One day I happened onto a box containing an electronic kit, with components packaged into plastic blocks with magnetic contacts. The blocks could be assembled onto a metal plate to form various interesting circuits, with many examples in the manual. I spent several hours playing with it, then my grandmother found me. She was upset because she had bought it to give me as a Christmas gift, and thought she had hidden it adequately. I didn’t get to play with it any more, and I didn’t receive it as a Christmas gift.

I didn’t remember the name of the kit, and I’d never seen one again until today, though I did get a Radio Shack 100-in-1 Electronic Project Kit a few years later.  A friend got one of the kits with plastic blocks with magnetic contacts recently, and it turns out that it is a Lectron kit.  They are still made and sold in Germany.The Lectron blocks look exactly like what I remember from the basement.    In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were imported and sold in the US by the Macalaster Scientific subsidiary of Raytheon. The Decode Systems web site has a review from the September 1967 issue of Electronics Illustrated.

There are some other similar products, such as the Elenco Snap Circuits (available from Radio Shack), and for digital logic, Logiblocs.  Bloc-Tronic was similar to Lectron, but was apparently not very commercially successful, as it is extremely rare.

I’ve had a PowerShot G2 for about five years now, and it’s about time to replace it.  I’d like to get a digital SLR like the Canon Digital Rebel XTi for digital photomicrography of integrated circuits, but for my initial experiments a friend has offered to lend me his Nikon.

For general daily use, though, I don’t want to carry around a digital SLR.  I like the convenience of the LCD viewfinder on non-SLR digital cameras.  I’m tempted by the PowerShot SD900.

Although I have a friend who worked for an employer that bred greyhounds, I’d never been around one before Dawnie.  She was quite possibly the most friendly dog I’ve ever met.  Mom says that she wasn’t exceptional in that regard.  I’m amazed that more people don’t have greyhounds as pets; apparently a movement to adopt them started in the 1990s.

In recent times, I’ve only been able to visit my mother and sisters a few times a year, but I always enjoyed seeing mom’s dogs, and especially Dawnie.  She will be missed.