08:34 – Barbara is taking a break this morning from labeling bottles to work out in the yard before it gets too hot. I’m doing laundry and other normal Saturday tasks. This afternoon, Barbara will be back to labeling bottles and I’ll be making up solutions and filling bottles. Finished kit inventory is currently at comfortable levels and building.
I spent some time yesterday reviewing and editing the cover for Illustrated Guide to Forensic Science Experiments. All that remains is a quick QC2 pass and then the book will be off to the printers. It’s currently scheduled to hit the bookstores on 12 August. By then, we need to have the first batch of forensic science kits ready to ship.
Barbara and I have been watching Lying Little Pretties on Netflix streaming. My favorite of the four is Spencer, played by Troian Bellisario. I can’t help liking a girl who, while playing Scrabble with her boyfriend, fills in “glyceraldehyde”. I do wonder where she got all those tiles, though.
09:32 – I should remember this stuff, particularly when I’ve left myself notes. I have sheets of paper taped to the cabinet doors in my lab. They’re instructions for making up chemicals for the various science kits. So, this morning I was making up two liters of 0.1% methyl orange indicator. The instructions are as follows: “Methyl Orange, 0.1% – Dissolve 2.00 g of methyl orange powder in about 1.8 L of hot DI water. Cool and make up to 2.00 L.”
So what did I do? I boiled 1 L of DI water, added it to 1 L of room-temperature DI water, and added 2.00 g of methyl orange powder. The water was about 140 °F (60 °C), which most people would consider “hot”. Not hot enough, obviously. Maybe half of the powder dissolved, with the remainder forming clumps that settled to the bottom of the bottle.
So now I’ll decant off about half of the solution, leaving the undissolved powder and maybe a liter of the dilute solution. I’ll boil that and hope the clumps dissolve. If not, I’ll discard what I have and start over, this time with boiling water. And I’ll update the instructions from “hot” to “boiling“.
Just pre-ordered the forensics book. Good idea, putting the link in the post. I hadn’t realized it was available for order yet. Even if the Dumbhead#2, er, my beloved second child, is too busy with playing violin for the retarded children in a special ed class and all the other non-productive things his mother pushes him to do, maybe getting a science book on a subject that interests him will motivate him to put more time into science and math.
(To clarify, I have nothing against playing violin, even if one lacks any particualar talent and certainly lacks the motivation to practice enough to get good. Nor do I object to helping out the less fortunate, and children who are born with problems certainly qualify as that. But there needs to be some sense of proportion. His mother has him spending at least ten hours a week on that, and in building sets for dinner theatre musicals she’s appearing in, and an endless list of similar non-paying, non-academically-beneficial tasks. On top of high school and part-time job, it’s too much.)
I started learning violin when I was in about 3rd grade. After all, Sherlock Holmes played the violin.
I gave it up after about a month, with my parents’ complete approval. Every time I tried to practice, our Border Collie, Abbie, would howl piteously the whole time. At times, it actually sounded like she was singing along. My parents never admitted it, but I suspect they were howling right along with Abbie.
Then, in 7th grade, the music teacher asked the class to write down the instrument they’d like to learn to play. That was the era of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and the whole class with only two or three exceptions listed either guitar or drums. A couple girls wrote down “piano”. I wrote down “harpsichord”.
Heh. I wanted to learn bagpipe in 7th grade. I will never publicly admit that it was more for being able to annoy everyone within a quarter mile than for the musical qualities of the instrument.
Our beloved Princess up here has just been accepted at McGill in Montreal, her mom’s alma mater……….where she will major in……Chinese and music.
God give me strength.
McGill is a tough school, though, and they’re gonna kick her butt. She already knows Latin, Italian, Greek, French, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese and has a bit of Mandarin Chinese, too. And plays piano and organ. How this will translate into a paying occupation is, at present, a complete mystery to me. But what the hell; nothing one trains for or is educated in is any kind of guarantee, anyway. I have an advanced education in English literature and I’m stringing orange spaghetti fiber under the data center floor and installing the constant RH security patches on several thousand servers running on Cisco switches.
Bagpipes and drums, yeah! Great stuff! A couple of times when I lived in an apartment in a questionable ‘hood down in Woostuh, MA, the local riff-raff would crank up hip-hop and salsa down in the street of a weekend. I’d get our giant boombox and load up a tape of bagpipes and drums and crank it full volume; within five minutes all that racket down in the street would stop and there would be no one in sight. Now I do it in my truck when some bonehead next to me has the usual crap blasting away for everyone else to enjoy. Hey, fuckhead, get a load of THIS! The Black Watch Tattoo, Edinburgh, circa 1984! Or maybe some Seven Nations, formerly Clan na Gael….
Didn’t I recently post my favorite image of a bagpiper?
I started music lessons when I was 9 years old, a VERY long time ago. My mother was selling newspapers from a newsstand/kiosk in the Boston subway system (then called the MTA). Every day she sold a newspaper to a very old professorial type with swept-back long hair, who carried a violin case. My mother wanted her kids to be musical and one day she asked him to come to our house to see if we could deal with music lessons.
He took the subway/trolley to our house, and for $1.00 a week, he proposed to give me and my brother violin lessons. The teacher and I both gave up after a month or so: I simply had to talent for the violin, but … we had a piano and I switched to piano lessons. My younger brother simply refused to try and ran away every time he showed up at the door. I continued with the piano for about 4 years, and then my teacher, Armeneg Nalbandian, died. I never found another teacher as good and continued on my own. I still play to this day, although arthritis is taking a heavy toll.
People used to ask me why I switched to the piano and, stealing a very old joke from Victor Borge, I told them the beer glass kept falling off the violin.
Thank you, Prof. Nalbandian. You enriched my life in many ways and I have never forgotten you.
For performing arts, I thought the only three schools worth attending were North Carolina School of the Arts, Juilliard School, and Tisch, at least for those who expected to get a paying job.
As to Chinese, wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper and more effective if she just got a job at a good Chinese restaurant?
RBT wrote: For performing arts, I thought the only three schools worth attending were North Carolina School of the Arts, Juilliard School, and Tisch…
Oh, my. There are many MANY more top level schools: Eastman, Manhattan, Peabody, Yale, Cincinnati, and many many more. There are 156 schools in the U.S. that offer a Doctorate of Musical Arts Degree (not a guarantee of paid employment, but…). My niece is a graduate of Eastman and Yale, her husband is a graduate of Eastman and Manhattan. Every Thanksgiving they schlep their instruments to my house and we fill up 5 days with turkey, booze, and music. We’ve had people stop in the street just to listen. These kids are pros, and the music they make is proof of that.
My wife has been watching “Pretty Little Liars” on the ABC Family channel since it came out. I have to admit to watching it some also with her. It is quite good at times.
Has Barbara tried “Switched at Birth” ( http://abcfamily.go.com/shows/switched-at-birth )? It is not bad, not great either, but is a good family drama.
Hey OFD, are you at liberty to say which data center you work at? I host my websites at http://www.pair.com which is very, very good except for the greenie slant that they have been taking lately. Uptime! Uptime! Uptime! My dedicated server has been up for 282 days and just loafs along ( http://qs1257.pair.com/pair/status.cgi ). My customers and prospects rarely pull more than 100 GB/month from it.
I have been thinking about moving to http://www.hostgator.com since they are here in the Houston area but have no impetus to do so.
I had a new graduate work for me for a year or two in the late Eighties, he’d majored in Chinese and Computer Science. Smart guy but not much initiative. He could solve assembly language problems faster than I could set them but never bothered to learn to be useful on our mainframe software help desk.
I don’t like the violin much but years ago knew a 14 year old Korean boy who’d been in my sister’s class. It was just wonderful to listen to him playing.
No insult intended, but I simply notice when I’m looking at biographies of actors and actresses on Internet Movie Database, the three schools I mentioned seem to dominate.
“Didn’t I recently post my favorite image of a bagpiper?”
Yeah, you did. We agreed you could take the bagpiper home and you, he, Barbara and Colin could all get married and live happily ever after, and I’d take the poor lass who was propping him up.
Perhaps Miles_Teg is using “agreed” in a sense I’d never before encountered.
RBT wrote: No insult intended…
Aha, said the blind carpenter as he picked up his hammer and saw.* I missed the “performing arts” part. I tend to focus in on purely musical education, and tend to forget that places (very great places) like Julliard and Tisch also have a focus on theater arts. Robin Williams, f’rinstance is a Julliard grad.
At any rate, no insult perceived on this end.
That asterisk in my previous post was meant to point to an apology for that awful pun.
“As to Chinese, wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper and more effective if she just got a job at a good Chinese restaurant?”
No doubt; I will pass that bit of advice along but, like most women, she has nearly zero sense of humor, esp. if it comes from me. Plus she’d get paid at the same time. In any case she is currently working part-time at an Irish pub up there but learning Irish Gaelic isn’t gonna help much, either.
“Hey OFD, are you at liberty to say which data center you work at?”
I work for a very large corporation that has been around for a century and which is also a huge DOD contractor firm. I’m responsible for hw and sw config, maintenance, troubleshooting, etc. in two local data centers and also provide support for more down in upstate NY, for a total of around 3,300 servers, 20k CPUs, and 112TB of RAM; don’t ask me how much storage. We run RH 4 through 5.6 with a few units trickling in now of 6.2 on x86’s and blades, with mostly Cisco and Broadcom switches.
We share a bathroom between us and two card-access security doors with another heavy DOD contractor firm. We do no web-hosting and our main raison d’etre, at my level anyway, is IT support of sensitive DOD systems and data. That’s probably more than I should have said, but WTF, anyone can find this stuff out.
Because there are so many servers involved, there is always something for me to do, and there are usually some reboots every day. But previously I worked for another huge corporation that is Windows-centric and I could have spent 7×24 simply rebooting Windows Server 2003 physical hosts and the hordes of vm’s they ran.
Anyway, I do everything from soup to nuts in the place and every day is different and I have a good krew to work with, at least half the battle. And we all know constantly that we can be gone in the next five minutes for any reason at all or no reason at all.
What a country!
RBT, what you need is augmented reality goggles. You don’t have to write updates on your paper instructions at all. Just make a verbal note and the goggle system somehow automagically keeps track of it. The next time you look at the instructions, “hot” will be replaced in your view by “boiling”.
I don’t know where you would get such goggles, but they’re apparently for sale somewhere. Certain frequent contributors on this forum already have them, replacing, for instance, pictures of Hillary Clinton with pictures of something more readily identifiable as human.
Soup to nuts?
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/4771/neabtyhsoup2nuts.jpg
Yeah, I’m the big fat drone back in the kitchen ladling out the soup, with a ciggie dangling from my gob, a little cloud of flies around my head, and my baggy pants are hanging down. I am also swilling rancid Budweiser by the case. The soup is made from rats and snails and puppy dog tails. The chick hauling out this rubbish to the kooks is my gf and she’s a riot in the sack.
RBT: Since you’re trying to teach capital S Science, why not change ‘hot’ water to, for example, 85*C water?
Wow, I knew that IT employment was dropping but not by this much:
http://www.cringely.com/2012/07/06/it-class-warfare-its-just-ibm/
I’ve been telling all the kids to go into engineering or computers. Looks like the computer stuff may be going away or becoming way more efficient.
Lynn
“The only way out of this mess is to innovate ourselves into a better future.”
Gee, thanks a lot, Cringely. We sure will do that. Sounds a lot like the tripe from Gilder and other cheerleaders for the miracles of tech that will change the universe, the next insanely great thing.
I know this much: the Cloud still has to run on iron, at some level, somewhere. Carbon-based machines and electricity. Low-level subhuman Morlocks like me are needed to tend these buggers, ‘hands-and-feet,’ to push buttons, open up metal boxes, string cables and fiber, do arcane shit from consoles, push in and pull out other metal boxes like switches and terminal concentrators, and sweep the place up. Couple this with systems running software and data that requires a DOD clearance and Bob’s yer uncle, for me, anyway, the aforementioned subhuman drone. How long will it last? Who knows? I could be gone Monday afternoon, with nary an explanation. Regardless of education, veterans status, training or certifications or seniority.
There are other guys down the hall from me who have 12, 17, 25, 35 years with the firm, and they are working out of dumpy claustrophobic offices with no windows right up against a data center wall that produces 80 db from noise and vibration (monster a-c units). I should get more certs and graduate degrees so I can end up like them? Or the drones among them who are now being offered shitty partial retirement “packages” that often involve, if they are lucky, moving to part-time status?
I’m 59 and probably have only a few more years left of doing this kind of thing, at BEST. So I’m working on other ways of earning money now, and especially ways of doing it that do not involve answering to, and working for, clueless PHB manglers and assorted upper-ranks asswipes who wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire.
If it’s something I love doing, hopefully, I will work as hard at it as Robert and Barbara and others here work at what they love. But the days of yore are not coming back again; Cringely is right about that, at least. (and BTW, he got a TON of intel from a LOT of pissed-off former and current IBM’ers; there are plenty there who love the place and love what they do; mostly highly-paid engineers and scientists).
So, Lynn, you may wanna qualify what you tell the kidz about computer and engineering “careers,” if such a thing is even possible anymore: they need to get at LEAST master’s-level degrees in those fields, and preferably doctorates, if they are capable of doing so. Those guys do all right. In my view an undergraduate degree in some type of engineering with plenty of exposure to cutting-edge IT would be—a START. And the hot field right now is data analytics, involving so-called Big Data.
And one of the technologies involved can be studied free of charge right now at IBM:
http://bigdatauniversity.com/courses/course/view.php?id=301
My son, the Warrior, is working on a dual Chemistry and Physics degree at the University of Houston. He is 29 now and has been working for me programming since he was 15 while going to school, except for those 4 years where he was a part of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children vacationing in Iraq. In fact, he taught me C++ when we transitioned our software from Win16 to Win32. He has got about a year to go but I am telling him to jump into Chemical Engineering if he can (he says no way!). He was talking about going to grad school but he has learned that grad school means that you become a slave for your prof at $18/hour with no benefits. He maintains that a Chemistry degree means that he can work at any chemical plant / refinery on the Gulf Coast and he may be right.
I’ve got a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M but I run a small Chemical Engineering software company. Been programming in Fortran, Basic, C and C++ since I was 15 (used to keypunch Fortran code on cards for the programmers). My partners founded this business back in 1969 (one was my Dad) and we have been doing this in one form or another since then.
It does look like everything is heading to the Cloud on a fast train. One of my partners is jumping up and down about moving to the Cloud but I am telling him it is a $5,000,000 project (SWAG). We missed the first PC transition from mainframes back in the 1980s and it cost us a lot of our customers. Now I am wondering about the Cloud sucking all the Windows desktop business away.
I would say that there is zero job security out there as there is zero customer security out there. The old adage, “what did you do for me today”, has never been truer. Customers are very flighty nowadays and do not want to be locked in for more than a year. In fact, my larger customers are now refusing to sign multiple year contracts, even if they have to pay more.
Every Thanksgiving they schlep their instruments to my house and we fill up 5 days with turkey, booze, and music.
I am coming to your house for Thanksgiving. You don’t have to feed me much and I promise to be quiet.
I’m 59 and probably have only a few more years left of doing this kind of thing, at BEST.
I am 61 and have at most 4 years left of the daily grind. I have been in IT since 1969 starting work on big iron and progressing to the little boxes. I don’t really know that anymore work is really getting done but the output is sure nicer looking. I have programmed in multiple languages even writing some of my own compilers for some users. One compiler was in BASIC that generated BASIC code as output. It was to make life easier for the users as the language was specific to their needs and understanding. In this case it was a vet doing embryo research using terms that were Greek to me.
I work for the top engineering honor society in the US. A small office of 11 people with an IT staff of one, me. I am no expert in any of this stuff but know enough to get it done. Being an expert in it all is impossible and I have to be a jack of all trades doing desktop support, database support, network support, software development, phone system support and changing batteries in the clocks.
It is a dead end job and I really don’t care. I spent years chasing the high level position, status and pay. Found out it is not worth it as it can destroy your home life and your health. The current job pays enough to cover the bills plus a little extra and that is just fine by me. The most important thing about the job is that it is secure as long as I don’t screw up, which after 43 years I doubt is going to happen.
It sounds like you and your son have a rock-solid basis in hard sciences, maths and programming stuff; should have much better chances at decent work than most people these days in this economy and culture. Someone has to create stuff, make it, fix it and maintain it, whatever it is, at whatever level. Carbon-based stuff. The water vapor stuff is happening already, and lots of folks are in it without knowing it. If they use Dropbox they’re in it. And huge corporations and gummint are getting very heavy into Big Data.
All I can do is keep hammering at my little drone job day in, day out, try to keep learning as much new stuff as I can, which I am able to do every day so far, and also work on something else for when this goes away. Right now one of those things is a creative enterprise, where I can actually use my wonderful advanced education in English literature, history and research. The other is more hands-on, with objects that are selling like hotcakes and already in huge profusion in this country with no end in sight.
I may be pushing 60 but I’ll be damned if I throw up my hands and slink away waiting for the bread lines to kick in.
“Every Thanksgiving they schlep their instruments to my house and we fill up 5 days with turkey, booze, and music.”
Ray and I are BOTH coming to your house in November this year; you have to feed me a lot but I don’t drink and I will also STFU and be quiet and listen. I’ve learned THAT much in more than a half-century on the planet. Hey thanks for the invite!
As a kid, I wanted to learn music, but was forced into violin by my parents in 3rd grade. I had no interest whatever in that instrument, and never practiced. Still, the orchestra teacher claimed I was one of the best in the city. By 5th grade, my career path of broadcasting was fixed (they say priests know at a similar age what they will do), and I began backing out of everything that was not a direct benefit, switching from music to speech, drama, and stuff like that.
About that time, an unspeakable thing happened. The Rocky the Squirrel show premiered on TV in complete conflict with the city orchestra rehearsal. I was outta there, and never went back. Many years later, I did regret that I never again saw a girl whom I liked a lot but went to a different school. Back in that day, moms did not ferry their kids to and from every event in the kid’s life, and we all walked everywhere—carrying our instruments to orchestra practice. Elaine and I walked home together every week. I moved to the big city the next year, and her family moved way up north in the state. Years later, I saw her again in uni, but she had a boyfriend by then. I gave up music and a potential girlfriend, all to watch the Rocky the Squirrel show (later renamed to The Bullwinkle Show). It WAS a great show!
It has really helped to get the central air going earlier in the day. Only rose to 77°F inside today—even though this was yet another 100+ day at 80% humidity. Relief tomorrow, supposedly, as highs will only be mid-80’s. Indiana has a couple of business-only newspapers, and both have had articles about how the whole nation can expect higher food prices because of crop failures here. Indiana is 5th in the nation in corn production, and much of it has failed, with plenty more likely to. Of all Midwestern states, those articles say Indiana has been hit by heat and no rain by far the hardest of any.
My pet earwig showed up this morning. Dead and glued to the kitchen sink. Not sure what happened, because it was the left side of a double sink, and I almost never run water on that side, so I don’t know how he could have drowned, much less gotten glued to the stainless sink itself. The other day, I opened the Listerine bottle, and he fell out of the cap. He was obviously drunk, as he could not walk in a straight line. I put him back outside, only to find him dead in the sink this morning. Police will likely want to investigate.
” Police will likely want to investigate.”
A Fed SWAT team has already been alerted and is ramping up with a convoy of Homeland Insecurity armored vehicles and choppers as we speak. Prepare to be tasered, handcuffed, and then flown to Gitmo for further interrogation. You will be issued an orange jumpsuit and a Q’uran. You will wish you kept your KJV.
Yeah, we have the nooz here, too; nationwide crop failures this years, esp. with corn. I note that the corn here was the usual ‘knee-high by the fourth of July’ but that ain’t gonna save us. Higher food AND meat prices coming our way. And hell, the gas and oil people will probably pile on, too, at about the same time Roberts/ObamaCare kicks in with its new “taxes.”
What a country!
Bought a new GE microwave about 5 months ago from Walmart. Today, it quit. Blew an internal fuse I am sure—but I am also certain that something else is also wrong, which made the fuse blow. I checked on the Internet, and lots of people report that this particular microwave has failed completely, after only a few months of service. Wish I had read those before buying, but it was an impulse purchase for me, when I saw it on sale.
One guy on the Internet spoke with confidence in reporting that Walmart had insisted that GE make this particular microwave so cheaply (it is only offered for sale at Walmart), that crappy parts destined it for failure. A couple other reports are that cost estimates for repair of any microwave are upwards of $120, no matter what the problem. Since I only paid $99 for the thing while it was on sale, that is truly not worth it. One person reported that contact directly with GE produced the news that—because this unit is assembled abroad and is so cheap—no parts are available from GE at all for repairs of this particular model. When I tried to go to the parts website for GE, that is also the message I got: “no parts available for this model”.
One of the big appliance outlets that is local to the Midwest, closed down their appliance and TV repair facility in Indy about the time I returned from Germany. A friend who knew a couple people that worked there, said the price of repairs are almost always higher than the cost of a new unit—whatever it is: camera, TV, microwave, hair dryers, you name it. Thus, so few people were getting repairs anymore, that they just closed the repair facility.
After a little research, I guess I will try Panasonic, and buy it from somebody besides Walmart, to insure the quality has not been compromised by Walmart’s hellbent insistence on cheapness.
OFD – do you happen to work for the same company I do, the one turning 100 this year?
Alas, I may be out the door in the next few weeks, and by the end of the year for certain if we don’t win a proposal I worked on. (I’m with IS&GS Civil, btw.)
On musical instruments: a friend has been learning a new one every 5 years since he got out of college. I think he’s about to learn a new one. The two he learned while I’ve known him are bagpipes and theremin.
I dunno about the rest of GE but the Healthcare division is a Windows shop and in a very tight relationship with Microsoft now. They also have about 22 layers between the lowest drone and the CEO, whereas where I am now has about seven. And the CEO’s email and phone number are easily available. Also GE’s CEO has been the current Administration’s labor “czar” while his company has been busily off-shoring jobs and has a team of around a thousand former IRS Gestapo agents taking care of their taxes, of which they paid zero last year, legally.
As for electronics made, assembled, parts from, or whatever, yeah; they’re not worth repairing anymore and are destined for so-called recycling or a landfill.
ech, the firm I work for has already turned 100. I am sorry to hear of your situation, though and hope it works out for you. We all skate on very thin ice these days.
OFD wrote:
“As for electronics made, assembled, parts from, or whatever, yeah; they’re not worth repairing anymore and are destined for so-called recycling or a landfill. ”
I very much regret the throw-away nature of our society and wish that more stuff was repaired, not dumped and replaced.
(Nevertheless, I am pondering when to take a 15″ CRT, 19″ CRT, 21″ CRT, small TV (bought in 1980) and large TV (bought in 1999) to the dump to free up some space for the new gear I’ve got.)
I have the same regret; and am actually horrified at the amount of junk that is in the oceans and on the ocean floors, let alone what is wasted on terra firma.
64 here right now, at 11:23 EDT. But still humid. And Mrs. OFD’s pay is now a full month late. Just as we’re in the middle of trying to buy a house. Perfect.
I gotta make some serious change in the next few years somehow. And get out from under The Man.
OFD wrote:
“And get out from under The Man.”
Too much information, Dave.