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Category: science kits

Thursday, 12 June 2014

08:39 – It’s a small victory for sanity, but the city government has finally decided to kill the West End trolley service downtown. The “trolley” is actually just a standard city bus duded up to look like an old-fashioned trolley. It’s been running since 1988, and has never had many riders. The vast majority of the time, it has no riders at all, and just drives around empty but for the driver. Every time someone gets on that bus, it costs city taxpayers $23. And it took the city council 25 years to realize that it was a waste of money.

I read an interesting article on CNN yesterday, America’s middle class: Poorer than you think

In terms of average net worth per adult, the United States comes in at $301,000, fourth behind Switzerland, Australia, and Norway. But in terms of median net worth, the US comes in 19th, at only $45,000. Neither of these numbers is particularly useful. The average is skewed by the fact that the US far and away leads the world in millionaires and billionaires. If you consider a group of 100 people, one of whom has a net worth of $100,000,000 and 99 of whom have a net worth of zero, the average net worth of that group is $1,000,000. The median is skewed by the fact that the poor in the US have essentially zero net worth. The bottom 40% hold less than 0.5% of total US net worth, the bottom 60% something under 5%, and the bottom 80% something like 10%, leaving about 90% of total US net worth to be shared among the top 20%. If you want numbers that provide a better picture of the US middle class, look at the net worth and income necessary to be in the top quintile.

10:16 – Most of the backorders are starting to clear out. UPS showed up yesterday with 200 beakers and 480 graduated cylinders that had been backordered for a couple months, and FedEx is supposed to deliver 300 5/10/15X folding pocket magnifiers today that have been backordered for 3 months or more. That’s a relief, because we were down to only 50 or so of the magnifiers in inventory, and just four of the cylinders. Now all I need to do is get all this stuff moved downstairs and checked into inventory.

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Wednesday, 11 June 2014

10:06 – I managed to cut down on the backlog of labeled bottles by about a third, which still leaves me with 1,400 or so labeled bottles to be filled. I’ll try to get a few hundred more of those done today.

I really wish we could ship forensic science kits internationally, but it’s just not practical both for cost reasons and the amount of hassle involved for us. In the last two or three weeks, I’ve gotten four queries about shipping forensics kits internationally, one to the UK, two to Canada, and one this morning to Australia. I hate turning people down, but the only option would be to ship them as hazardous materials via UPS or FedEx, which costs hundreds of dollars. And even if the prospective customers would agree to that, I’d have to go through the process of getting certified by UPS and/or FedEx to ship hazardous materials, which would take a lot of my time and cost several hundred dollars. It’s just not worth it, but I really do hate turning people down.

Barbara leaves next Monday on a driving trip up the Parkway into Northern Virginia with one of her friends. They plan to spend the week sightseeing and making side trips, staying in B&B’s along the way. Colin and I of course will be desolate, but we’ll manage somehow. Colin suggested having lots of human food and watching Heartland re-runs, which sounds like a plan to me. I’m already most of the way through season one. At 13 hours per season, Colin and I will probably make it through season two and most of season three before Barbara returns home.

Boy, talk about inflation. The other day I mentioned that Amazon Pantry was selling the 16-ounce cans of Bush’s Baked Beans for $1.48, but the 28-ounce cans for $1.78. Yesterday, I noticed that the 28-ounce cans were now $2.59, a 45.5% increase in only two days.

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Tuesday, 10 June 2014

09:08 – According to our inventory records, we have 2000+ labeled bottles that need to be filled. I’ll try to knock that number down some today. When I get tired of filling and capping bottles, I’ll spend some time working on the earth science manual.

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Monday, 9 June 2014

11:43 – We drove out to Home Depot yesterday and picked up a steel shelving unit, which we’ll dedicate to food storage. We decided to get the 4-foot wide one rather than the 5-footer to leave more clearance for Barbara to get the lawnmower, lawn vacuum, wheelbarrow, and other farming gear in and out. Even the smaller unit provides considerable storage space, with 40 square feet of shelving in a unit 6’6″ tall. That’s about two cubic yards of storage space, enough for at least a full person-year of stored food.

USPS has struck again. I just shipped a kit to Canada, and they’ve changed their Click-N-Ship page. Until recently, there was an empty field where one could enter the Canadian postal code manually, in the form X9X 9X9. That’s no longer an option. This morning, I found that empty field had been replaced by a drop-down list, as had the field for city name. I was shipping the kit to Ottawa, Ontario. So I chose Ontario from a drop-down list, followed by Ottawa from another drop-down list. But when I got to the postal code field, my only options were to choose the first three characters, which in this case were K2A. There was nowhere to enter the remaining three characters. I figured that the USPS software would fill out the missing three characters, but when I printed the label they were still missing. The last line was “K2A Ottawa Ontario”. I wasn’t sure that was sufficient, so I manually printed the full postal code beneath the CANADA line.

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Sunday, 8 June 2014

10:45 – We’re doing the usual Sunday stuff. Barbara just finished cleaning house. I finished the last of the laundry and started hauling stuff downstairs from the library/living room.

We’re getting to the point where kit components are in reasonable supply, so I’m going to shift gears from working on kits every day to devoting two days a week to stuff that’s been on my to-do list for a long time. Such as finishing the earth science manual, getting started on the manual/design for AP Chemistry and AP Biology, and so on. Not to mention doing some cleaning up and uncluttering of the upstairs.

11:12 – Texas Republicans favor ‘reparative therapy’ platform for gays

Morons. There are two things wrong with their reasoning, if such a word can be applied to their thought processes: first, the implicit assumption, with no supporting evidence, is that there’s something wrong with being gay, that it needs “fixing”. Second, there’s the explicit assumption, again with zero supporting evidence, that it’s possible to “convert” someone from being gay to being straight. In all of the history of H. sapiens, that’s been accomplished exactly zero times. If you are heterosexual and doubt the truth of that statement, just try to imagine “therapy” that would cause you to “convert” to being gay.

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Tuesday, 3 June 2014

08:06 – One of the minor annoyances with Netflix streaming has been that titles disappear with little notice. In the past, Netflix has provided as little as three or four days’ notice. That’s fine for a movie, but not very helpful for a series. Every time I’ve spoken to Netflix tech support about another issue, I’ve asked them to please make the end date available for each title, or at least give more notice. Yesterday, I noticed that they’ve started doing that. Three of the items in our streaming queue are marked as expiring on 1 July, including one series that we just started watching: Outrageous Fortune, a pretty good series from New Zealand. We won’t have time to finish it. There are 107 episodes, so we’ll just bag it for now and wait until Netflix gets it back, as they probably will.

In the first six seasons of Heartland, Amber Marshall’s character Amy didn’t drink alcohol, other than one incident where a bad guy spiked her drinks with vodka at a party. Even during holidays, birthdays, etc. when all the adults were having wine with dinner, Amy had a glass of water. But during an episode we watched the other night, Amy had a glass of wine with dinner. Apparently, she’s turned 21 and is now allowed wine. So I mentioned this to Kim yesterday because Jasmine turns 21 on June 21st. I mentioned jokingly that Jas would now be allowed to drink. I was flabbergasted when Kim said that Jas has already mentioned this and said that she expects to have wine with her birthday dinner. I thought Jas was an alcohol-shall-never-pass-my-lips kind of girl. For example, she refuses to go out with college boys who (gasp) drink beer. I may have to reconsider my opinion of Jas. She’s not as prissy as I thought she was. She does, however, have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws.

10:06 – I’m in the midst of making up 137 30 mL bottles of iodine solution, which is included in most of our kits. That’s as many bottles as I could fill with the ~4.25 liters of solution I had on hand. I’ll make up another 6+ liters of iodine solution today, but I can’t fill another batch of bottles because I’m down to only half a dozen of the special phenolic cone caps we use on those bottles to keep the iodine from outgassing.

I spent some time yesterday afternoon getting one of the new laptop systems configured for Barbara to use as her main system. It should have been easy to transfer her Thunderbird email data and Firefox browser data over from her Linux system, but it just didn’t work. I copied the contents of the .thunderbird and .firefox profile directories from her Linux system and pasted those files into her new default profile directories under appdata on the Windows 8.1 system, but neither Thunderbird nor Firefox used those data. Fortunately, Barbara doesn’t have much that she cares about having transferred. She said not to worry about it. She’ll recreate her addressbook manually and send herself any emails that she cares about keeping. What really matters are her documents and spreadsheet data, which I copied over directly.

I also got power management set up for an always-plugged-in desktop configuration. Apparently, even though the charger is connected at all times, the system ignores the charger and allows the battery to run down to 50% before it actually charges it. Supposedly, that’ll make the battery last a lot longer.

I connected a standard mouse to one of the USB ports because Barbara doesn’t particularly like touchpads. She’s happy with the keyboard and display, though, so I won’t bother connecting a USB keyboard and full-size display. I also didn’t bother to connect her Ethernet cable. She’s happy using WiFi instead.

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Sunday, 1 June 2014

09:31 – May turned out to be an okay month for kit sales, thanks in part to a bulk order for 30 kits. As of the end of May, YTD revenues for 2014 are about where YTD 2013 revenues were through early August, which is good. We’re also in pretty good shape on finished kits, enough to last us through June and maybe into July. So now we can spend the next six weeks getting more kits built for the rush from mid-July through mid-September.

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Saturday, 31 May 2014

10:05 – We’re working on home projects this morning, along with our regular Saturday stuff. That, and building more kits.

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Friday, 30 May 2014

13:38 – Another day being eaten by locusts. I thought, as just one example, that I had another case of 500 Petri dishes in stock. That turns out to be wrong, so I just did a PO for another case of 500. For the time being, I’m fine, but I’m down to only 150 Petri dishes in stock, which is only 25 biology kit’s worth.

It took Barbara an hour to get to work this morning. We had a thunderstorm last night, which wasn’t at all strong here, but a couple miles down the road at the Wake Forest University main entrance it knocked down a tree and powerlines, which blocked traffic on Reynolda Road both ways. Which is an example of why I want to be prepared for emergencies. If something as minor as a downed tree can bollix things up so badly for so many people for so long, just imagine what a serious problem could do, let alone a catastrophic problem.

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Thursday, 29 May 2014

08:00 – I didn’t quite finish building the biology kits yesterday, but I’ll get that done today. Fortunately so, because I have outstanding orders to fill today.

The US MSM has paid little attention to the seismic shift in European politics over the last week. Embarrassingly, UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tories finished third in the EU elections, far behind the UK Independence Party (UKIP; think the British version of the Tea Party). The Tories even managed to finish slightly behind Labour. But it’s not just the UK. Voters in most EU countries voted heavily for Eurosceptic parties. In France, voters’ rejection of Hollande’s Socialists was stunning, with Marine Le Pen’s Front National (FN; think the French version of the Tea Party) essentially sweeping the election.

These elections bode ill for the EU in general and the euro in particular. Here’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s take: Europe has an even bigger crisis on its hands than a British exit FTA:

If Europe’s policy elites could not quite believe it before, they must now know beyond much doubt that they have lost Britain. This island is no longer part of the European project in any meaningful sense.

British defenders of the status quo were knouted on Sunday. UKIP won 27.5pc of the vote, or 29pc after adjusting for the negligence – or worse – of the Electoral Commission in allowing a spoiler party with much the same name to sow confusion. Margaret Thatcher’s Tory children are scarcely more friendly to the EU enterprise.

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