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Month: August 2012

Saturday, 11 August 2012

08:08 – One to-do item taken care of. We now have about three dozen biology kits finished and ready to ship. Today, I’ll get started on the next batch of 60 chemistry kits. Well, half-batch, really. I’ll do them in two groups of 30 each. I also need to get started on making up solutions in bulk for the forensic science kits, which we plan to start shipping by 27 August, and earlier if possible. We’re doing an initial run of 30 of those kits, and we already have pre-orders on some of those.

Barbara called last night, but the cell phone service where she was was horrible. We lost the connection on her first attempt, and when she called back she was breaking up so badly I could barely understand her. But I did hear enough to know that her dad is fine and everything is going well.

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Friday, 10 August 2012

09:42 – Barbara and her family finally got on the road late yesterday afternoon. They broke their trip in Roanoke, and will finish the drive this morning. Her dad is still on IV vancomycin, which she has to administer at 9:00 p.m. daily. Colin and I are missing her, but we’re surviving so far.

Last night, we watched several more episodes of Heartland. Well, I watched, while Colin mostly pestered me to throw his toys down the hall. I wouldn’t mind if he’d just bring them to me and drop them so that I could pick them up and throw them. But that’s not enough participation to satisfy him. He brings them, drops them, and as soon as I reach for them, he grabs them away from me and then stands there whining at me. Very annoying.

Despite our mutual kidding, there aren’t really any speech characteristics that allow one to discriminate reliably between Canadians and Americans. Yes, there’s the “ou” diphthong, which most (not all) Americans pronounce to rhyme with “cow” and most (not all) Canadians pronounce to kind of rhyme with “loose”. But there are many Americans who use the “Canadian” pronunciation, and vice versa.

So, on my first pass through the five seasons of Heartland, I thought I’d discovered a speech difference. On three or four occasions, one of the characters was referring to his or her school days and used a construct that strikes American ears as strange. Where an American would say, “my third-grade teacher”, Canadians apparently instead say, “my grade-three teacher”. I thought I’d discovered something.

Then, last night as I re-watched episode six of series three, Lou was telling Amy, Ty, and Scott in detail how much work was involved in caring for an orphaned foal. Scott (the vet) asked her how she knew so much about it, and she replied that she’d done a “sixth-grade” project on the subject. Oh, well.

We ended up shipping six kits yesterday, four chemistry and two biology. So far today, we have only one order. That’s actually a bit of a relief, considering that our finished-goods inventory is now down to only four biology kits and five chemistry kits. So yesterday afternoon I brought 30 almost-complete biology kits up from the basement. They’re now sitting in the kitchen, where I’ll complete final assembly today and stack them in the finished-goods inventory area. Once I finish that, I’ll start assembling another 30 chemistry kits, followed by yet another 30 chemistry kits. Then it’s 30 forensic science kits. Lather, rinse, repeat.

12:18 – When I shipped our first science kit to Canada a month or so ago, I had to drive to the post office to have the box weighed. Even though I was shipping the box International Priority Mail flat-rate, the customs documents required an actual weight for the box. So, the other day I finally got around to ordering a shipping scale from Amazon.com, which arrived yesterday and which I used for the first time today.

The main reason I put off ordering a shipping scale so long was that I figured it’d be expensive and I didn’t really have time to do any comparisons before ordering. So I was shocked when I found a perfectly suitable scale from a good manufacturer on Amazon for $35. It’s the American Weigh Ship-Elite. It has a capacity of 50 kilos/110 pounds and resolution of 0.1 ounce across that range. The metric resolution is 1 gram up to 20 kilos and 2 grams from 20 to 50 kilos. It runs on two AA cells or the included AC adaptor, and has a remote read-out on a coiled cord.

I may actually use it in the lab as well. For example, one of the solutions included in the biology kit requires dissolving 1.5 kilos of dipotassium hydrogen phosphate in 15 liters of water. Weighing out 1,500 grams of something on a lab scale with a capacity of 200 grams is a pain in the butt. With this scale, I can weigh it in one pass, and know that I have between 1499 and 1501 grams, which at ± 0.07% is certainly close enough.

13:24 – Geez, I’d forgotten what a pain in the ass it is to pack biology kits. I was wondering the other day why we’d made a second set of goggles an option with the chemistry kits, but not the biology kits. Now I remember. When all of the components of a biology kit are in the box, there’s no room for anything more. Nothing. Not even a packing peanut. I’m even opening the ziplock bags to squeeze excess air out. These biology kits are, in the words of Veronica Mars (referring to game hens), “dense little turkeys“.

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Thursday, 9 August 2012

08:55 – Barbara just left to pick up her parents and sister to head up to their family reunion in Pennsylvania. They’ll return sometime Sunday.

Interesting trend on the science kits. We sold one Monday, two Tuesday, three yesterday, and five so far today. Component backorders permitting, we can sustain 10 or 15 kits a week indefinitely, but we’re still a week or so away from when the really heavy flood of orders typically commences. I’m going to take some time over the next couple of days to do a quick inventory and get POs cut for stuff we’re likely to run out of.

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Wednesday, 8 August 2012

10:29 – Barbara’s dad may or may not be released from the hospital today. They’d planned to leave tomorrow for the family reunion in Pennsylvania, but they may have to delay their departure until Friday. He’s feeling much better, which isn’t surprising since he’s on heavy antibiotics. In addition to the pneumonia and UTI, Barbara told me yesterday that they’d mentioned that he has an S. aureus blood infection. I would imagine that they’re treating him with bacteriostatic antibiotics and are concerned that the infection(s) will come roaring back once they take him off the antibiotics.

When Barbara arrived home yesterday, she immediately asked what the terrible smell was. I’d gotten several deliveries yesterday, which were still stacked in the foyer. I’d noticed a slight musty/rancid smell but I wasn’t able to localize it. When Barbara walked into the foyer, she immediately narrowed it down to a box that contained three one-pound bags of sodium dithionite, which is a chemical that will go into the forensics kits. It’s a bleach used in fabric dyeing. The MSDS says that it has a “characteristic slight sulfurous odor”. According to Barbara, it’s anything but slight. She may be right, because those bags were heat-sealed aluminized plastic, and some odor was still able to escape.

I told her we’d be packing 25 g of the stuff in 30 mL widemouth bottles, and she immediately replied, “*You’ll* be packing…”. When I told her that in addition to the odor problem, the chemical was spontaneously combustible if exposed to air or water, she said there was no way she was going to touch it.

Speaking of hazardous chemicals (and sodium dithionite is classified as only slightly hazardous), I’m always looking for ways to eliminate shipping hazards while maintaining functionality. One of the chemicals I’d like to ship in a kit I’m designing now is universal indicator solution, which is very flammable. For some other chemicals I can get around that problem by shipping a bottle that contains only a tiny amount of the dry chemical. The kit buyer can then simply fill the bottle with, for example, drugstore isopropanol to dissolve the chemical and make up the actual solution.

The problem with universal indicator is that it contains four indicator chemicals in really tiny quantities, as in 0.03% w/v. That means that for a 15 mL bottle I’d need somehow to put more or less exactly 4.5 mg each of bromothymol blue, methyl red, phenolphthalein, and thymol blue powders in each bottle. That’s obviously impractical, but I have a cunning plan, which I intend to test when I have a moment. Rather than mess with the dry chemicals on a per-bottle basis, I’ll simply make up the actual solution, fill each bottle with 15 mL of it, and then heat the bottles at low heat in the convection oven in my lab until all of the liquid evaporates. I’ll then allow the bottles to cool, cap them, and ship them with the kits. And people wonder why my wife calls me Baldrick.

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Tuesday, 7 August 2012

09:48 – Barbara’s dad is doing much better, and may go home from the hospital today. Apparently, he had both pneumonia and a UTI, both of which have been knocked down by antibiotics. Barbara says her dad is insistent that he wants to leave Thursday for the family reunion in Pennsylvania, but it still worries me. A 90-year-old man recovering from pneumonia should be taking it easy, not taking an 8 or 9 hour car trip. But, as Barbara says, her dad is stubborn. And Marines are nothing if not tough. At least he won’t be driving.

Today we sold our first science kit to a customer in Winston-Salem. I’m not sure why I was surprised when I saw the address. There are a lot of homeschoolers in North Carolina.

Today I need to make up a batch of 30 shipping boxes for chemistry kits. We actually have 60 chemistry kits in progress, but we do kits in batches of 30 because we simply don’t have room in the assembly area to do 60 at a time. At the moment, I’m burning DVDs for the new batch of 30 biology kits, which is the last item we need to complete the kits. We’ll get those boxed up and stacked, which’ll free up a lot of space. After we get those boxed and stacked, we’ll box and stack the 30 chemistry kits, and then start on 30 forensic science kits.

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Monday, 6 August 2012

07:42 – Too much going on yesterday. Around 3:00 yesterday afternoon, we walked over to a neighbor’s 40th birthday party, and then headed over to pick up Mary and Paul and head for Costco and then dinner. When we arrived home at around 7:15, there was a message waiting on the answering machine to call her parents. As it turned out, Barbara’s dad had collapsed and they’d called 911. I stayed home to take care of Colin, and Barbara headed for the hospital.

As usual, nothing much happened for several hours, while Barbara and her family sat around waiting to find out if they’d treat and release her dad or admit him. Late in the evening, they finally told Barbara and her mom and sister that they were going to admit him, at least overnight. She finally got home just after midnight, and said her dad had pneumonia. At this point, Barbara doesn’t know if they’ll send her dad home today or keep him in another day. She also doesn’t know if they’ll be able to make the trip up to Pennsylvania later this week for the reunion.

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Sunday, 5 August 2012

10:00 – Barbara is heading out late this coming week to a family reunion in Pennsylvania, so it’ll be wild-women-and-parties™ while she’s gone. Either that, or I’ll just have a Heartland marathon. Assuming, of course, that Netflix streaming works.

Last night, we started to watch something on Netflix streaming. Everything appeared normal until I tried to start running the episode, at which point, it bounced back to the episode screen, popped up a “Content unavailable” message, and suggested I try again later. So I tried running episodes from several different series, and got the same message each time. So I backed out of Netflix and tried a couple other services, both of which worked fine. So I called Netflix tech support and spoke to a nice young woman who eventually had me de-register and then re-register my Roku box. She said that was the generic fix for any Roku problem, so from now on I’ll just de/re-register any time we have a problem.

Figuring if anyone would know, a Netflix tech-support rep would, I asked her what she’d buy to stream Netflix. She said she’d just bought her father a box for Netflix streaming, and she’d decided on a Roku. She said, which confirms my experience, that the Roku ordinarily Just Works for months on end, and when it has problems it’s almost always just a matter of de/re-registering to get it up and running again. She also said that using a hard-wired connection eliminated about 90% of the problems people had with Roku, which again confirms my own experience. Roku wireless networking simply sucks. When it works, it works very well, and it stays up for months on end. But when it has problems, you can expect to spend hours getting it to work again. I should have expected that from the start. When I bought the Roku and connected it for the first time, their “5-minute” set-up procedure took me two or three hours. This for a guy who co-authored a book about TCP/IP network administration for O’Reilly. I shudder to think what ordinary civilians have to go through when they have Roku problems with wireless.

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Saturday, 4 August 2012

10:46 – Ever since I can remember, I’ve used the 3D organization system for physical items. That is, I stack them, and simply remember which stack each item is in, and how far down in the stack. Although this is probably the most common organization system among scientists, college professors, engineers, and so on, it doesn’t work particularly well for what I’m doing now. The three science kits we’re currently selling contain a total of more than 200 items, and that’s only finished-goods items. If you break out the bill of materials, it’s more than 1,000 items. For example, the finished-goods item “Biuret Reagent” is a 30 mL bottle of biuret reagent. That in turn is made up of a 30 mL bottle, a cap, a label, tape to seal the cap, and 30 mL of the solution itself. The solution, in turn, is made up of distilled water, copper(II) sulfate, sodium potassium tartrate, potassium iodide, and sodium hydroxide. In other words, that one finished SKU is actually made up of 10 separate SKUs, all of which have to be kept track of, and many of which are also components of other finished-goods SKUs.

So far, I’ve been keeping track of all of this stuff in my head. And, if I do say so myself, I’ve been doing it pretty well. I just remember, for example, that I have 268 thermometers and 322 24-well reaction plates in stock, and when we built the last batch of 30 biology kits, I mentally decremented that to 238 and 292 remaining. Barbara gets annoyed with me when we run out of something, but that doesn’t happen often, and about 90% of the time it does it’s because an item is backordered from a supplier rather than because I forgot to order it. But, at age 59, my memory is a pale shadow of what it once was, and I’m trying to force myself to get better organized using traditional methods.

One of those traditional methods that’s been in use for hundreds if not thousands of years is to use inventory bins. So this morning we made a Home Depot run, and I looked at the storage bins they had on offer. I ended up buying 37 plastic shoeboxes with lids, which are stackable, chemical- and leak-resistant, a good size for many of the items we inventory, and reasonably cheap. I would have bought a couple hundred of them to get started–in fact we drove the Trooper instead of Barbara’s car just because we wanted more room to haul stuff back–but 37 was all they had.

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Friday, 3 August 2012

09:46 – Kit inventory is getting uncomfortably low, with only 15 chemistry kits and seven biology kits in stock. As of now, we’re shipping around 12 to 15 kits a week, which is a good rate for early August. That rate is ramping up, and will probably be double or triple the current rate late in August and into September. As of now, we have 30 more biology kits that need only final assembly, and 60 chemistry kits that aren’t far behind. The next batch will be 30 forensic science kits, followed by another 60 biology kits and then another 60 chemistry kits. Earlier this year, I thought I’d be pleased if we sold 60 total kits in August. It looks like that won’t be a problem.

Barbara just emailed me with very sad news. Randi Weiss, one of the attorneys at Barbara’s firm, died suddenly yesterday of cancer. Barbara’s email summed up in two sentences how everyone felt about Randi: “She was brilliant and kind. It is really a blow to the Firm.”

Randi’s doctorate was in molecular biology. I’d exchanged several emails with her and spoken with her on the phone a couple of times. I told Randi that at some point I intended to do a lab manual and kit that focused on molecular biology, and she had kindly agreed to be my tech reviewer for that project. Although I never met her face to face, I’ll miss her.

11:58 – It seems that Spain is in even worse debt trouble than anyone thought. A Polish legislator has pointed out that Spain borrowed about $60 million worth of gold from Poland about 400 years ago. At current gold prices, and assuming that Spain pays 400 years’ worth of compound interest at the natural 3% annual rate, that means Spain owes Poland just over $8 trillion. Some might argue that a debt 400 years old is impossible to collect, especially since neither Spain nor Poland is the nation it was 400 years ago. But in my opinion, debts, most especially including sovereign debts, must be paid. Of course, in effect this means that Germany now owes Poland $8 trillion, beyond whatever Germany still owes Poland for what it did to Poland in WWII. I suspect that Poland would be willing to settle for $8 trillion even.

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Thursday, 2 August 2012

08:09 – Mario Draghi made what may in retrospect be recognized as a strategic blunder last week when he announced that the ECB would do whatever was necessary to save the euro. It was certainly a tactical blunder by anyone’s standard. Draghi’s comment led to a big upswing in the markets, which took his word for it. The trouble is, it is not within the power of Draghi or the ECB to save the euro, and whatever measures he announces today will either fall well short of what is required or will exceed the authority of the ECB.

The Germans do not control the ECB, and it’s quite possible that Draghi will today announce that the ECB will grant the ESM a banking license. Doing so is not in their power, and is specifically prohibited by treaty, but that may not stop them. And if the ECB announces that it will grant the ESM a banking license, the Germans will go berserk. In effect, granting the ESM a banking license will allow it to make unlimited purchases of sovereign bonds without “sterilizing” those purchases by selling other bonds that it already holds, which means those purchases will be funded by printing money. That is the line in the sand that Germany refuses to cross. If the ECB takes this step, it paints Germany into a corner with only one way out: departing the euro and returning to its own sovereign currency. And you can bet that Germany, which absolutely refuses to give the southern tier what amounts to an unlimited right to spend Germany’s money, will depart the euro before it allows that to happen.

So, Draghi has two choices. He can announce steps that are grossly insufficient to save the euro, and the markets will respond accordingly. Or he can announce that the ECB will grant the ESM a banking license, and Germany will respond accordingly. It sucks to be Draghi.

10:00 – What a shocker. Mario Draghi announced precisely nothing, and the markets are responding accordingly. Draghi didn’t give them the ESM banking license. He didn’t even cut the interest rate. All he did was promise to do something unspecified at some unspecified future date. So much for yet another “last chance to save the euro”. News flash: there is no chance, last or otherwise, for the euro. Speaking of which, I just moved series two of The Walking Dead to the top of our Netflix disc queue.

I just spent a couple hours cleaning up my lab, unpacking and inventorying chemicals, and so on. I really need to get some horizontal space freed up.

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