Bamboo Spagetti

My brother who came back from Japan a few months ago got me this strange snack food for christmas. Basically it was instant cold noodles with sauce out of a fake plastic bamboo shoot. Not sure the western market is ready for this...

Phone back up

Amazingly, Bell pulled through and our phone was working by the time I got home from work yesterday. Apparently our line was 'accidentally' disconnected at the switch box. Whatever happened to five-nines reliability? Since moving to this house our phone reliability has been less than 98%.

Phone out again

Our phone line is down again since Friday. There was a crew of telephone repair guys in the neighbourhood on Saturday, and I assumed that they were fixing things. Nope, not ours. I called Bell and they assured me that it will be repaired by 21:00 tonight. Hopefully they are a little more prompt than the last time. If you need to get a hold of Emily or I, simply leave a message or send an email and we will try to get back within 24 hours.

Meltdown

Well maybe my LED headlight was not the best design. It worked great for about 5 hours of commuting to work and back and then began to dim. I thought that maybe my battery was dying, but that is not the case. Further investigation has shown that:

• The forward bias voltage of the LED has increased by about 0.5 volts.
• The light output is erratic over the current range.
• The lens has begun delaminating from the package.
• Solder flux has made a mess all over the aluminum board.

My conclusion is that this is a case of thermal overload. The thing is running just too damn hot.

Back to the drawing board, but what to do? I could drop down to a Luxeon I, which would have much less thermal issues, but also much less light output. I could re-install a new Luxeon III and run at a lower current. Maybe 700mA instead of the 900mA I was running it at. Somehow get a more efficient heat sink into the light... maybe a fan? This may be difficult due to space constraints.

Argh... I did not realize that 3 watts of heat would be such a problem to dissipate.