3KW

You may be wondering where I have been. Actually I have just been taking a week off, and I don't tend to update these pages when I'm not at work. It was an enforced holiday because the company at which I currently work shuts down for one week every year. No one really seems to know quite why. It was however, quite a nice little break.

In the week off I managed to get the car through an MOT test first time. That has only ever happened to me once before, and even then they had to adjust a headlight. In truth, the man said that the emissions were just on the very edge and he could have failed it. That's because the catastophic converter was welded back together. So I guess I owe him a beer. I also got a new tax disk for it, at some ridiculous cost thanks to Blair's Britain. I also got an interview in Poole this week. The dragon is quite interested in relocating there and it is a nice part of the country. So fingers crossed. Another position has also come up in Portsmouth and interest has been shown. I'm hoping for a phone interview.

I finally got around to putting up a gallery of baby pictures on DongXi yesterday. You can either click on that link and go to the gallery page by clicking on the train window, or you can go directly to the html page here. And if you don't like frames, you can even go straight to the pictures, here. You may of course be bored to death with my baby rambling, in which case you can skip right on to the next paragraph containing no baby news without looking, I quite understand.

Talking of babies, we haven't quite mastered the art of sleeping through an entire night yet. Last night however was the closest yet. He woke at 2.30 for a feed, and was still asleep when I left at 6.30 this morning. He has developed a habit lately of screaming whenever he is put down anywhere and last night we decided that we should just let him scream for a while to see if he would shut up. He did, but it took 30 minutes. It wasn't easy, but I think he has to learn that his parents can't carry him around all day. We had dinner together without him for the first time in a while, but we did of course have to listen to him bawling. I hope this doesn't last long. This morning he had managed to turn himself completely around in his cot, so his head was where his feet should have been. I suspect this was a protest.

I haven't really been watching the news or reading papers this week. I am aware of an anti terrorist raid in Britain that resulted in a non-fatal shooting. There seems to be some confusion over whether the victim was shot by police or another terrorist. It seems to me that simply looking at the bullet would confirm that.

I've just worked out that our new 3KW kettle must draw 12.5A. In fact, that's 13A if the supply voltage is 230V. That's a lot of current. How do countries with 110V supplies manage to run 3KW devices? That's over 27A. I guess you simply have slow kettles in those countries.

I'm designing and building a Tesla coil with friend Big Pete. We've got a secondary coil wound on a piece of water pipe I stole from a site at the side of the road. I've got the design in my head and I need to build some huge capacitance next. This may all sound liek Greek to you, but it's terribly important to me.