Season's Greetings

Merry Christmas to everyone in Bloggerland!
A picture of our Christmas tree version 2008 is here:



I think all of you can recognise this guy and especially this version:


But did you know that the "grandfather" of this Santa was a Finn? And his "grandmother" was a Swede?
The Coca-Cola Santa is the creation of mr. Haddon Sundblom, born 1899 in Muskegon, Michigan. His father came from Foglo in the Aland archipelago (Finland was a part of Russia back then) and his mother was from Sweden.
The rights to this picture belongs to the Coca-Cola company for sure but I nicked this picture from here:
St.Nicholas Center


Last weekend the Christmas-bunny paid us a visit:

He came bouncing into our backyard at dawn and took cover underneath our raspberry bushes. He has not fully developed his white wintercoat yet so he has to take cover from the dogs and other predators in the neighbourhood during daylight.
He sat there the whole day until dusk, then he bounced away looking for something to eat.
As you see, we have got a white Christmas this year though nearly all of the snow in this picture melted away in the middle of last week but then the weather changed for the colder and we have got some few inches more of snow by now and the temperature is several degrees C below zero now and this day dawned crisp and clear.
Ingela is baking and making n+1 different kinds of pickeled herring in the kitchen and I am just loafing around...
Well I suppose it's time to fetch the vacuum-cleaner and throw out the carpets.
See ya next year!

Lots of congratulations

Uh-oh... Time flies and I have not been around Blogspot for a while.
In the meantime my mother has turned 88, the very same day Pete and Roger received the Kennedy Center Honors of 2008, Ingela's father turned 81 and last but not least: Matti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland and renown peace-negotiator, recieved the Nobel Peace Prize of 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQomxbnQr7E
Embedding of this clip was disabled
Yesterday there was a big celebration concert in honor of mr. Ahtisaari in Norway, the concert was broadcasted on TV here in the Nordic countries.
My congratulations to all mentioned above.

And congratulations to myself, my amplifier is now working at full power, a new output transformer was shipped from Germany some weeks ago, all demons (like unwanted internal feedback and oscillation...) have been exorcised and it sounds really good, the output power before onset of excessive distortion in the power-amp itself is even higher than expected, I aimed for 50W but it is nearly 60W at less than 10% distortion which would be acceptable for any amplifier used for public announcement.
Single tone, pure sine wave at 1 kHz produces 50W at 2% distortion in clean mode.
It is funny that the guitar-amp industry never went for these tubes (QQE06/40 aka 5894)as they were around and mass produced in the late fifties.
Maybe the solution with the anode-contacts located on the top of the tube was a little scary and made tube-change a little more complicated. At least Ampeg built a big 200W amplifier using 6146B:s and they also have a similar solution with anode contacts on the top so the solution was not completely unfamiliar.
Now I have to build the second channel and order another output transformer from Germany. Then I will build it a nice case and hopefully get it ready in time for the fund-raising ball that Lukas and his classmates will arrange this winter in benefit for their trip to Germany and Poland this spring.