cooking advice requested

I know there are several cooking-fanatical people on my friendslist, so I figure at least ONE should be able to bail me out here: I have a wok. I do not have a gas burner to sit it on. I have a halogen/ceramic electric cooker which has a 0-6 power range, and that’s it. I have made several unsuccessful attempts to do useful wok things, but ultimately I run into one of two problems: (a) smoke and (b) more oil than I’m happy with in the end result. So. Given that I cannot, at the drop of a hat, replace my halogen/ceramic heat source with something that might actually be wok-friendly, I have the following questions:

1. How should I best determine the optimal setting for heating the wok? I am leery of anything that involves smoke generation, due to a hypersensitive smoke alarm that’s hooked into the house upstairs and which I cannot switch off once it’s triggered
2. Is the excessive oil down to too much oil in the wok, or incorrect heating?
3. Should I just give up on the wok entirely, and buy chinese from the local takeaway (it is quite good)?

That is all, thank you in advance for any input (especially useful input)

while I'm asking

I am generally somewhat flummoxed when faced with a new cooking device as to the correct settings for any given type of cooking. Some experimentation leads me to believe that by and large anything over half-way on my current cooking surface is good for boiling water and little else, practically speaking. It would be nice, however, to be able to cope with such cooking instructions as "the pan should be hot enough to cook an egg" without wondering, well, "WTF?" a lot. I mean, most of the settings on either the small or large rings are "hot enough to cook an egg", depending on how you like your egg cooked - slowly and thoroughly, or like plastic with a raw centre, or a range of options in between. Aside from the time-consuming (and food-consuming) "through experience" method, are there any rules of thumb for this stuff that I should know about? (e.g. at some point I was told that when deep-frying stuff in a pan full of oil, you should toss in a piece of potato; when it floats, the oil is hot enough. This may or may not be correct, but since I don't deep-fry stuff it's kinda academic, but it gives you an idea of the sort of guidelines I seek)

when Perl goes bad

my @tags = sort grep /^(HOME|WORK)$/, map { my ( $i ) = $_ =~ /(\d+)/; uc( $phonelabels[$i - 1] )} grep /^phone/, keys %{$record->{fields}};

I’m still giggling at this.

update: in case anyone’s sufficiently curious: I am tooling around (again) with the Palm addressbook. It has some odd rules for generating the vCards that it beams, one of which revolves around whether the record you’re dealing with has a phone number tagged as "home", one tagged as as "work", neither, or both. The above disaster pulls out the phone numbers, checks their categories, and generates an array of 0, 1 or 2 elements - neither tag exists, one or other tag exists, or both tags exist. Previously I’d done this with a loop and all sorts of readable code, but hey. Sometimes I get a bit silly.

clarification of stance

While the misuse and misspelling of common english words and phrases occasionally bothers me enough to post a whiny item here about it, I'm quite happy to let other people get hot under the collar over more obscure and/or less obvious errors. This way, I can keep making ronebofh cry while still maintaining some sort of moral high ground.

the thing about Ireland's paramilitary groups...

...is that they don’t ultimately need an actual enemy. This is a feud between two groups that are ostensibly on the same side, i.e. loyal to the UK (hence Loyalist) and keen to keep things that way. There was a similar feud on the Republican side some years ago, involving the INLA. Or maybe it was entirely within the INLA, I can’t recall. I can’t even keep the acronyms straight in my head any more: IRA, CIRA, PIRA¹, RIRA², INLA, LVF, UVF, UDF, and god knows what else. And to add to that you’ve got the political party acronyms: UUP, DUP, PUP, SDLP. I don’t know if the group with "32 count(y/ies) sovereignty" in their name are a political party or a paramilitary group, either.

1. The Provisional IRA, as distinct from IRA "classic". Generally speaking any reference these days to the IRA without qualifiers refers to the PIRA, or "Provos".
2. This would be funny if these weren’t the guys behind the Omagh bombing. "rí-rá" is a Gaelic word in roughly the same headspace as "craic". Generally found in the phrase "rí-rá agus rúile búile", which means "did anyone get the number of the party that hit me?" or thereabouts. mopti might correct my spelling and/or translation as required.