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Category: business

Monday, 6 May 2013

09:20 – Barbara’s dad is doing better, but it’s looking like he’ll never be able to live at the retirement village apartment. It’s “independent living”, and at this point Dutch needs at least “assisted living”, if not yet a nursing home. Barbara and Frances are looking at options. Apparently, the hospital has provided them with a list of such facilities so that they can review them. When it comes time to discharge Dutch, the hospital will give them a subset of that list–the ones that have beds available–and then discharge Dutch directly to the family’s choice of facility. Although assisted-living facilities are more expensive than independent-living ones, Barbara’s parents’ actual out-of-pocket expenses may not change much, if at all. Dutch’s VA insurance doesn’t pay anything toward their current costs because they’re in independent living; if he or he and Sankie move to an assisted-living facility, the VA insurance starts paying part of the costs.

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.

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Friday, 28 December 2012

08:36 – I finally ordered a bottle-top dispenser yesterday from one of my wholesalers. Also called auto-burettes, these are basically pumps that sit on top of reservoir bottles and deliver an accurate volume of liquid with each stroke of the pump.

I thought about ordering one some time ago, but decided not to. They cost about $200 each, but the real reason I hesitated was that we were filling only 30 bottles at a time. Having to stop every 30 bottles to tear down and clean out the dispenser before refilling it with the next chemical just wasn’t worth the hassle. Filling 60, 90, or more bottles at a time probably makes the setup/cleanup time worthwhile.

The model I ordered can be set to deliver 2.5 mL to 30 mL per stroke, in 0.5 mL increments. It’s accurate to ±0.5%. The working surfaces are Teflon-coated, and it handles a wide range of viscosities accurately. It’s designed for production use all day long every day, so it should be durable. We’ll see how it works out.

09:53 – Barbara announced this morning that she wanted a new ceiling fan in the den. I thought we’d installed the one that’s in there now, but she tells me it was there when we bought the house back in 1987. In the past, I might have thought about driving out to Home Depot to see what they had available, but this time the thought never crossed my mind. I looked up ceiling fans on Amazon and ordered one. Total time, five minutes, if that.

Amazon is rapidly becoming what Sears Roebuck was a hundred years ago: the first choice of retailer for a large percentage of the public. I wonder how long it’ll be until they have a real competitor. Sears blew it, as did all of the other big box brick-and-mortar retailers. Sears still has a chance, but I don’t think they’ll take it. To do so, they’d have to recognize that on-line can’t coexist with brick-and-mortar. It has to be one or the other. Sears would have to close down its physical stores and shift entirely to the web. They’d have to expand their product lines hugely to match or beat Amazon. And they’d have to bring up their own equivalent of AWS. On the plus side, they already have a distribution network and warehouse infrastructure at least as good as Amazon’s. But I doubt that anyone at Sears will admit that after more than 100 years their brick-and-mortar retailing operation is as dead as every other B&M retailing operation, and act accordingly.

12:17 – I just finished running 2,200+ labels, which is 60 sets of chemistry kit bottle labels. That’s 1,440 15 mL bottles, 660 30 mL bottles, and 180 30 mL widemouth bottles. Once Barbara gets all those bottles labeled, we’ll run a batch of 60 biology kit labels and then 60 forensic kit labels, and then another 60 chemistry kit labels. Given the number and mix of kits we sold in 2012, I want to start the busy season in July with 300 to 400 kits worth of chemical bottles ready to roll, so we’ll be doing lots of labels and bottles between now and July.

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Tuesday, 27 November 2012

08:44 – More smoke and mirrors on the Greek bailout. Essentially, the EU and ECB (but not the IMF) have agreed to take a huge loss on their outstanding loans to Greece, but not by an explicit writedown of those debts. Instead, the EU/ECB are taking that loss in the form of extended maturities, reduced interest rates, and rebates that allow the actual debt to be reduced significantly while the nominal value remains the same. In other words, Greece will default, again, but the EU/ECB can (falsely) claim not to have written off any of the debt. So they’ve kicked the can down the road yet again, ensuring that Merkel can be re-elected before any of her voters notice that they’ve been royally screwed.

The ChromeBook arrived yesterday. I fired it up briefly and then put it on the charger. I’m still considering what exactly to do with it. For the time being at least it’ll be running ChromeOS, although I haven’t ruled out installing Linux on it. One way or another, it’ll be Barbara’s personal system. She’s already using the Chrome browser on her Linux desktop, so that won’t be a problem. But she’s running standard Linux applications for other things: Korganizer/Kontact/Kmail for mail and calendar, LibreOffice for documents and spreadsheets, and so on. I’m not entirely sure that Barbara is ready to be migrated to web-based apps for those things. Or that I want to migrate her email to gmail. I mistrust the cloud, and I’m not delighted at the idea of Google seeing (and storing) everything we do.

I got snail-mail yesterday from a company called MuniServices, saying that they were working on behalf of the City of Winston-Salem to identify businesses that didn’t have a business license. So I called the city offices this morning to ask why I needed a business license for Winston-Salem since my business was buying and selling on the Internet; that I worked out of my home and had no business premises; that I didn’t meet customers at home or at their locations; that I had no business signage or vehicular traffic at my home, and so on. I said that if I needed a business license, there must be literally a thousand eBay sellers in Winston-Salem that also needed one. The woman I was speaking with jumped in to interrupt me, saying that I didn’t need a business license and that she’d send email to MuniServices to let them know that.

14:21 – UPS just showed up with six cartons of bottles and caps, something like 7,000 of the things. At first, I was going to do what I usually do, which is move the boxes off the front porch and into the library, off the foyer. But then, not being a rookie at this being-married thing, I had second thoughts. Barbara just finished putting up the Saturnalia tree and otherwise decorating the library, so she probably wouldn’t be best pleased if she came home to find the room filled with boxes. So I asked the UPS woman if she’d mind rolling the boxes down around back. She did so, and even put them in the garage for me. So now the worst thing Barbara will notice when she gets home is a large stack of boxes next to where she parks.

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Monday, 2 July 2012

14:37 – I’ve spent most of the morning on the phone, on-hold, being transferred among, and talking with representatives from various US government organizations, ranging from the US Postal Service to the Department of Commerce to the Department of Defense to (I am not making this up) the Census Bureau.

I was trying to find out how to fill out a form properly, more particularly PS Form 2976-A Customs Declaration and Dispatch Note. The Census Bureau was actually the starting point, where the instructions on the form directed me for information about filling out Box 11, which is descriptively named “EEL/PFC”. I might have figured it out myself if they’d used the expanded form: “Exemption or Exclusion Legend/Proof of Filing Citation”.

I learned that I really, really wanted an EEL rather than a PFC, because the latter is a lot more work. The EEL is basically the quick-and-dirty no-paperwork option. To use it, you must meet two requirements. The first was easy enough. The value of the individual shipment has to be $2,500 or less. Our kits sell for about a tenth that or less, so that wasn’t a problem. But (there’s always a “but” with government crap) the second requirement was that the shipment contain nothing restricted. Restricted in the sense of having potential military or terrorist uses. Stuff like ultra-centrifuges for separating fissionable isotopes. After spending three hours on the phone, with everyone saying “I don’t think high school science kits will be a problem, but you need to make sure…” I finally got to someone who knew how to resolve the issue. I visited a web page where I could “self-qualify” as exempt. So now all I need to do is write “30.37a” on line 11 (and possibly “EAR99” although I couldn’t get a definitive answer for that) and on line 17 “NLR” or “No License Required”. I think.

So then I called USPS support to verify that I knew exactly how to fill out the form. The woman I spoke with said everything sounded fine. In fact, she thought I could just leave lines 11 and 17 blank, but said it wouldn’t hurt to write what I’d been told to write in them. She also suggested that for the first shipment I should visit the local post office just to verify that everything was correct. So, Thursday (Wednesday is a USPS holiday and I didn’t want to ship the day before a holiday) I’m going to drive to post office and ship my first kit to Canada. We’ll see what happens.

We got four chemistry kit orders yesterday, which took us down to only three remaining in stock. I’m not too concerned, because we have everything necessary to assemble another dozen quickly, followed by 18 more once the shipment of beakers arrives. But we did decide to boost the size of the next batch of chemistry kits from 30 to 60, because these things are starting to sell pretty quickly.

I also posted a forensics landing page and forensics kit page. As of now, we’re accepting pre-orders for the forensics kits, although we won’t be shipping them until next month.

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Wednesday, 20 June 2012

08:14 – The markets have reacted pretty much as I expected to the announcement of the €750 billion Spain/Italy bailout, which is to say that Spanish/Italian bond yields have fallen by 10 or 15 basis points (0.1% to 0.15%). The markets aren’t stupid. All along, the EU has been trying to fool the markets. Promise them anything, but don’t commit to spending any real money. And this so-called €750 billion bailout–which hasn’t even been approved by Germany and probably will not be–is actually backed by only about €20 billion of real assets. The rest of the money is to come from, you guessed it, selling bonds, at which the EFSF hasn’t been notably successful. Ultimately, everything depends on the ESM being given a banking license, which would give it essentially unlimited credit to borrow from the ECB. Germany is almost certain to veto a banking license for the ESM, recognizing that this would be just a back-door way of allowing the ECB to monetize the debt of the profligate southern-tier countries and ultimately shifting the debt to taxpayers. German taxpayers.

I am still trying to get an answer from UPS and FexEx to what seems a simple question. How much would it cost to have them pick up an ORM-D box of specific dimensions and weight and customs value from our address and deliver it via ground to a specific Canadian address? All I want is a number, but that’s apparently impossible to get. But I’m persistent.

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Monday, 18 June 2012

07:53 – Greek elections results are in. New Democracy and PASOK between them have enough votes to form a coalition with a slim majority, but PASOK has announced that it will not be a part of any coalition government that does not include the far-left Syriza party. The most likely outcome is a three- or four-sided coalition that will claim to be attempting to comply with the Troika terms while insisting on their modification.

This result was actually the best that the supporters of Greece remaining in the euro could have hoped for, expecting that it would buy Greece and the euro a little more time. That hope has already been dashed this morning. After a very short upturn in the markets, the plunge has reasserted itself, with Spanish benchmark 10-year bond yields hitting new record highs above 7% and Italian benchmark yields again climbing over 6%. In other words, Spain has lost access to the markets and Italy nearly so.

I just read an interesting article: Will ‘showrooming’ kill businesses?

The interesting part is that the author is completely clueless about how showrooming actually works these days. He talks about people visiting stores to look at items they want to buy, recording the details, and then going home to look up better deals on the Internet. That’s so 2009.

The way it actually works is that people point their phones at the barcodes on the items in the stores. An app running on their phones scans the barcode, hits a price comparison site, and lets them order the product on-line while they’re standing in front of it in the store.

Nor is this a new phenomenon. When I was working at Entre Computer Center nearly 30 years ago, we called them SHABEs. Shop Here And Buy Elsewhere. And that was even more annoying, because they weren’t just comparing prices and then buying somewhere else. They were taking up the time of our sales staff–all of whom were very knowledgeable not just about computers and networking but about their application to business–getting detailed advice and recommendations, and then buying from places that could sell at deep discounts because they employed minimum-wage order takers.

Ultimately, there’s simply no way that local stores can survive if they’re selling what amount to commodities. In that business, you have to be efficient, and brick-and-mortar stores are inherently inefficient. When local stores come up against competition that uses a more efficient business model, they’re going to lose. That’s what happened to music stores, bookstores, and video stores, all of which were attempting to sell commodities in competition with more efficient suppliers.

But showrooming really isn’t the problem. Only a tiny percentage of buyers actually showroom. The problem is that for many stores the vast majority of their potential customers are like me. They don’t bother to visit the store at all. They don’t even consider buying locally. They just use the web to find a good price from a reputable vendor and order the product.

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Saturday, 9 June 2012

10:17 – Well, I’ve parted ways with NewEgg.

On Thursday, I ordered a long Ethernet cable for $11.95 with free shipping. The transaction completed normally, or so it seemed. NewEgg said it’d send me email to confirm the transaction, and I thought nothing more about it. Then, early yesterday morning, I hadn’t received the email so I went over and logged onto my NewEgg account. There was just the one outstanding order, with its status showing “Void” and a note saying that the order had been canceled and would have to be re-placed. I received no notification of a problem.

So I called NewEgg support and worked my way down through several levels of the auto-attendant menu until it finally told me I was holding for the next available agent. Then it said that instead of holding I could request a call-back, which it expected would occur within the next 7 to 11 minutes. So I punched in my phone number, recorded my name, and confirmed the call-back request. Sure enough, a few minutes later the phone rang. It played back my name and said to punch #1 if I was available. I did that. It rang twice and went to dead air. I sat there like a fool saying “Hello? Hello?” with no response. So I shut up and waited. A minute or so later, it disconnected me.

So I called NewEgg support again, worked my way down through several levels of the auto-attendant menu until it again told me I was holding for the next available agent. That agent told me that my account was “blocked”. I asked him what that meant and he had no idea other than that I couldn’t place any orders until the block was removed. I asked if there was a problem with my credit card being approved. He didn’t know. I asked him what he did know, and more importantly what he was going to do about it. He said that he’d call another group within NewEgg and get an answer. I expected him to do that while I was holding, but he said it might take several hours. It was then about 0900 my time, and he said he’d call me back no later than mid-afternoon my time. I told him to make sure my order for the Ethernet cable was in fact canceled, because I was going to order it from someone else. He said that order was irrevocably canceled.

I ordered the cable from Amazon.com. I’m still waiting for the promised call-back from NewEgg. Not that I’ll ever do business with NewEgg again. NewEgg wasted much more of my time than the $11.95 cost of the cable. What the guy should have done was apologized profusely and shipped me a free cable by next-day air. Even that wouldn’t have made up for the amount of my time that NewEgg wasted, but at least it would have shown that NewEgg was trying to do the right thing. So, the next time I revise any of our PC books, NewEgg goes on the not-recommended list. If they treat me like this, they’ll do the same to other customers. They need to look at how Amazon takes care of customers and alter their policies accordingly.

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Sunday, 22 April 2012

09:34 – I’ve finished stubbing out the company web site. It was getting embarrassing to have just the order pages for the kits. There are still missing and broken links, and some of the text is just placeholder stuff, but at least the framework is up and working.

Colin needs more exercise than he’s getting. Working Border Collies routinely run 50 miles a day or more. He doesn’t need that much, but he does need more than I’ve been giving him, which is a half dozen short walks a day, down the block and back. Watching Amy on Heartland exercising horses on leads in the coral gave me the idea to try exercising Colin the same way. I connect him to the 6-meter roller leash and stand in the middle of the front yard, with Colin running in circles around me, at about 35 to 40 meters per circuit. If he stops, all I have to do is turn my back on him and take a couple steps in the opposite direction. His Border Collie instinct is to circle out to cut me off. I figure that if humans can run 4-minute miles, a BC on the run should do 3-minute miles, so a few minutes of that gives him at least a mile (1.6 km) of flat-out running. I try to do that at least 2 or 3 times a day. The trouble is, a young BC like Colin could run a full Marathon and be ready immediately to run another, literally. BCs truly are running machines.

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Monday, 9 April 2012

07:55 – I start work on our federal and state incomes taxes today. As far as I can see, our LLC makes zero difference to how I’ll do the taxes. The revenue and expenses for the corporation go directly to Schedule C on the federal return, just as they did when I was operating as a sole proprietor. And the state return simply uses figures plugged in from the federal return, as always.

Speaking of the state return, I finally took some time yesterday to get my new Epson V300 scanner up and working. There was no prayer of that happening on my main office system, which is running Ubuntu 9.04 (!). So I took the scanner back to Barbara’s office and connected it to her system, which is running a more recent Ubuntu. Epson supplies Linux drivers, but the installation wasn’t completely straightforward. I had to install an older version of one of the support files manually, after which the scanner was immediately recognized by xSane. I did a test scan, and everything appears to be working normally.

What motivated me to finally get the scanner running is that the stupid North Carolina PDF tax forms can be filled out and printed with Adobe Reader, but they can’t be saved. How stupid is that? So, my choices were to just print an extra copy of the completed return for our records or to get the scanner working. Either that, or to what I’ve done in a couple prior years when I didn’t have a working scanner: put the completed forms on the floor and shoot images of them with a digital camera.

Barbara tried to give Colin a bath yesterday. As usual, she stripped down and got in the downstairs shower and then I brought Colin into the bathroom. The last time, he was pretty good about getting into the shower with her and seemed resigned to being bathed. This time, he simply refused to get in the shower. He was terrified. He actually snapped at Barbara. I could feel him shivering in terror. So we bagged it. With the weather getting warmer, it’s not a big deal. Barbara will wash him outdoors with the hose at the next opportunity.

We’re starting to get queries about the biology kits, which will start shipping next week. Other than the supplemental DVD included with each kit, we have the first batch of 30 kits made up and ready to go, with components for 30 more in the on-deck circle. We hope that’ll be enough at least to buffer the initial flood of orders when the book hits the stores, but of course we’re prepared to order in components for and assemble a lot more kits quickly if the initial flood of orders is larger than expected. We’re also in the process of making up 30 more chemistry kits, and we’ve penciled in some time in a couple of months to begin assembling forensics kits. Obviously, we’re going to be busy for the next few months.

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Thursday, 16 February 2012

07:55 – A comment yesterday got me to thinking. Dave mentioned that if the kits were still available in a dozen years or so, his daughter would be the right age for them.

I replied that we’re in this for the long haul, which is true, but it got me to thinking (again) about what happens if I get run over by a beer truck. As things stand, although Barbara helps with packing, labeling, and other tasks, this is really a one-man operation. I wear all of the hats, from lead scientist to manual writer to IT to purchasing, A/R, and A/P to …. well, you get the idea. The last thing I want to do is grow too fast, which means for at least the next couple of years we’ll be doing things pretty much as we’re doing them now.

But I do want to make sure that if I do get run over by that beer truck, Barbara will be in a position to carry on, either herself or with hired help. I intend to build this business gradually, with the goal being to establish it as a rock-solid enterprise. If for some reason I’m no longer around, I don’t want the business to die. I’ve already made some efforts in that direction. Several months ago, I talked to Mary Chervenak. As Mary is aware, Barbara is not a scientist, so one of the big things she’d need would be a scientific advisor. Mary (and Paul) are ideal for that. They could steer Barbara in the right direction and help her understand sciency things that she wouldn’t otherwise be able to deal with on her own. I’ve also made a start on documenting everything about the business, from usernames and passwords for the website to a procedures manual for making up chemicals to lists of wholesalers, contacts, and account information to business and corporate information.

To be honest, I’m not sure what Barbara would do in that situation. She might just choose to let things drop. But if she does want to continue the business, I want to do everything possible to make it as easy as possible for her to do that. At least until one of my clones is old enough to take over.

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