11:40 – I haven’t shut down the old system yet, but I’m doing pretty much everything now on the new one. Science kit sales have started to slow down a bit now. We’re shipping four or five a day at this point.
Speaking of shipping, USPS scared me yesterday. The regular guy had the day off, and I expected his replacement to be running very late. Danny usually arrives around 1600 to 1630 on Mondays, so with the holiday I figured the replacement might not get here until 1700 or 1730. As it turned out, it was 1850. Fortunately, I made it to the front door just as the guy was getting back in his truck. I shouted that I had boxes to be picked up. He’d just grabbed the letters from the mailbox, along with my notice poster that says in a huge font: “USPS Priority Mail box awaiting pickup. Please ring bell.” He was getting ready to drive away with our outgoing envelopes and the poster, but without the eight boxes I had ready for pickup. While he was loading my boxes into the back of his truck, another USPS truck pulled up behind him. I didn’t recognize either of the drivers, and I suspect they were both counter guys that had been pressed into service. The Tuesday after a Monday holiday is always all-hands-on-deck.
I’d better get to work on building more kits. We’re down to three of the CK01A chemistry kits and only one of the CK01B kits, and we might well get orders for all of those later today.
17:12 – And, sure enough, we’re now completely out of chemistry kits. Actually, our stock status is now -1 because I got an order from Canada a few minutes ago for a chemistry kit. Fortunately, I also just finished assembling two dozen sets of chemical bags for the chemistry kits, which is everything I need to build another 24 kits on the fly. This’d actually be a lot of fun if it weren’t so exhausting. In the first four days of this month, kit sales are already about 40% of what we sold all of last September.
Our President is un-freakin-believable. He can do no wrong. Everybody else is wrong. Why is he wasting time with Congress, just go nuke Syria now (just to be sure). Geez. Even McCain has changed his mind. The Narcissist in Chief.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/09/04/201163/obama-i-didnt-draw-the-red-line.html#.UidWpRapVMI
Microsoft is busily building a variant of Windows in the Cloud. It is not Windows. It is not the Cloud (javascript, php, etc). I do not think that MS can win this game but they are going to try. Hard.
Here is my thought the minute that I saw the notice about MS-Nokia. “R.I.P. Windows”:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/09/microsoft_nokia_deal_a_great_idea_that_came_too_late_and_killed_windows.html
“By purchasing Nokia’s smartphone division, Microsoft has killed its signature strategy.”
He’d just grabbed the letters from the mailbox, along with my notice poster that says in a huge font: “USPS Priority Mail box awaiting pickup. Please ring bell.” He was getting ready to drive away with our outgoing envelopes and the poster, but without the eight boxes I had ready for pickup.
This bespeaks a troubling lack of organization. USPS needs to fix this problem before people (like me) can take them seriously for package shipment here in the USA. We are staying with Brown at $5/box anywhere in the USA. I suspect that we are actually paying $10/box here in the USA but I have yet to figure out the actual costs as their billing is so cryptic.
“By purchasing Nokia’s smartphone division, Microsoft has killed its signature strategy.”
So, Linux actually has finally killed Windows?
Oh, I’ve seen UPS and FedEx make similar errors under stress. USPS is still by far the best choice for our business, and I’ve heard from quite a few small businesses that have switched from UPS and/or FedEx to USPS. The changes USPS made late in July are having an effect, too.
Wow, I didn’t see this coming:
760 grams CaCl2 and one pillow.
24 hours later… 772 grams!
It must have been in an airtight container. In 24 hours in the open air, 760 g of anhydrous CaCl2 would have sucked up several times its mass in water vapor.
“By purchasing Nokia’s smartphone division, Microsoft has killed its signature strategy.”
So, Linux actually has finally killed Windows?
Smartphone / Tablet Linux is killing Desktop Windows. Desktop Linux is going nowhere in a hurry. Server Linux is ??? Server Windows is growing (ask OFD).
Are Server Linux and Server Windows the same as Cloud Linux and Cloud Windows? I honestly do not know but both cloud products are growing rapidly. Google, Bing, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.
Desktop Windows is the current flagship product of Microsoft (in terms of revenue and visibility). Next is Desktop Office on Windows. Microsoft has decided (apparently) that they want their flagship product to be Smartphone / Tablet Windows. That is a big change in user experience, cpu, drive space, power usage, etc, etc, etc. Will Desktop Windows of the future be locked to a certain hardware spec as Smartphone Windows is?
As far as I can see, Microsoft has only one real strength, and that is their penetration of the corporate desktop market. Given the growth of the cloud and browser-based services, this is a fragile advantage. They need penetration in mobile computing.
To me, this explains the idiocy of putting a tablet interface on Windows 8: They want to leverage their corporate market, to gain marketshare in the mobile market. It’s a sexy idea, in a sense: If I had exactly the same applications and exactly the same data on my work PC and my smartphone, wouldn’t that be cool? Go to the customer, call up the PowerPoint presentation on my phone, and go.
It ain’t gonna work that way. But it is a nice vision, and it’s pretty much their only chance to still be relevant in 10-15 years.
If I had exactly the same applications and exactly the same data on my work PC and my smartphone, wouldn’t that be cool?
Apple sort of does this already with Pages (Word), Numbers (Excel) and Keynote (Powerpoint). The apps run in the cloud (iCloud) and run on the iPad and iPhone. You can create a document on the iPad, it will sync to iCloud, and you have it available on your iPhone. All automagically and immediately. Well, as long as you have a data connection. You can also use the apps in a web browser so you can take advantage of a desktop.
The apps are $10.00 each so you can get all three for $30.00. And that price includes lifetime updates (at least for now). The apps can also open Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents.
I missed this when it was originally announced, but I just read about it the other day and I know some of RBT’s regulars used to be Opera users.
Opera has dumped their proprietary layout/rendering engine called Presto and has converted their browser to Webkit (same layout/rendering engine that Safari and Chrome use that was derived from KHTML). So, all of those “It doesn’t look right in Opera!” annoyances should be getting eliminated. So, if you stopped using Opera in frustration then you may want to download the latest version (v16) and give it another try.
Opera.com
If I had exactly the same applications and exactly the same data on my work PC and my smartphone, wouldn’t that be cool?
Google Apps. Used to be free for domains, now just free for individuals:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/
>>It must have been in an airtight container.<<
Yeah, it was.
Still, sucking up 2½ tsp of water vapor out of a single pillow over 24 hours seems pretty impressive.
You weren't kidding when you said that stuff was deliquescent!
The MS purchase of Nokia’s cellphone business was probably driven by a need to invest cash held in Europe. They bought Skype the same way. Apple is probably shopping for overseas investments, as they also have a lot of cash parked in Europe. It’s not coming home anytime soon unless Congress gets a clue and cuts the corporate tax rate. Like to zero.
LOL! You have to love this. Everybody has a SWAT team these days. I’m thinking of starting my own:
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130903/gold-miners-near-chicken-cry-foul-over-heavy-handed-epa-raids
“This’d actually be a lot of fun if it weren’t so exhausting.”
The thing that would worry me the most if I was doing this is that I’d miss components out, put too many of the same thing in or just put X instead of Y in the box.
We’re pretty organized. We get a report of a missing item maybe once in every 200 kits, which isn’t perfect but isn’t bad.
That is very good. Industrial assembly line managers dream of that accuracy rate.
I read a story once of a group of saboteurs that was going to disrupt operations in some military or governmental headquarters. They figured that they could get away with 20% screwups in this task but only 10% in that other task without getting called on the carpet. They carefully committed “mistakes” to stay under those ceilings, but they came to the inspectors’ attention anyway … for having such an outstanding accuracy rate.
I don’t know if the story was real, apocryphal, or purely fictional. What details I vaguely recall — and I came across this a thousand years ago, which is very impressive because I’m nowhere near that old, but creative abuse of time machines and rejuvenation drugs will get you a long way — was that it was a WWII operation. If it really happened and was really in WWII, I’d guess it was the Americans doing it to the Germans, because I don’t think anyone but Americans would have such a crazy-ass idea, and if they did it to the Italians they wouldn’t need to worry about maximum error rates.
Just read that Alaska story in the link from MrAtoz; these bozos are gonna get somebody fucking killed, including themselves, if they keep pulling this robocop SWAT shit on every little thing. And there are increasing reports of cop abuse like this, only much worse, all over the country now, horrific stuff. A frequent topic of discussion on other internet boards; people are now discussing taking bad cops out. I tell them we ain’t there yet; calm the fuck down. We have other means at our disposal now before we go to Condition Red in the next civil war.
Please elucidate. Courts don’t work. Citizen review boards were never intended to work. Efforts to cut budgets don’t work.
Begin intel gathering. Names, dates, places, residences, relatives, vehicle reg numbers, shifts worked, friends’ names and other info, biographical info, etc. Identify primary offenders and begin taking pictures and videos; upload them via secure o.s. and secure browsers all over the net; seek to reinstitute public shaming as a means of control and discipline. Provide detailed accounts of the abuse to the net. Have backups of all info on secure servers offshore. Coordinate secure databases of all of this and exchange data with offshore entities who are working the same procedures and methodology with their own LEO abusers.
Meanwhile, aboveboard; file class action lawsuits with friendly and like-minded paralegals and lawyers; send complaint letters to elected officials and through the officially approved channels. Pass this info on to selected media regularly.
As conditions deteriorate, also identify friendly LEOs and ratchet up activities against the bad apples. Keep the pressure on. And identify and use secure communications methodologies.
In other words, keep working the legit and “approved” channels to bitch about LEO abuse but at the same time be working to collect intel for further use.
Re: Opera, I still use it on a daily basis for about 20% of my browsing. I have version 12.15 and XP.
Recently, I got a newer laptop on craigslist (to see if I could stand ‘upgrading’ to Win7) and downloaded the latest and greatest from Firefox, Opera, etc. When I opened Opera, I couldn’t find some of the stuff I used all the time. A quick search showed that their recent changes broke a ton of the unique features of the browser. Apparently, 12.16 is the last of the previous style.