Year: 2006
-
Broadband Comes to Town
Even though I knew the village we were shifting to was small I thought that broadband internet access was available everywhere in Germany. Unfortunately that wasn’t true and even the largest company (Deutsche Telekom or T-Online, T-Mobile etc) had few options[1]. All I wanted was something that meant the phone could be used at the…
-
Holiday Plans: Summer 06
Unfortunately our time away this year will be a little less than we would like, due mostly to being book-ended between my experimental preparations at work and the children returning to school. Joshua also has a week-long excursion with the youth at church (see our online calendar for more ‘when’ details on these things). So…
-
Amsterdam
13/4/06We have previously posted a few reports about trips we have made as a family. Many of these give a glowing report and generally depict a happy time with enthralled visitors. So that our readers don’t receive an unbalanced view of our travels we feel compelled to include our recent trip to Amsterdam. The official…
-
Fire Targa
Though I’m usually in favour of the separation of Church and State, if it comes at the cost of losing many of the religious public holidays we have recently enjoyed here I’m not so sure :). In reverse order, we have recently had days off for Fronleichnam[1], Pfingsten[2], Christi Himmelfahrt[3], Ostern and Karfreitag[5]. Another religious-type…
-
Spring Sights
As I mentioned last year, the switch to spring seems to be very fast here. True, we have had a bit of a lingering winter but on the whole I am only slightly less amazed this time round at how quickly the new leaves appear, flowers bloom, festivities kick-in and something approaching warmer weather arrives.…
-
One Year More
My employer, Stichting voor Fundamenteel Onderzoek der Materie (FOM), has offered me a contract extension of one year. Several difficulties have arisen in completing my project to the previous schedule (current contract was due to expire the end of July) and they have asked me to stay on to finish these experiments and to help…
-
Frankfurt & Prague
Here is a blog about a trip we made last October: Immediately after Fenton’s trip to the US we took advantage of the opportunity offered by the Autumn holidays (Herbstferien) to travel to Frankfurt and Prague. We left late as usual (to be fair Fenton had arrived back only the day before, and the weather…
-
Poster Accolade
Followers of the newly published calendar (link to the left) may have noticed a recent two-day event, the 18th NNV/CPS Symposium. It’s a small conference run by the Dutch Physical Society (NVV) primarily as a forum for PhD students. I presented a poster (pdf file, 1.8MB) entitled Detection of Relativistic Electrons and Positrons in a…
-
More Gruesome Details!
In the wake of popular demand I have decided two things with regards to this blog. Firstly, I solemnly promise to further harrass, cajole, poke and pout other family members into posting more frequently. It won’t be easy to increase my already virtually intolerable high output of these Encouragement MechanismsTM but it’s a sacrifice I…
-
One Year Here!
For those that have not been watching their calendars recently, we have been in Germany now for one year! Though we said goodbye to some people before Christmas 2004 we didn’t arrive here until the 5th February 2005. To celebrate this small milestone we had a small party with a family who were very helpful…