Funny Chinese picture: these guys are in a rush

This picture was shot by one of the guys that is working in our Chinese factory in Qingxi near the highway.....See the bored guy that is sitting locked in his car!

Nice gig with our band: The One

Yesterday afternoon we had our first gig at "Kerkzicht" in Diessen with our new singer. All went very well.
I hope to post some pictures in the coming days.

For our next gigs: check http://www.youtube.com/user/patrickduis

Cloudy nights: so scope pimping time

Most nights are cloudy, so there's not much to be seen with the telescope, so it's scope pimping time.
I decided to turn my heq5 pro mount into a real goto mount with the EQDIR interface. After installing it I can star-align my mount, together with Cartes du Ciel planetary software in such a way that I can easily select any object in CdC and the scope will automatically slew to that object. This will enable me to see many objects in 1 night without having the fuss off starhopping from 1 object to another. Which is in turn nice to do, but takes a lot of time, and since the nights are getting shorter it makes sense to focus on using the "dark time" more efficiently. We'll see what happens when the EQDIR interface arrives from the USA.......

End of March snow?

This morning there was a few centimeters of snow in our garden, very unusual for March......On the news was that at 8.30hrs there was an 888km traffic jam, not the all time high, but second best ever in Netherlands.





On the way to my work I shot this nice picture while driving through the woods.

Astronomy picture of the day

I found a very nice site each day has a different very nice picture of an astronomy object.

Look at:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

.......

Back from Pila

Here we are flying in an Alenia ATR72 turboprop from Poznan to Warsaw......











And from Warsaw with an Embraer jet airplane to Amsterdam. Here we are flying towards the west, where the sun is setting on the horizon.
This airplane had a lot of room in the economy class, very special for such a small plane.

Final testing

Here one of the kilns is running a cooling test.

Almost ready!

This is the inside of one of the kilns. You see the ceramic heating elements that heat up the kiln. Each element can heat with a maximum current of 90A and 8kW. This enables us to heat the kiln up to about 1300 degr. Centigrade......






And this is the control room. On the right is the computer that controls the kiln I put over here last year. On the left are the 2 new ones....

Pila report 2

Yesterday we had dinner in the "Orange Piano" where they serve the famous Polish "Zurek" soup in a very nice piece of bread......
I had many times "Zurek" in Polish restaurants, but this was one of the best ever....






And this morning when I opened the curtains of my hotelroom I saw a very nice sunrise.......
It became a very nice day today, with a lot of sunshine! (Maybe spring has started over here......)

Pila report

Today is Sunday, we went to the factory for some checks on both kilns. After that we took a nice walk through Pila because it was nice and sunny.
Here's one of the churches.




The people over here paint their houses in very nice colours.......

Both kilns are already running burnout curve

It is all going quite well over here in Pila. Today we burned both kilns out and tomorrow we are going to test with a dummy load of products.







One of the kilns had a broken UPS. After checking it thoroughly I found that one solder spot of the main relay was damaged.
I soldered a separate wire to the connection points, and the UPS started working ok again!

Back in Pila again.....

So: I'm back in Pila again for starting 2 new kilns.
The trip was long and boring: from Amsterdam to Warsaw in 2 hours time, then 5 hours waiting in some kind of -shithole- and then in 1 hours time back from Warsaw to Poznan. From there with taxi to Pila.

The weather was very nice though, see the picture......