08:31 – It was 64.4F (18C) when I took Colin out around 0615 this morning, overcast and drizzling.
After a miserable May, science kit sales are kicking into high gear this month. It may be just a blip, but my guess is that things are just speeding up a month or so earlier this year than usual. As of this morning, with June about 14% gone, we’re at 55% of revenues for all of June 2016, and we’ve already matched revenues for all of last month.
I hope this keeps up, but the downside is that we’re quickly drawing down our finished goods inventory of kits. We’re in reasonably good shape on our flagship biology and chemistry kits, but we’re getting low on forensics kits and are completely out of the smaller basic chemistry kits, for which I have an outstanding order that came in overnight. So we need to get another batch of those made up immediately and start building stock on the others.
I have the amateur radio license exam coming up in a couple of weeks, and I haven’t yet done much to prepare for it. I’m taking the Technician Class exam, which is all I really care about, but as long as I’m taking that I decided I might as well take the General Class exam as well.
I’ve flipped through the ARRL General Class exam manual, and it all seems pretty straightforward. I read through the review questions and answers, which are all published. Both tests are 35 multiple-guess questions from a pool of something over 400 questions. Correct answers on 26 of the 35 questions is sufficient to pass the exam. I also have the ARRL Technician Class exam manual on order, due to arrive tomorrow.
I’ll just brute-force the exams, memorizing the answers to all 900 or so questions. Old-school hams consider that “cheating”, but of course it’s perfectly acceptable. And I start with a big advantage, having held a general class licence, albeit 40+ years ago. I don’t expect to have much problem. I’ll just spend the couple evenings before the test going through the questions and answers.