anything anyone told you about Nepali gin

Anything anyone has said negatively about Nepali gin is a lie. The juniper berries really do their work in the Blue Riband. At 375 rupees for 750mL (72 Nepal rupees = 1 USD), you can't beat it, unless you're buying Oasis, where the tonic will cost you as much as the gin.

Rosie, from Stanford, and her two friends have been staying with us here in Patan for the last couple days. They've been in India for two months, and tomorrow they leave for Lukla on their way to Everest Base Camp for Christmas.

I was standing in a book store down the street the other day, reading what the Economist had to say about the US economy. The short of it, before I had to go home and take a nap to recover, is that it's completely tanking as George Bush Jr. spends his time staring at his pewter Iraqi-war risk pieces, delicately painting each soldier's M-16 gun metal grey while the world is passing us by. Even the international edition of Newsweek, in the same issue where it compares Bush and Blair to Roosevelt and Churchill, says China's GDP will eclipse the US's by 2025. This is just great.

Ecosystems-wise, we got some great brushless DC low-torque motors from a Chinese importer the other day. These motors are meant to power electric scooters. They range up to 350 watts, at a rated operating speed of 170 rpm. Ewan and I spent the weekend in the garage at our bosses' place, taking apart and testing setups, soldering and constantly asking why the previous Nepali repairmen decided that the first step of fixing a motor they don't understand is to cut off all the connectors, destroying forever the information of which wire goes to which. Aside from the cut-off connector issue, this is great news for tarbato development. A 350 watt motor at 170 rpm would mean no bulky geartrain to rob efficiency and break.

We opened up one of the broken Chinese motor controllers, and guess what was inside? A 16-series PIC, a burned-out 7806 voltage regulator, and a lot of power mosfets bolted to the housing for heat sinking. This stuff is straight out of 218.