Michael Reid said of the achievement: “It shows a tremendous degree of resourcefulness. For two 17-year-olds to accomplish this on their own is pretty impressive.”
Maybe Captain Wiszniowski would be happier if the students had just made some bombs, like they do in Belgium.
Anyway, here’s a video of the Legonaut in action.
It seems to be an annual event that our internet, TV and telephone provider invites their customers to a free day out in Plopsa Hasselt. They probably invite other customers to other locations, but Hasselt is the closest to us and, therefore, where we find ourselves the weekend before Halloween.
Of course I took a camera.
No matter how frustrating democracy is, I think so many people forget that this is a *feature* and not a bug.
Living in Belgium, as I do, this quote struck me as particularly pertinent. The country has had no government for 15 months, essentially because the Francophone and Flemish-speaking politicians really don’t trust each other much. But, because Belgium is a democracy – and one that understands what this means – this distrust has led to 15 months of discussions as the various political try to reach some sort of consensus.
It’s that time of the year again.
Do you want to know more about Belgium?
And yes, the country’s political structure really is as bonkers as that.
Thanks to @gdk for the link.
Yesterday was a public holiday, so we went to Antwerp and visited the zoo. Over the course of the day, Macsen got hold of my camera and started snapping. Here are the results.
It turns out that 13th June is a public holiday in The Netherlands. Now I’m just waiting to see if I will be putting my feet up or claiming for overtime.
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