We’re hoping that today will be a relatively ordinary day. Barbara is out cutting the grass right now, and I’m doing laundry. She’s going to go over to visit her dad this afternoon. I’ll go with her if she wants me to. Visiting Dutch isn’t easy for me and of course is even harder for Barbara. The last two or three days when I visited, he just sat there unresponsive most of the time. When he did speak, I couldn’t understand most of what he said and I got no sense that he understood anything I said. Frances and Sankie visited Dutch last night. Barbara talked later to Frances, who said that Dutch was so deeply asleep when they arrived that they couldn’t wake him. When they did, he was talking nonsense for a while, but he did eventually start talking and acting normally for a while at least. I told Barbara that that reminded me of my father toward the end. He was generally non-responsive, but when my brother drove over from Raleigh to visit, my dad would intentionally try to act and speak normally and would tell my brother that he was fine. As soon as my brother left, my dad would immediately drop back into his non-responsive state. Dutch is behaving the same way, telling people that he’s not ill and that he’s going to get his strength back and return to live with Sankie at Creekside. Obviously, that’s not going to happen, but I think Dutch actually believes it will.

13:50 - Barbara is out running errands and visiting her dad. I’m finishing up the laundry, printing container labels, and putting together purchase orders.

We’re down to about 4,000 bottles in stock. With about 1,800, we’re in good shape on the 30 mL wide-mouth pharma packers, because we don’t use them in large numbers. Depending on the mix of kits, 1,800 is enough for something in the range of 350 to 600 kits. We also have 1,000 or so of the 30 mL amber glass bottles on hand, which again we use in relative small numbers. But we have only 1,100 of the 15 mL PE bottles, which we use in very large numbers, and we’re completely out of the 30 mL PE bottles, which we use in numbers about half as large as the 15 mL ones. So I’m cutting a PO for 4,400 more of the 15 mL and 3,000 of the 30 mL, along with caps for them.

It’s time to stop screwing around with making up only enough for 30 or 60 sets of chemicals or small parts bags. Other than chemicals with relatively short expiration dates (such as the Kastle-Meyer reagent in the forensics kits), we’re going to start making up stuff in batches sufficient for 90 to 180 kits at a crack.

That also means I’m using some different suppliers. For example, until now, I’ve been buying multiple bottles of methylene blue stain from one of our regular suppliers. That vendor carries only 10 g bottles, which is sufficient to make up one liter per bottle of stain powder. So this time I’m going with a vendor that carries methylene blue stain in 100 g bottles. That’s sufficient for 10 liters, or 667 kits’ worth. I may make up only four liters at a time, but at least I won’t have to keep track of how many small bottles of the stain I have on hand.

Every time I ask him if there’s something he wants, he asks for ordinary liquids. He wants coffee and ice cream and juice. When he visited the doctor the other day, he mentioned this to the doctor. I was surprised at the doctor’s response, which was completely reasonable. He said that, at nearly 91 years old, Dutch should be able to eat and drink what he wants to eat and drink. If he aspirates and gets pneumonia, they can put him on antibiotics.

So, when I was over at Brian Center yesterday, I spoke to the staff about this. They said that, in the absence of a doctor’s order, they couldn’t give Dutch ordinary liquids, but that if I signed a release they could give me ordinary liquids to give to him. They just weren’t allowed to give him those liquids themselves. So I signed the release, explained the risks to Dutch, and got him the cup of coffee he so desperately wanted. I also asked the staff what we needed to do to get them permission to give Dutch whatever liquids he wanted when one of us wasn’t there to pass them along to him. They said the nursing home doctor was visiting at the moment, and if I could wait until he was free I could talk to him about it. So I did. He was completely in agreement that that was a reasonable thing to do. We agreed that if we got to be 90 years old, we sure didn’t want anyone telling us what we could or couldn’t drink. He asked if I had power of attorney for Dutch, and I told him I didn’t but Barbara did. So he asked if I’d have her call Brian Center to tell them she approved by her PoA. She wasn’t able to get through to them yesterday, but will do so today.

When I explained things to Dutch, I didn’t pull any punches. I told him that if he drank ordinary liquids, he could aspirate them, get pneumonia, and die. Or he could choke on them and die. I asked him if he understood that, and he said he did. I asked him if he still wanted a cup of coffee, and he said he did. So he got his cup of coffee, and we’re going to get things set up so that he can have a damned cup of coffee or cup of ice cream any time he wants one.

10:31 - I just got back from getting my driver’s license renewed, so I’m good for the next eight years. I thought I’d dropped the motorcycle endorsement the last time I renewed, but it was still on there. I told them to drop it this time. I’ll never get on a motorcycle again. If it didn’t kill me, Barbara would.

I stopped at Brian Center on the way home to visit Dutch. Unfortunately, he’s not doing very well, physically or mentally. He’s taking antibiotics for a UTI, and Barbara said last night that he’s never tolerated antibiotics very well. So on top of everything else, he now has nausea and vomiting.

Barbara’s dad is not doing well. We stopped over to see him late yesterday afternoon to take him some more clothes. He was asleep when we got there, and Barbara wasn’t able to wake him, despite touching him and speaking loudly to him. Dutch had been to visit the doctor earlier that day, and the doctor told them it was time to have him transferred to Hospice. The problem is, Dutch doesn’t believe he’s ill. To add to the congestive heart failure and kidney failure, he now has a UTI.

Meanwhile, kit sales are booming. We shipped six kits yesterday, and are averaging just over three kits per day for the last week. Our stock of finished kits is dwindling. We’re down to under a hundred kits of all types in stock, so it’s time for me to start issuing purchase orders for more components. If I have time this afternoon, I’ll start filling more bottles and making up some chemicals.

Yesterday afternoon, I had the new system pretty much ready to go. I almost shutdown the old system and pulled it off my desk. I’m glad I didn’t. When I came into my office this morning, the display on the new system was black with a blinking white cursor at the top left corner. The system now refuses to boot. It just comes up to that blinking white cursor. Fortunately, my old system is still connected and working. In fact, the Ethernet problems appear to have resolved themselves, and it’s now working perfectly. I really, really hated Kubuntu 12.04 anyway. I may just re-install everything on Ubuntu 12.04 and suffer from its horrible interface. It can’t be any worse than the horrible Kubuntu 12.04 interface.

Kit sales are on the rise. We’ve shipped four kits so far today, and with the month half gone our MTD sales are already more than twice those of the whole month of May 2012. Given that more than 90% of total May 2012 sales were in the second half of the month, this may turn out to be our biggest month so far in 2013. I’d better get back to work on building more kits. We’re down to less than a hundred in finished goods inventory.

I finally switched back over from air conditioning to heat this morning. Our forecast overnight low was 38F, which would tie our record low for 14 May. Our recording thermometer says it got down to 41.9F, but our actual highs and lows often vary by several degrees from the official numbers. Our indoor thermometer says it’s 66.3F right now. I’m chilly at 70F and cold at 68F, so I set the heat to warm things up a bit in here. This is our last chilly day for a while. The rest of the week we’re expected to have highs in the mid-80′s and lows of 61F, so it’ll be back to using the air conditioning.

I copied all my data from the current system to my new system yesterday. That took a long time. The networking on the old system is failing, so rather than install a new network adapter I just connected a big external USB drive to it, copied all my data and configuration files up to it, and then reconnected it to my new system. Copying the 800 GB of data down to the new system took hours, but it’s all there now.

I managed to get all my old mail transfered over to Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer on the new system, but I haven’t yet tried to import my contacts. I’m pretty optimistic that I’ll be able to do that, but the big problem remaining is that I can’t get the new Kmail installation to send mail. I remember this happening the last time I was migrating systems. I got it worked out then, and I’m sure I’ll manage somehow to get it worked out this time. Meanwhile, I can still send mail from the old system, assuming it’s willing to connect to the Internet. Nothing is ever easy.

Meanwhile, with Barbara and Frances both fully occupied taking care of their mom, I’ll be visiting their dad in the Brian Center nursing home. Barbara visited him yesterday and said that he pretty much completely ignored her. He wouldn’t speak to her. This is nothing new. Dutch for the last couple of weeks has been very short with Barbara and Frances. I suspect he blames them for being in the hospital and then the nursing home, rather than back at the apartment where he really wants to be. Unfortunately, I think that’s very unlikely to happen. It’ll surprise me if Dutch ever recovers enough to move downstairs to the assisted-living floor at Brian Center, let alone moving back to the apartment. And Sankie really doesn’t want Dutch at the apartment. She can’t take care of him and she knows that, and she’s terrified that he’ll drop dead before her eyes.

Science kits continue to sell well. We’ve already shipped three today, and sales for this month are on track to be three to four times sales in May 2012. Until now, we’ve been building kits in batches of 30, but I think we’ll ramp that up to batches of 60.

Here are some recent examples:

Michelle Burke (Little Men) and Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl). Other than the 15 year difference in ages, these two could be not just sisters, but identical twins.

Jessica Raine (Call the Midwife) and Helen Baxendale (Cold Feet). Again, other than the age difference, these two could be identical twins.

Anastasia Griffith (Copper) and Emily Vancamp (Reven8e). The resemblance here is more subtle, but I kept thinking that Griffith really reminded me of someone. Last night, seeing her in profile on Damages, it finally hit me. Barbara agreed instantly that she looks like Emily Vancamp.

I gave up on Linux Mint yesterday, although it’s still running on Barbara’s office system. While my new hex-core system was sitting on the kitchen table, I’d installed Linux Mint on it. Other than the fact that it wasn’t connected to the Internet, everything was working properly. Yesterday, I set it up on my main desk in my office, beside the current system.

I started the new system, and it came up to a login prompt. I entered my username and password, and it told me the username or password was incorrect. Say what? So I entered them again. Same deal. So I entered them again, this time typing them out with one finger, just to make sure. Same deal. Shit. So I rebooted from the Linux Mint 13 64-bit DVD and re-installed. When the installation finished and the system rebooted to a login prompt, I entered the username and password I’d just entered. It came back to the login prompt, telling me the username/password was incorrect. Double shit. So I re-re-installed Linux Mint. Same deal.

Other than plugging in an Ethernet cable, the only change between that system sitting on the kitchen table and it sitting on my desk was that in the kitchen I had the display connected via the analog cable while in the office I used the digital cable. So I shut the system down, disconnected the digital cable, reconnected the analog cable, and restarted. Same problem. It wouldn’t accept my password. So I re-re-re-installed Linux Mint. Same deal. It simply wouldn’t let me log in. So I downloaded Kubuntu 12.04 LTS, burned a disc, and re-re-re-re-installed. It came up with no problems and is working normally. Well, except for the fact that the same thing that happened when I tried to migrate Barbara’s mail and contacts to her new system happened again when I tried to migrate my mail and contacts to my new system. Mail and contacts from earlier versions of Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer simply refuse to import into the current version.

For Barbara, that sucked but wasn’t a huge issue. She just doesn’t have much important old mail and her list of contacts is pretty small. For me, it’s a major issue because I have thousands of old mail messages to migrate over and probably 1,500 or more contacts. Also, my contacts have embedded information such as which kit(s) they bought. I really don’t want to lose that information or have to recreate it. So I’ll spend some serious time and effort to get that information migrated. I think I’m going to bag Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer completely and move to Thunderbird, assuming its contact management abilities are up to the task.

One of the things I found most impressive about the place is that there’s no odor. Not only no urine odor, but no pervading smell of disinfectants. The place just doesn’t smell at all, which is very difficult to accomplish in a nursing home. There are plenty of staff, and they’re all friendly. Dutch was eating lunch when I arrived, and he said the food was good. And, of course, the place is only a couple miles from our house, so it’s easy to get over there for frequent visits.

While we were there, I asked one of the senior staff members about something that had been bothering me. When my mom was at Brian Center, she had an extraordinary nurse, whose name I couldn’t remember. It was LaToya. LaToya was a delightful young woman, and my mother loved her. She was 23 years old, and a single mother of a toddler. One day, she wasn’t at work. Nor the next, nor the next. We asked about her, and were stunned to learn that she was in the hospital and not expected to live. Shortly after, we learned that she had died of a rare genetic condition. My mother was inconsolable, not just because LaToya had been her favorite nurse, but because LaToya was only 23 years old and left a young toddler motherless. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten her name. She deserves to be remembered.

Colin was due for his annual checkup, so around 4:15 we headed off to the vet, making a stop at Dutch’s apartment on the way to pick up some stuff for him. The traffic was hideous, as always, but we managed to make it out to Clemmons in time for the 5:15 vet appointment.

Our vet is Sue Stephens, and we’ve been taking our dogs to see her for about 25 years. She originally had her own practice not far from us, but 15 years ago or more she sold her practice. She’d signed a non-compete that restricted her from practicing near her old practice, and she ended up working part-time at a practice out in Clemmons. Driving out there is a pain in the ass, but Sue is the best vet I’ve ever known, and we considered it worth the hassle to continue seeing her, particularly when we had older dogs with more health problems.

So, we got out there and, as always, the first thing was to get Colin on the scale. The scale wasn’t cooperating very well, refusing to settle at 0.00 even when tared. On the first attempt, Colin weighed 85 pounds (~ 39 kilos). On the second, 81 pounds. On the third, 82 pounds. I stepped on the scale, which said I weighed 203.4 pounds (~ 93 kilos). So, we concluded that Colin likely weighs somewhere around 83 pounds. Sue wants to see Colin down to 68 pounds, which we think is ridiculous. He’s not fat now. At 68 pounds, he’d look anorexic.

I asked Sue if there was any factual basis in terms of morbidity or mortality for the recommended weights vets use for dogs. There apparently isn’t, other than one study Purina did many years ago, in which they apparently didn’t bother even to define their terms. I told Sue this reminded me of the recommended weights physicians use for people. Morbidity/mortality is significantly lower for people who are “overweight” versus those who are “normal weight”, which pretty definitively establishes that so-called “overweight” is in fact the proper weight and what they define is “normal weight” is in fact underweight. And any normal person looking at Colin would not think he was too heavy. We’re not going to make any significant changes to his diet unless and until he actually starts to look chubby.

Nor me, for that matter. On our wedding day, I was 30 years old and weighed 238 pounds. Over the last 30 years, and particularly over the last 5 or 10, my weight has been gradually decreasing. It’s not that I’ve been trying to lose weight; it’s just that I eat less and less as I get older. As I said to Barbara yesterday, I’m now almost down to my tennis-playing weight of 185 to 190, and maybe I should take up the game again. I quickly assured her that I was only kidding. With vertigo affecting my balance and some arthritis in my hands, there’s no way I’d even attempt it.

We’re on schedule to start shipping the LK01 Life Science Kits on Monday. There are 30 of them on the assembly table right now that are nearly complete, missing only a few components. We’ll finish them up this weekend.

I was getting low on pipe tobacco, so I ordered five pounds (2.3 kilos) yesterday. It’s a Dunhill My Mixture 965 clone, and it cost me about $27/pound, with free shipping. Years ago, I used to smoke the real Dunhill 965, but Dunhill hasn’t actually produced it for many years. Instead, they license out the name. They’ve done that serially with two or three different manufacturers over the years, and it’s never been the same as the original stuff. The clone I ordered is actually better than the branded stuff from the current manufacturer, which costs about twice as much as the clone. The vendor was backordered for a couple weeks on the clone 965 product, which is fine. I always reorder when I get down to my last pound, and five pounds lasts me about seven months.

While I was on the phone with the vendor, I asked the guy about the possible new taxes on pipe tobacco. He said they were following the matter, but had no real idea if or when these new taxes would come into play. I’ve heard numbers as high as $100/pound in new taxes, and told the guy they needed to keep their mailing list updated on when these new taxes would come into effect so that we could stock up before the price skyrocketed. I also told him that I was in North Carolina and if it really came to that I’d just start growing my own.

Since I was making phone calls anyway, I decided to call DMV to make an appointment to renew my driver’s license, which expires next month. After getting busy signals several times, I finally got through and told the guy that answered that I wanted to make an appointment. He said “just a moment” and put me on hold. Eighteen minutes later, the call disconnected. So I called back, getting busy signals several times, and finally got a person on the line. I told him I’d been dropped after 18 minutes on hold. He apologized and … put me on hold. Fortunately, this time someone picked up after about 15 seconds and made the appointment for me.

I was on a roll, so I decided to call Time-Warner Cable tech support and see if they could do something about the Internet problems we’d been having for several days. They’d gotten much worse by yesterday, and I ended up connected to a nice young woman, who said that my modem had been up for six months and needed to be reset. She verified that we had Internet service and basic cable TV. She said the modem was a TWC Internet + VoIP modem. I explained that we formerly had VoIP but no longer had it. She said, “So you’re talking to me on a phone?” I said, “Yes, but …” She said “I’ll reset your modem now.” I continued “we’re on a third-party VoIP service so if you reset the modem you’ll kill our call”, but I was talking to dead air. I looked down to see the modem lights resetting. Oh, well. The reset worked, and our Internet is now running normally.

I managed to get 30 sets of the LK01 Life Science chemical bags made up yesterday, and 30 sets of the small parts bags. Today I’ll assemble shipping boxes for them and get some finished kits built. Then I’d better start on a new batch of biology kits, because we’re down to 20 or so of those in stock.

With both parents still in the hospital, Barbara and Frances are still waiting to find out when they’ll be discharged, and where they’ll be discharged to. It’s pretty clear that Dutch will have to be discharged to a nursing home, but there’s no way to know which one because it all depends on which nursing homes have a bed available at the time he’s discharged. We’re hoping that Sankie will be well enough to return to their apartment at Creekside, but we won’t know that for sure until she’s ready to be discharged.

I’m busy putting together subassemblies for a first batch of thirty LK01 Life Science Kits. At this point, it’s all a matter of assembly except that we’re out of stock on bottles of methyl cellulose. I have two liters of that made up, but none bottled. The second bottle-top dispenser I ordered arrived yesterday, so I just need to get some bottles filled. We announced that the LK01 kits would begin shipping the week of 26 May, but we may in fact have them ready to start shipping as early as next Monday.

11:00 - One thing I didn’t think about when we decided to start building and selling science kits is the amount of physical labor involved, particularly as our sales ramp up. I just hauled four cases of goggles downstairs and stacked them. On the return trips upstairs, I’m hauling up finished kits, five at a time. I have about four dozen kits to haul up and more stuff to haul down. And UPS should show up today with a couple cases of 144 glass beakers and several cases of 100 mL graduated cylinders. If I catch Don as he pulls up, I’ll ask him to roll those crates around back to save me having to carry them downstairs.

I tend to think of components as small, light items, which is true individually. How much can a stainless-steel spatula or a glass stirring rod weigh, after all? But put a case of 700 of each of them in a large box along with similar quantities of two or three other “small, light” items, and the mass adds up quickly. At 30, I wouldn’t have thought twice about any of this stuff; at nearly 60, it becomes an aerobic workout. Between hauling components and kits up and down the stairs and walking Colin, I probably get more exercise than most guys my age.

14:56 - Urk. Now that’s embarrassing. I’m starting to clean off my main desk to make room for the new system. I’m going to run it side-by-side with the current system until I’m sure everything I need is migrated over. So, as I was moving piles of stuff off my desk, what did I notice but a stack of five hard drives in those clear plastic form-fitted cases. I looked at the first one: “Oh, well, it’s only 160 GB, not big enough to worry about.” At the second: “Oh, well, it’s only 500 GB.” At the third: “Oh, well, it’s only 1.5 TB.” At the fourth: “Oh, well, it’s only, uh, 2 TB.” At the fifth: “Oh, shit. Another 2 TB drive.” Both 2 TB drives, as best I remember, have never been used other than briefly to test a RAID system. Oh, well. One can never have too many hard drives. I’d completely forgotten I had these. I’ll probably just stick them in an external eSATA drive carrier and use them for portable backup.

16:20 - With Europe already turning into a smoking pile of rubble, I sometimes wonder if Comrade Barroso has been inhaling too much of that smoke: Federal Europe will be ‘a reality in a few years’, says Jose Manuel Barroso

Federated, hell. They’ll be lucky if the EU still exists. The euro certainly won’t, unless it’s a Southern-tier euro, with the protestant Northern tier returning to their own currencies, or perhaps, if they haven’t learned their lesson from this catastrophe, a shared Deutsche Mark under whatever name. I’ve known for years that Barroso, that “former” Marxist, is delusional, but he keeps coming up with even more impressive castles in the sky. Barroso, who defines the term True Believer, no doubt actually believes that not just the eurozone but the EU 27 will fall in with his ridiculous plans. Even now, the UK is teetering on the edge of withdrawing from the EU, and with prominent defections among even his own Tories, Cameron may not be able to hold things together for another year, let alone until the proposed referendum on EU membership four years from now. And what are the chances that Germany, Finland, and Holland will agree to pay not just the Southern tier’s outstanding debts but to continue to subsidize them forever and without limit? I’d say the probability is slightly more than zero. Maybe 0.000001.

Meanwhile, Sankie is starting to break down physically under the stress. Basically, she knows that she can’t take care of Dutch in their apartment, and she’s not even comfortable with being there by herself. She’s exhausted and stressed out. What she really wants is Barbara and/or Frances to be there with her 24 hours a day, which obviously isn’t going to happen. Sankie does have long-term care insurance that will pay if she’s in an assisted-living facility or nursing home, so the best solution may be to find an assisted-living facility that will accept both Dutch and Sankie and allow them to share a room. The downside is that most such facilities have small rooms, so they wouldn’t be able to take many of their possessions along with them. Still, the combination of having round-the-clock help available on-site and being able to continue living together may be enough to make that the best option. The other option is to move Dutch to assisted-living and leave Sankie where she is. Of course, with that option, she’s not going to have someone with her constantly. Until a week or so ago, Sankie seemed content with the idea of living at Creekside by herself after Dutch dies. Now she’s worried that she won’t be able to make it on her own, but we’re hoping that’s only because she’s exhausted and possibly ill at the moment. We’re hoping that things work out as well as possible for Dutch and Sankie, which would also take a great deal of the stress off of Barbara and Frances.

11:58 - I haven’t said much about this new initiative to force businesses to collect and remit sales taxes on interstate sales because I’ve been waiting to see what happens. The bill appears to be likely to pass the Senate, although it may founder in the House. I hope so.

The problem with this bill is that it violates the Constitution on its face. States are not permitted to interfere with interstate commerce. North Carolina, for example, cannot set up a customs station at the Virginia border and impose an import duty on goods crossing into North Carolina. Nor can North Carolina tax a transaction that does not occur fully within North Carolina. If I sell a kit to a buyer in another state, neither state can Constitutionally tax that transaction, because it did not occur fully within either state. Attempting to tax that transaction is interfering with interstate commerce, which the Constitution prohibits states from doing.

In fact, the whole “nexus” idea violates the Constitution. If I visit the local Wal*Mart and purchase an item, Wal*Mart can legally collect sales tax from me. But if I visit Wal*Mart.com and purchase an item, the fact that Wal*Mart has physical stores in North Carolina is insufficient for North Carolina to tax that sale. That sale did not occur fully within North Carolina, so in taxing it North Carolina is interfering with interstate commerce, thereby violating the Constitution.

The same holds true for so-called “use taxes”, which are transparent attempts to enforce extraterritoriality, again in violation of the Constitution. If I buy an item from Amazon, the Constitution prohibits North Carolina from charging a sales tax. Calling it a “use tax” doesn’t make it allowable, unless North Carolina also charges that use tax on local purchases, in addition to the sales tax. And, of course, forcing any business to collect sales taxes (or any other type of taxes) on the governments’ behalf is prohibited Constitutionally, if nothing else by the amendment that prohibits involuntary servitude.

The only minor concession this proposed new law makes is to exempt small business with revenues under $1,000,000 annually from collecting sales taxes for roughly 9,000 separate tax jurisdictions. So, our way forward is clear. We will simply refuse to allow our revenues to exceed $1 million annually. If we eventually get to the point where $1 million in annual revenues is a real possibility, we’ll simply incorporate a second, legally separate business and split the sales between the two businesses.

13:46 - Barbara called a little while ago to say that her sister was taking their mom to the hospital. Frances had taken Sankie to a doctor’s appointment, and apparently the doctor thought she should be in the hospital. Sankie has suffered for years from recurring lung problems, and she apparently has some kind of lung infection again. The doctor talked about possibly sending her home with a prescription for azithromycin, but when Frances explained that there was no one to stay with her mom around the clock, he apparently decided to admit her to the hospital and put her on stronger antibiotics. Barbara and Frances suspected she might have another lung infection and that that was causing or at least contributing to her problems over the last few days. We hope they’ll get Sankie cured and back to her apartment soon. So now Barbara and Frances have not one but both parents in the hospital, and in not one but two different hospitals. Geez.

The replacement hard drive for my new system arrived several days ago, but I hadn’t had a spare moment to do anything with it. While Barbara was away yesterday afternoon, I took the time to install the drive and get Linux Mint 13 LTS up and running. The system is still sitting on the kitchen table, but it’ll shortly move into my office, where it will sit, along with its new monitor, keyboard, and mouse, alongside my current system. I’ll run them side-by-side until I’m satisfied that everything I care about on the current system–apps and data and configurations–has been migrated successfully to the new system. Then and only then I’ll do a cut-over.

I’d originally planned to install the system to the 128 GB SSD, but I changed my mind. I installed Linux to the hard drive, and will use the SSD as a second drive devoted exclusively to data. When I leave the house for anything more than walking Colin, I’ll unmount the SSD, slide it out of its bay, and take it along.

09:33 - I just boxed up another forensic science kit and set it out to ship tomorrow. That’s the third one in the last week, which is about two more than I’d expect to sell in a week this time of year. (The biology kits and chemistry kits both ordinarily outsell the forensic science kits by a factor of four or five.) We’re down to only six forensic science kits in stock, so we’d better get another 30 built soon. Or at least get the small parts bags made up and the chemicals bottled and bagged. Given those, we can build kits as needed on the fly.

Going through the list of chemicals and reagents we’ll need for the new batch of forensic kits I noticed glycerol, which is one of my least favorite chemicals to fill bottles with. The stuff is viscous, which makes it very difficult to fill bottles manually because it wants to form a bubble at the bottle’s mouth and then blurp over and run down the side of the bottle. Using the automatic dispenser is easier, but the viscosity of glycerol makes it almost a gym workout to use the pump. Then I realized that the viscosity of glycerol is strongly affected by temperature. At room temperature, the stuff is gloppy. At around body temperature (37 C) to hot tap water temperature (50 C), the stuff is much, much less viscous. So, the next time I fill glycerol bottles, I’m going to run a bucket of hot tap water and put the 3.8 liter stock bottle of glycerol in it to warm up before I dispense it.

As I was talking to Frances, my call-waiting beeped, but by the time I was able to hookflash over to the new call it had been disconnected. The caller ID showed it was Barbara’s parents’ apartment calling, so I called back. Sankie answered the phone, obviously very upset. I asked if she’d just called, and she said she had. She said Dutch had fallen and Barbara needed to come over right away to help them. I asked Sankie if she meant that Dutch had fallen again, in the apartment, or if she was talking about his fall out in the parking lot that Frances had just told me about. She was obviously confused, and just hung up. So I called Frances’s cell phone back. She’d been out in the parking lot moving the car, and arrived back in Dutch and Sankie’s apartment just as I called. She said her mom was talking about the fall she’d just told me about, and that he hadn’t fallen again.

I heard Barbara just finishing up outside. When she came upstairs, I told her what was going on. She called Frances back and told her to call 911 and have Dutch transported to the hospital. Barbara said Dutch’s symptoms were exactly what they’d been the last time they’d brought him home from the hospital and had to turn around immediately and take him back. She told Frances that she was going to change clothes, eat a quick dinner, and then head over to the hospital.

Barbara left around 7:00 for the hospital, and got home about 2:30 this morning. I’m sure she’ll post more details on her page when she has time to do so.

10:24 - I’m still trying to get a reasonable projection of what our science kit sales might be for the year. A big part of the problem is that our sales are extremely seasonal. More than 90% of our sales last year occurred in the last seven months of the year. Put it this way, in 2012 we had higher sales in our biggest month (August) than in the first six months of the year combined. And in every month so far in 2013, we’ve had higher revenue in that month than we had in the entire first quarter of 2012.

The scary part is that in 2012 we shipped less than a dozen kits on our biggest day. If the current sales trajectory holds up, in 2013 we may need to be prepared to ship 60 or more kits on a big day, which obviously means we’ll need to have a boatload of kits in inventory come July. I’m not even entirely sure that I can process 60 orders and ship 60 kits in one day. And, of course, the other scary part is what happens if somehow this sales increase is just a blip. I’d hate to end up with several hundred kits in inventory and no orders to fill.

It’s probably just as well that we never see them when we’re out with Colin. It’d be awkward to run into her. I mean, what could we say? We’re sorry to hear your husband’s in jail for raping a student. Oh, well. I suspect that house will be on the market again shortly. The wife probably can’t afford the mortgage on one salary, and even if she could she certainly wouldn’t want to live here, with everyone knowing what her husband is accused of doing.

The girl in question is 15 years old, and there’s been no suggestion that the sexual activities were anything other than consensual. He’s only 24, and a first-year teacher. As I’ve said with regard to other similar cases, if he’s guilty, he should be fired under the no-fucking-the-students rule and never be allowed to teach again, but prosecuting him on multiple felony counts seems a bit excessive unless he in fact coerced the girl.

09:08 - Reflecting on what’s happened to our neighbor, I’m again struck by how little credit women give men for their generally excellent behavior. The simple fact, rooted in biology and instinct, is that all heterosexual guys–from boys just past puberty to old men on their death beds–really, really want to have sex with every attractive young woman they encounter. Any guy who denies this is either lying or deluding himself. Three million years of evolution has created this biological imperative: all men want to impregnate as many women as possible, thereby spreading and immortalizing their own genes.

The disconnect exists because women’s reproductive interests are diametrically opposed to those of men. A man’s part in reproduction takes five minutes. A woman’s part takes nine months. Plus the 18 years or more that it takes her to nurture her new baby to maturity. So, ideally, men want to have sex with as many different women as possible every day, while a woman wants one man who will stay with her to aid in child rearing.

The other thing is that men don’t want to have sex with just any women. They want to have sex with attractive young women. The age of the man doesn’t matter. It’s all about the age (read fertility) of the women in question. Biologically, an attractive young woman is attractive precisely because she’s fertile. It’s a subliminal thing for men. We generally don’t understand at all why a particular woman is attractive. But studies have shown that men are subconsciously evaluating the suitability of women for reproduction, subconsciously judging things like their hip/waist/bust ratios and so on. And, while we think of pheromones as something that apply to insects and “lower animals”, we humans are just as subject to pheromones as any other animal. It has been established beyond question that men find women most attractive when the women are ovulating. How can we tell? Because, subconsciously, we recognize that these women smell fertile.

And that brings up the second disconnect. Women think it’s unfair that, regardless of their age, men remain sexually attractive to women, and in fact many women find older men more attractive than younger ones, while men are sexually attracted to young women. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of men find women in their teens and 20′s most attractive. It’s because women of that age are in by far the most fertile period of their lives. Women’s fertility begins declining when they’re in their late 20′s, and declines precipitously after age 35 or so. But neither women nor men are to blame here. We’re both simply acting on instinct. The wonder is not that some men stray in favor of younger women. The wonder is that most of us don’t. Most of us are well-trained to act against our own instincts, and women don’t give us nearly enough credit for that. As Anonymous famously observed:

Hogamus Higamus
Men are Polygamous
Higamus Hogamus
Women Monogamous

Until very recently, women were realistic about this phenomenon. When a husband strayed, the wife generally didn’t divorce him. She made him aware that he’d been a very bad dog, and hit him on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper. She reserved her ire for the Other Woman, whom she called a home-wrecker. She understood that it wasn’t her poor husband’s fault. He couldn’t help himself. It was the other woman who deserved all the blame, so the wife would confront her and claw her eyes out. That’s biology.

09:29 - Oh, yeah. Here’s a working link to that video that Barbara sent me yesterday. She originally sent me a WMV file rather than a link, but apparently some of my readers are having trouble viewing that file.

It’s a TV commercial, which I generally hate on principle, but I have to admit that this one was creative and well done. Speaking of things I generally hate, I see that Netflix streaming has replaced the butchered version of Coupling with the original, full-length episodes. Ordinarily, I’d refuse to watch any TV series with a laugh track, but I made an exception for Coupling. Mainly because I’m usually too busy laughing myself to pay any attention to the laugh track.

This series (the original British version, NOT the pathetic US knock-off version) gets my vote as the funniest TV series ever. Funnier than Black Adder, even. I’ve been re-watching an episode or two after I knock off for the day and am waiting for Barbara to get home from the gym. Last night, I watched S2E1, which had to be the funniest TV episode ever. I then watched S2E2, which had to be the funniest TV episode ever.

10:56 - Today, I’m making up three different types of antibiotic test paper for the life science kits: neomycin sulfate, penicillin G potassium, and sulfadimethoxine. These test papers are commercially available from BD and other suppliers, but they’re ridiculously expensive for student use. Home Science Tools, for example, sells a set of eight 1/4″ (6.35mm) discs, two discs of each of four antibiotics, for $3.95. That’s $0.50 per disc. Or, even worse, about $1.56 per square centimeter. Or they’ll sell you vial of 50 discs of any of the four antibiotics for $11.50, or $0.23 per disc.

The main reason these tiny test discs are so expensive is that they’re intended for medical/diagnostic use. The antibiotic concentrations are very precise and tightly controlled, and BD and other suppliers always have to build in a lot of margin to cover legal costs if they’re sued. But this is gross overkill for student lab sessions.

We do everything we can to keep the costs of our kits as low as possible, and this was a clear case of something we could do. Make our own antibiotic test papers. The antibiotic concentrations are the same for all three of our test papers: about 100 micrograms per square centimeter, accurate to maybe 10% either way. That’s more than accurate enough for school science labs. This in contrast to the BD discs, which have different concentrations for different antibiotics. (That’s because serum levels are an important consideration for human treatment; the achievable concentration in blood serum varies from antibiotic to antibiotic. For our purposes, we’re actually better off having the same concentration for each antibiotic, so that students can compare apples to apples when they determine which antibiotics are most effective for different types of bacteria.) And, rather than supply the papers as tiny discs, we’ll supply a 2.25×3″ piece of each paper. That’s about 43 square centimeters of each. That’s enough for at least 50 tests with each type of antibiotic, and at a small fraction the cost of using the BD discs. The students can punch their own discs with a standard paper punch.

A lot of people who read these figures may find them worrying but not terrifying. After all, a 0.1% to 0.2% mortality rate is bad, but it’s not the black plague. The problem is that measles, like all viruses, tends to mutate. And while the current strain, which probably originated in the first half of the 20th century, has a mortality rate under 1%, historically some measles strains have had mortality rates of 70% or thereabouts. That’s 700 dead people of every 1,000 infected. And no one knows if or when another deadly strain will develop. Avoiding inoculation is playing with fire.

UPS showed up at dinner time yesterday with a bunch of boxes. Our living room is now populated with hundreds of splash goggles, hundreds of lab thermometers, hundreds of disposable scalpels, hundreds of teasing needles, etc. etc. And I just cut another purchase order for hundreds of beakers, graduated cylinders, and other kit components. That’ll be it for a while. I’m starting to run out of storage space for component inventory.

My bottle-top dispenser died the other day. It’s a pretty cool device. It works kind of like those pumps they use in ice cream shops to dispense toppings. There’s a slider that can be set to dispense any volume from 2.5 mL to 30 mL, accurate to 0.1 mL. The pump sits on top of a reservoir bottle. To fill a container, I simply lift the pump body, put a bottle under the dispensing tip, and press down on the pump. Using it, I can fill 350 to 400 bottles an hour, or twice that many if Barbara is capping the bottles as I fill them. It’s definitely not something I want to do without.

As it turned out, the thick glass cylinder inside the pump body had cracked longitudinally. I checked the manual, and found that nowhere did it list the name or contact information for the manufacturer. So I called the wholesaler I’d bought it from. They said they’d send me a replacement cylinder but that they didn’t have any in stock, so it might be a week or so before it shipped. I decided this was something I needed to have a spare for, so while I had them on the phone I gave them a verbal purchase order for another dispenser, this one a 5 to 60 mL unit with a 2,000 mL heavy glass reservoir. That ships today, so I should have it early next week.

The units cost about $200 each, but as I told Barbara last night even if it had turned out that the original unit wasn’t under warranty and couldn’t be repaired, it would still have been worth it. I’d used it to fill a few thousand bottles, at cost of a few cents a bottle. Simply in terms of time saving, that unit had already paid for itself.

11:22 - I just made up two liters of 1.5% methylcellulose, a viscous solution that’s used to slow live protozoa when viewing them under a microscope. Methylcellulose has an interesting property: it’s freely soluble in cold water, but insoluble in hot water.

The first time I ever made up methylcellulose solution, I had that fact firmly in mind, which just goes to show that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I sprinkled the methylcellulose into ice-cold water and ended up with a globby mess. The problem is, the stuff clumps, resulting in little globs with slimy surfaces and dry powder inside the blob. The best way to make up the solution is to sprinkle the methycellulose power gradually and with stirring into very hot water, in which it’s insoluble. You end up with a suspension of the powder, which you then cool in an ice bath. The tiny solid particles in the suspension dissolve as the water cools, and you end up with a nice, even, non-globby solution.

12:00 - This is simply beyond belief. And public schools wonder why they’re losing so many of their best students to homeschooling.

Subject: Fwd: [IP] 16-Year-Old Girl Arrested and Charged With a Felony For Science Project Mistake | Alternet
From: “Dale Dougherty”
Date: Thu, May 2, 2013 11:24 am
To: Online Editors at Make
Robert Bruce Thompson
Brian Jepson

Insane.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: *DAVID J. FARBER*
Date: Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Subject: [IP] 16-Year-Old Girl Arrested and Charged With a Felony For
Science Project Mistake | Alternet
To: ip <ip@listbox.com>

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/16-year-old-girl-arrested-and-charged-felony-science-project-mistake?akid=10386.21554.88KhZl&rd=1&src=newsletter833535&t=3

16-Year-Old Girl Arrested and Charged With a Felony For Science Project Mistake

A Florida teen with an exemplary record is facing federal charges after conducting what a classmate calls “a science project gone bad.”

16-year-old Kiera Wilmot is accused of mixing housing chemicals in a small water bottle at Bartow High School, causing the cap to fly off and produce a bit of smoke. The experiment was conducted outdoors, no property was damaged, and no one was injured.

Not long after Wilmot’s experiment, authorities arrested her and charged her with “possession/discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device,” according to WTSP-TV. The school district proceeded to expel Wilmot for handling the “dangerous weapon,” also known as a water bottle. She will have to complete her high school education through an expulsion program.

Friends and staffers, including the school principal, came to Wilmot’s defense, telling media that authorities arrested an upstanding student who meant no harm.

“She is a good kid,” principal Ron Richard told WTSP-TV. “She has never been in trouble before. Ever.”

“She just wanted to see what happened to those chemicals in the bottle,” a classmate added. “Now, look what happened.”

Polk County Schools stands by its decision to expel Wilmot, asserting in a statement, “there are consequences to actions,” and calling Wilmot’s experiment a “serious breach of conduct.”

h/t Reason

12:44 - I may have been mistaken in my first reaction to the story of the girl charged with a felony. I just got off the phone with Carmen Drahl at Chemical and Engineering News. She told me a bit more, although she’s having a hard time getting solid information because, as she said, “everyone has lawyered-up”. But it’s possible that this girl actually committed a terrorist act. Or it may be that she simply had an experiment go wrong without realizing the dangers of what she was doing. Without knowing her motivation, it’s impossible to say whether she had bad intentions.

Carmen informed me that her experiment involved reacting aluminum with drain cleaner, but we don’t know the details. I suspect the “drain cleaner” was sodium hydroxide (lye). If so, the reaction with aluminum produces hydrogen gas. If the reactants are confined in a soda bottle or other container, the pressure of the hydrogen increases until the container bursts, splatting concentrated lye solution over anyone in the vicinity. Getting concentrated lye solution in the eyes will permanently blind someone in literally five seconds flat, and will also cause severe chemical burns to exposed skin.

Our local paper has reported several incidents in the last few years of someone leaving one of these nasty little devices where someone can find it. They look just like a soda bottle partially filled with water, but if you pick one up that causes the lye solution to contact the aluminum foil. Very quickly, the bottle bursts and sprays lye solution over the unfortunate person who picked up the bottle. Most people think these devices are placed by teenagers as a prank. Some prank. These devices have only one purpose: to kill or seriously injure a person or pet who disturbs them. There is no question in my mind that making and placing one of these devices is a terrorist act.

But again, the key question is the girl’s motivation. She may have just done something stupid, with no intent to harm anyone. Teenagers do stupid things. So do adults. But if this girl intended to harm someone with her experiment, expelling her and prosecuting her for committing a terrorist act is appropriate. My guess, not knowing much about the case, is that she had no intent to harm anyone. But we need a lot more information before we can know for sure.

16:56 - After reading more about the situation from several sources, I’m now convinced that this young woman had no intention of hurting anyone. She’s a straight-A honors student, liked by everyone. She’s never been in any trouble before. Both the students and the teachers and administrators say she’s a good person. She appears to be a victim of the mindless “zero-tolerance” policies that are so popular nowadays. Release the girl, I say.

It sounds to me as though she did this on school grounds because she lives in an apartment and didn’t have anywhere safe to work, pursuing her love of science. That’s a failing on the part of the adults around her, but I’m afraid she’ll end up paying the price for their failures. And, apropos of nothing, Barbara just sent me this:

papierlose-welt

We’re now up to about five dozen assorted biology and chemistry kits in finished-goods inventory. I’m building a batch of forensic kits today, using the finished subassemblies we have in stock. Next on the schedule is a batch of 30 life science kits, followed by 60 more biology kits and 60 more chemistry kits. After that, it’ll be lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of this year. May is historically a pretty slow month, about like April. But things start to pick up in June, before the crazy time starts in July and August. June should be about three times the May’s volume, and July and August each three or four times June’s volume. So, for the next six months or so, my life will be spent making up chemicals, filling bottles, issuing purchase orders, building subassemblies and kits, and processing orders and shipping kits. Not that I mind. I like to stay busy, and I like making stuff.

14:28 - I just called Katie Dugan, my vendor rep at American Educational Products, to check price and availability on some items for a purchase order I’m putting together. Every January, AMEP offers four coupons for things like free shipping on any order over $750, a 10% discount on any order over $300, and so on. So, intending to use one of the free shipping coupons, I gave Katie the item numbers and quantities to verify: 30 dozen each 10 mL graduated cylinders and 100 mL graduated cylinders, 30 dozen 250 mL glass beakers, and so on.

I’d also intended to order some chemicals from Katie, mostly the same ones I’d ordered from her late last year. Stuff like 2.5 liters of 30% ammonia, several 500 mL bottles each of n-butanol and glacial acetic acid, and so on. AMEP doesn’t actually carry chemicals, but their sister company, eNasco, does. And the last time I ordered chemicals from Katie, they were actually shipped from eNasco. The problem is, eNasco is retail-oriented, and they apparently have no one on staff who has any clue about hazardous shipping regulations. So for my prior order, eNasco had essentially shipped everything as hazardous, with each bottle as a separate shipment. That means they had to pay a separate hazardous shipping fee for each bottle. What they should have done was combine all of the bottles in one box. If they’d done that, they’d have had to pay only one hazardous shipping surcharge instead of a dozen or more. Needless to say, eNasco billed AMEP for the shipping charges, which probably totaled several hundred dollars rather than the $27 it should have cost them. I apologized to Katie and told her that I’d never have ordered from them if I’d realized how much “free” shipping was going to end up costing them. And I suggested that eNasco really, really needs someone on staff who understands at least the basics of hazardous shipping regulations. That’s non-trivial. In fact, it’s almost a full-time job. Different requirements apply to different chemicals. For example, for shipping under the Limited Quantity Exemption (which is completely different from the Small Quantity Exemption, which in turn is completely different from the ORM-D exemption, which is being eliminated anyway), you may be able to put 5 liters of one chemical in a single package, but only 500 mL of a different chemical. There are also restrictions on which combinations of chemicals are allowed to share a box. As Katie said, they learned an expensive lesson.

I got another batch of biology kits assembled yesterday. Today, among other things, I’ll start building another batch of two dozen chemistry kits. With what’s already on hand, that should give us enough biology and chemistry kits to last through the end of May. Then I’ll get started on building subassemblies for the first batch of 30 life science kits, which start shipping the last week of May.

13:05 - I thought of Barbara’s father when I saw this:

I’ve assembled four dozen science kits in the last two days, which got me down to dangerously low inventory levels on several items. For example, I’m down to only four 12″ lab thermometers and less than 70 splash goggles. Fortunately, I’d just issued a purchase order this morning for 400 thermometers and 400 splash goggles, along with a bunch of other stuff. That vendor had everything I really needed in stock and they generally ship pretty quickly, so I suspect the stuff will arrive late this week or early next. I was also going to order a couple or three gross of 250 mL glass beakers, but this particular vendor doesn’t stock glassware and sells it only by the case. The trouble is, their lead time on glassware is 90 days give or take. Oh, well. I can get those beakers quickly from any of several other wholesalers.

Our finished goods inventory of science kits is getting low again, so I’ll spend some time today and tomorrow assembling more finished kits.

11:52 - Never, ever even think of ordering anything from Vitality Medical. I ordered 500 oral syringes from them a year or so ago, and they’ve been spamming me ever since. At first, it was one or two spams a week. Now it’s up to at least one a day. I’ve repeatedly clicked on the unsubscribe link in their emails, with no effect. I’ve emailed their customer support repeatedly, again with no effect. I’ve called the support number repeatedly, again with no effect.

Yesterday, I finally checked the email headers and found that apparently Vitality Medical subcontracts their spamming out to a company called Constant Contact. No shit. They do what their name says. The FTC needs to shut these bastards down.