Day 8: No actual decorating today as such. I disposed of some old… - John C. Kirk
Dec. 3rd, 2005
12:45 am
Day 8: No actual decorating today as such. I disposed of some old furniture (via Freecycle), and also had an electrician out to fix my light (although "12-2" wound up being "by 5pm"). He confirmed that the old fitting was completely broken, so there was no way that I would have been able to reattach it myself. I did consider buying a replacement fitting (they probably only cost about 60p), but I wasn't confident about being able to fit it myself. It only took him a couple of minutes, but I'm sure that experience helps, and I didn't fancy doing it for the first time when I was up a ladder.
When I was a kid, my dad had a plug from an iron or something, where the power cable had been hacked off about six inches from the plug. I used to practice on that (taking it apart and putting it back together), particularly when I was going for a cub badge, and that wasn't too hard, but I'd need to refresh my memory before I tried it again (I'm not 100% sure about which colour is earth/live/ground). On a similar note, it would probably make sense for me to get a cheap light fitting and cable that I can practice with, in case this happens again in the future.
Out of idle curiousity, a poll:
Would you be confident wiring up a:
Power plug
6(60.0%)
Ceiling light fitting
0(0.0%)
Meanwhile, I've been doing Japanese practice before tomorrow's test, and I'm reasonably confident about it. One thing I've done is to write out Japanese names in Hiragana, to help me get more familiar with the symbols. Since I don't know that many names, I wound up resorting to manga characters for this! So, I apologise in advance if I sound really pretentious by saying these names in unusual ways, e.g. pronouncing "Utena" as "oo-ten-ah" rather than "you-tainer". Then again, anyone who spends a significant amount of time reading/watching Utena is likely to have a sufficiently fried brain that you probably won't notice the difference :)
Anyway, sleep time...
Just remember, blue = neutral, green/yellow = earth, brown = live. Probably. Unless it's the other kind of wiring, in which case... You can tell by what's connected where anyway. Live should go through the fuse, and Earth is the top pin on the plug.
I now have some sympathy for the Japanese acquaintance who moaned about Americans and carry-oh-key instead of ka-ra-o-ke.
Is that the same episode where Ross tells everyone he's learning about u-na-gi (with a strange gesture along his forehead), and everyone looks at him strangely and says "Eel?". (Unagi sushi is eel, if you didn't already know - I dunno how much looking at non-vegetarian sushi menus you do :) )