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Category: science kits

Thursday, 3 April 2014

09:00 – Amazon’s new video streaming box looks interesting. If I hadn’t just bought a Roku 3, I’d probably buy the Amazon Fire TV instead. In video streaming, the Roku 3 is the box to beat, and Amazon’s box is serious competition for the Roku, especially for those who want support for casual gaming. We don’t, so I’m perfectly content with the Roku 3.

I’m going to work on taxes today. Grrrrr.

10:44 – One of the aggravating things about working from home is that many/most chemical vendors won’t ship to residential addresses. I run into this problem frequently. A couple of months ago, for example, I was trying to order three kilos of bacteriological-grade agar from one vendor. They refused to ship to me because the ship-to address was residential. Geez, the stuff is edible. It’s not like I could use it to take down a building or something.

Fortunately, some vendors are reasonable about it. I just realized that I was very low on methylene blue, so I went over to p212121.com to order 250 grams. This is one of those sites that I can never get to accept my login credentials, so I called them to place the order. He warned me that there might be a problem because my ship-to address was residential, but acknowledged that they’d shipped other stuff to me and that methylene blue shouldn’t be a problem. Indeed, about 45 seconds after I finished the phone order I got an email confirmation that my order had been accepted and will ship immediately.

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Wednesday, 2 April 2014

07:55 – Barbara is taking the day off work today to make a day trip up to Virginia with her friend Bonnie Richardson. As usual, I tried to convince her to take Colin along. As usual, she deemed that suggestion unworthy of a reply.

I did a phone interview yesterday with Lauren Wolf of Chemical & Engineering News about the S.P.A.R.K. Competition, mostly about the disappearance of real chemistry sets since the 60’s and what S.P.A.R.K. might do to improve the situation. She asked if I knew of any scientists who got their start with a chemistry set, and I told her that she’d be hard-pressed to find any scientist of my generation who hadn’t gotten started in science with a chemistry set. Lauren’s Ph.D. is in physical/bioanalytical chemistry, so I asked her if she’d had a chemistry set as a kid. She hadn’t, but she said she had spent some time in her grandmother’s basement mixing detergents and other chemicals she found there. Of course she hadn’t had a chemistry set. Lauren is young enough to be my daughter, and by the time she should have gotten her first chemistry set, such things no longer existed. More’s the pity.

10:11 – Kit sales still “feel” slow subjectively, but I just checked the figures. In Q1 of this year, our revenues were about 10 times those of 2012Q1 and 1.8 times those of 2013Q1. If that trajectory holds, we’re going to sell a lot of kits this year.

I’ve boosted our batch sizes accordingly. Originally, we made up and bottled chemicals for batches of 15 forensic kits and 30 each biology and chemistry kits. As of now, we’re making up and bottling chemicals for batches of 60 forensic kits and 120 each biology and chemistry kits. The larger runs use our time more efficiently. Which reminds me that I need to get the last half dozen or so solutions made up that we need for another batch of biology kits. And I need to get started on the taxes.

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Tuesday, 1 April 2014

10:33 – We’re back at comfortable inventory levels on all our kits, so I can spend some time today placing orders for more components.

In fact, I just cut a PO for a bunch of components. In what must be a corollary of Murphy’s Law, the one line item we really, really need (we’re down to two in stock) was for 480 10 mL graduated cylinders. That, of course, is the one item the vendor is back-ordered on. Oh well, I’ll pick up a few from another vendor, enough to hold us until the back-order ships in about 30 days.

For ten years our computers been running Linux exclusively, but I’m about to bag Linux in favor of Microsoft Windows. Don’t get me wrong. I still don’t like Microsoft, but I dislike it less than I dislike Apple. And what other realistic options are there for the desktop? I’m tired of desktop Linux “upgrades” that break things that used to work. I’m tired of not being able just to plug in a mainstream scanner and have it work without hours of screwing around with manually loading drivers and editing configurations. I’m tired of entire classes of application software disappearing. Right now, for example, there is no longer a WYSIWYG HTML editor that runs on Linux Mint. And I’m tired of mainstream applications like Firefox and Libre Office that crash frequently and remove useful features with every “update”. I’m just tired.

And, no, this is not an April Fools post. I’m seriously thinking about bring up one Windows 8/8.1 desktop system just to see if I can live with it. But I think I’ll wait and give Linux one more chance. When Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu LTS releases later this month, I’ll take a look at them and see if I can live with one of them.

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Monday, 31 March 2014

09:29 – As of this morning our inventory of FK01A forensic science kits stands at -1. Fortunately, we have 16 more ready to box up, so that outstanding order will ship today and we’ll have 15 left in stock, assuming no more are ordered today. Barbara got a good start yesterday on labeling bottles for 60 more FK01A forensic kits, so making up solutions and filling those goes on my to-do list with all the other stuff.

Colin missed his calling as a tracking dog. Border Collies are frequently used as tracking dogs, search & rescue dogs, corpse dogs, drug-sniffing dogs, and so on. Their noses aren’t quite as sensitive as those of Bloodhounds, but the BC’s much higher intelligence offsets that. BC’s are, for example, capable of discriminating between the odor of a human corpse and that of animal corpses and understanding that they should ignore all but human corpses. Colin is a natural tracker. Particularly now that it’s spring, our walks consist mostly of Colin trotting along, nose to the ground, following one thing or another. I’m tempted to have Barbara go for a walk, wait until she’s well out of sight, and have Colin attempt to track her.

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Sunday, 30 March 2014

10:17 – I somehow had it in my mind that today was to be a pretty nice day. Not so far. I got back from walking Colin around 09:00. The wind chill was well below freezing, and it was drizzling. I even saw some white stuff floating past, mixed with the cold rain.

Barbara just finished the weekly house cleaning. After her shower, she’ll get started labeling more bottles. I’m still working on the manual for the earth/space science kit. I’m also stubbing out some ideas for an AP Biology/biotechnology kit that I plan to enter in the SPARK Competition late this year, assuming they hold it again for 2015.

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Saturday, 29 March 2014

09:31 – Our current inventory of forensic kits is down to zero, so we’re building more today. I’d intended to build two dozen forensic chemical bags the other day, but I had enough of everything needed to build only 16. Still, even at the increased run rate on forensic kits 16 should hold us for at least a month, which gives me time to make up more chemicals.

My father used to do something that drove my mother absolutely nuts. If he was sitting at the kitchen table using, say, a jar of honey, he’d carefully balance the lid on top of the jar and give it about a sixteenth of a turn. Just enough so that if someone then picked up the jar by the lid, the lid would come off and the jar would go rolling away. He didn’t do it consciously, which is probably the reason my mother never assassinated him.

And I do something similar, but I’m the one that I end up annoying. When I empty a chemical bottle, instead of discarding it I carefully replace the lid (screwing it down completely) and set it aside. I think by keeping it I’m trying to remind myself to order more, but it never works out that way. Instead, I end up with a collection of empty bottles, which look exactly like full bottles.

So, yesterday I was making up two liters of Hucker’s crystal violet stain, which requires 20 g of crystal violet and 16 grams of ammonium oxalate. I had five-count-’em-five bottles of crystal violet in stock, sitting right there together on the shelf, exactly where they belonged. Four of them were 5 g bottles, and one 20 g. I thought I had enough to make up four liters. But when I started weighing out the crystal violet, I found that the 20 g bottle was partially used, with only 15+ g remaining. Three of the 5 g bottles were empty. Fortunately the fourth was still full, so I was able to make up the two liters with a bit to spare. So I just tossed those empty bottles in the trash, where they belong.

At least while I was making up the Hucker’s I solved the Mystery of the Missing 100 g Bottle of Eosin Y. There it was, in the Hucker’s bin. What it was doing there, I have no idea.

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Friday, 28 March 2014

11:15 – Among other things today, I’m trying to get purchase orders done for a lot of stuff we buy in bulk–cases of beakers, graduated cylinders, test tube brushes and clamps, microscope slides and cover slips, and so on. It’s still only March, but I want to get enough component inventory to allow us to start building finished-goods inventory in serious numbers in time for the summer.

We just finished season 3 of The Shield on Amazon streaming, and started Life Unexpected on Netflix streaming. It seems we always have one gritty, violent series in progress along with a “teen drama”. Both of these are no longer being made, which is an advantage because Barbara and I have both come to prefer binge-watching series from start to finish. We have a few in our queue that are still being made and that we’ve watched all available episodes of, but I really prefer not to do that. For example, we’ve watched the first two seasons of Reven8e and are waiting for season three to become available. The problem with doing it that way is that we can never remember what’s happened in earlier seasons. It feels like we should go back and re-watch all the older stuff before we start the new season, and I don’t want to waste time doing that when I could be watching Heartland reruns instead.

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Thursday, 27 March 2014

09:54 – Spring may finally have arrived. March came in like a rabid weasel on meth, but according to the forecasts March will go out like a soft, cute, fuzzy panda, with highs in the upper 60’s (~20C) and lows well above freezing. I blame it on global climate change.

Speaking of which, the climate-change nutters are at it again. I actually saw one story that blamed that enormous mudslide in Washington on global climate change. Geez. Science is supposed to be predictive, not postdictive.

Science kit sales remain slow. We’ll be lucky to do 130% of the revenue this month that we did last March. Still, 2014Q1 revenues will be close to double those of 2013Q1, so I can’t really complain. If the past is any indication, sales will remain slow on a relative basis through April and start to pick up again in May.

I’m still accumulating items for our car emergency kits. I’d considered adding a classic Zippo lighter to each kit, but on second thought I decided not to. The Zippo lighters are extraordinarily reliable and can burn ordinary gasoline but they’re not sealed, so the fuel evaporates over just a week or so. That means I’d also have to include cans of fuel for them. Instead, I’m just going to include a three-pack of filled Ronson Comet refillable butane lighters in each kit, and perhaps a small can of butane. The Comets will hold gas indefinitely even at the high temperatures reached in a vehicle during summer. I’ll also include a 35mm film can of strike-anywhere matches and a magnesium/flint firestarter.

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Wednesday, 26 March 2014

08:04 – Synchronicity. Until I used the word “graupel” yesterday, I don’t believe I’d ever seen it used in an English-language setting. Growing up in Pennsylvania, we called it “soft sleet” or “slush”.

So when Barbara checked her mail and regular web sites after dinner last night, she shouted “graupel?” to me. I told her what it was. A short while later, she told me that a National Weather Service Local Weather Alert on the Weather Channel website was forecasting graupel. Indeed.

Issued by The National Weather Service
Raleigh/Durham, NC
Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 6:11 PM EDT

… SCATTERED RAIN SHOWERS… POSSIBLY MIXED WITH SOME GRAUPEL AND/OR WET SNOW… WILL MOVE ACROSS CENTRAL NC OVER THE NEXT FEW HOURS…

SCATTERED RAIN SHOWERS WILL MOVE ACROSS CENTRAL NORTH CAROLINA THROUGH THE EVENING HOURS. WET SNOW AND/OR GRAUPEL WILL BRIEFLY MIX IN WITHIN THE HEAVIER SHOWERS. THERE HAVE BEEN SEVERAL REPORTS OF MIXED PRECIPITATION ACROSS THE TRIAD AND NORTHERN PIEDMONT DURING THE LAST HOUR AND THIS WILL TRANSLATE EAST OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF HOURS. HOWEVER… WITH TEMPERATURES ABOVE FREEZING AND MAINLY MIXED PRECIPITATION… LITTLE ACCUMULATION IS EXPECTED. ANY WET SNOW ACCUMULATIONS WOULD BE CONFINED TO GRASSY AND ELEVATED SURFACES WITH NO ACCUMULATION ON ROADS OR BRIDGES.

Work continues on building more forensic science kits. We need to get another dozen or two built this week, and then get to work on building more biology kits. We’re in good shape on chemistry kits for now.

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Tuesday, 25 March 2014

09:49 – I just returned from walking Colin. Talk about a wintry mix. It was about 95% cold rain, but with other stuff mixed in. There was snow, sleet (in the US/Canadian sense of tiny ice pellets), sleet (in the UK sense of mushy snow/rain), and I think maybe even some graupel. Fortunately, nothing is likely to stick. Barbara drove her car to work today.

I’m going to go make up some bottles of crystal iodine, which is the only thing I’m short of to make up more forensic kit chemical bags.

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