So, what did I do today...find a couple of extremely rare HID lamps! 

Awesome, are they ones you haven't found yet?

Yep!

Getting things up and running over here in terms of HID as well... for the first time ever in almost 10 years, I finally cleaned the glass lens
of two of my 20w CMH track lights. I've had those Powerball Sylvania 20w CMH lamps in them since about 4 years ago I think, and the glass lens
were so dirty that it didn't show how bright those lamps are. At all. Now I see... those CMH track lights are insanely bright.
From now on, I'll be regularly cleaning those glass lens... that was about 10 years of dust that I just cleaned off. Suzukir122 is an idiot.

Built a ballast box for my SOX 90w. There's a BSX90 and associated ignitor in there.
The box is generously sized because my previous HPL-N 50w ballast box was so small that i could barely get my hands in there to mount a strain relief etc. It is also large enough to mount some sort of cradle for the lamp on top.

I had a little fuckup - i designed the box for 6mm MDF, but for some reason the local hardware store doesn't sell that anymore so i used 9mm. Only after cutting i realized i didn't modify the cutting files...
It still fits together and is sturdy enough, just not as nice as the one i made for the 50w ballast for the clear MV lamp.

Jerry rigged a setup for my Sylvania F14T12 tube. It works, but the 15w ballast significantly underruns the tube. The specs are - as far as i can tell - 390 to 420mA. It's running on 320mA (rms) on this ballast, which i think may be problematic in the long run.

Perhaps a 20w ballast will do the job at 370mA - close enough. Got multiple 20w fixtures sitting around that i can steal a ballast from, but i kinda use all of them...

The workbench is of course in its perpetual state of chaos, today lit by a SON 50w and a color 530 (29) tube overhead if i'm actually doing the work.

I'm a lab tech at a high school, and i was asked to demonstrate some light spectrum related stuff to 13-14 and 17-18 year old students.
First explain stuff about primary colors, showing the mixing of R, G and B leds to form white light.

Then i blew the little ones' minds by showing that a clear HPMV lamp produces a mostly white light if you shine it on a white surface, but skin tones become a ghastly pale green. Put the lamp into a diffraction grating setup, show that there's a almost complete lack of red, and that the other colors are far dominant, causing the odd look despite having white light to the eye.

For the older ones some stuff about absorption and emission of substances and their spectral signatures (our cadmium spectrum lamp is particularly beautiful i think), demonstrated the total lack of color rendering with my big 90w SOX lamp (i got the comment upon starting it up 'Is that like a neon lamp?' Why yes, that is indeed mostly neon, with a bit of argon mixed in!) as well as black fire. Some demonstrations with the relation between the temperature of a black body radiator (read: incandescent lamp), color rendering (showing the incandescent has a near perfect continuous spectrum, a CFL has a really weird spectrum, and a modern LED is practically as good as an incandescent - but has a blue hump in the spectrum, with associated potential influence on the circadian rhythm of people and animals in nature, when the municipality or province installs LED lighting that doesn't have a reduced blue level.
For fluorescence, i of course had to drink some tonic from an uranium glass cup, and i showed that white LEDs actually work the same as fluorescent lamps - with the phosphor being activated by a blacklight CFL.

In return, it blew my mind that the older ones were able to listen to me for a full 45 minutes and were actually interested. Working at a school can be pretty satisfying with the right group of kids and the right sort of demonstration.

Wow, glad the kids liked it! Most of them will like a physical demonstration, not just watching a video, or some boring lecture followed by a quiz.

@Laurens Wow, that sounds cool. I wish I could have been in your class instead of being stuck with my sleepy science "teacher" in grade8.

Received a Philips CDM400S51/HOR/4K/ALTO for free!

Not today, but last light-thing I did was replace a ballast (2xF40 GE electronic RS) in one of my aquariums.
Kinda surprised it died, was only around 5 years old. One of the lamps did go EOL, which shouldn't have killed the ballast...but there's also been some weird things with the power here lately, random little flickerings & a couple outages. Maybe it was harmed by all that & the EOL finished it off.

Last light-related thing I did (on the weekend) was got into the Christmas lights, started sorting for what goes up where... and put some up too (ofcourse nothing will be 'on' (other than testing) til Thanksgiving )

Took away from ceiling the CDM-T system and put a SDW-TG mini system in use. Reason is simple. The colour properties of the SDW lamps.

It’s that time of year again. No not because of Halloween, it’s time to start testing, repairing, and ordering Christmas lights for this holiday season. It’s crucial to order now since in November stuff is sold out.

I’ve placed two significant orders from Tru-Tone and 1000Bulbs.com as part of an upgrade I’m doing to my house as well as a relatives.

Tru-Tone has almost everything in stock (specific colors of 5 packs are limited, no custom 5 assorted packs unfortunately).

Stay tuned.

Replaced the old Christmas light strings on the outside of the house.  The old strings were held up with coax clips, and I replaced those with Q-hangers to make changing them out in the future easier.  These new strings are better than the ones they replaced, so hopefully I won't have to worry about that for a while.  They're on a timer that can be activated after Thanksgiving.