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Category: science kits

Sunday, 1 December 2013

09:24 – We just ended a pretty decent month, with sales about 2.1 times those of November 2012. If that growth rate holds up for this month, we’ll ship 60 or 70 kits in December.

We just started watching series two of Reven8e on Netflix streaming. The plot, such as it is, is ridiculous, but I’ll watch anything at least once if it stars Emily VanCamp.

Speaking of adorable Canadian actresses, there’s the incomparable Amber Marshall, whom I’ll watch over and over. And over. Barbara is heading over to her mom’s today to get her apartment decorated for the holiday. I have only six episodes left in series six of Heartland, so I’ll probably watch those while Barbara’s away today and then jump back and start watching series one again. I plan to make it through all six series at least a couple more times before series seven wraps next spring and I can add it to the cycle.

Barbara always has a hard time choosing a Saturnalia gift for me, so yesterday I simplified that task by ordering my own gift for her to give me: the DVD sets for series one, two, four, five, and six of Heartland (we already had series 3). On the US Amazon site, the sets were priced from $20 to $50 each, averaging about $35 each, so I ordered them from Amazon.ca instead. The same sets there were $CDN 16.99 (~ $US 16.03) except for series six, which was $CDN 22.99. Shipping was only about $12.

09:49 – While I was walking Colin just now, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the almost-mythical Jasmine Littlejohn. Alas, I didn’t have a camera along, so I can’t prove it’s true, but I swear that I’m almost certain I saw her. She came out the front door, walked quickly to her car, waved at me, got in, and drove off. I guess I should file a sighting report on the Bigfoot/Jasmine reporting site.

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Saturday, 30 November 2013

08:57 – Barbara has finished installing and decorating the Saturnalia tree, which means I’m now free to walk Colin around the neighborhood wearing the Saturnalia antlers and little red blinking Saturnalia snout cover. I just realized that that sentence is ambiguous. It’s me who wears the antlers and snout cover, not Colin.

That also means it’s time to start planning the ASG (anti-Santa gun) installation for this year. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in previous years, it’s that the old bastard is FAST. So this year I’m thinking speed-of-light weapon, maybe a 4-megawatt UV laser. The utility feeds into our neighborhood can’t provide 4 MW of electrical power, so it’ll have to be a chemically-pumped unit.

Yesterday I decided to add another SKU for the earth science kit, a 30 mL bottle of ACS reagent grade 98% sulfuric acid. We’ll use that in the labs on chemical weathering and the effects of acid rain on plant growth. I thought about using technical-grade acid, which is cheaper and would have been fine for those purposes, but using the reagent-grade stuff will allow that SKU to do double duty. One of the forensic kits includes two presumptive drug test reagents, Marquis reagent and Mandelin reagent, both of which are reagent-grade concentrated sulfuric acid with a small amount of formaldehyde or ammonium metavanadate added, respectively. Both of those reagents are reasonably stable, but they do degrade eventually. So in the past I’ve been making them up on-the-fly as I shipped the kits. So yesterday I made up new batches of Marquis and Mandelin reagent bottles that contained only the formaldehyde and ammonium metavanadate. We’ll also include a separate bottle of sulfuric acid, which will allow kit buyers to make up those reagents themselves simply by adding sulfuric acid to the appropriate bottles, thus extending the shelf life and allowing us to pre-pack those two reagents rather than adding them at ship time.

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Tuesday, 26 November 2013

08:07 – We’re still under a winter-weather advisory, but it’s pretty much just cold rain. There may be some ice on bridges, but the temperature is hovering right at freezing and the streets are just wet. Barbara is driving the Trooper today. It weighs about three times what her car does, and if there’s ice I’m happier with her driving something with some mass.

More kit stuff today.

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Monday, 25 November 2013

07:52 – Winter has definitely arrived in Winston-Salem. The overnight low was 23F (-5C) and our high today is to be around 41F (5C). We got the gas logs in the den cleaned out yesterday and lit the pilot light. Running unvented on low, they put out considerable heat. On high, they put out as much heat as the furnace. We tend to get ice storms rather than snow around here, and ice storms tend to cause power failures. With the gas logs, we can at least stay warm.

I’m building subassemblies for chemistry kits today.

12:02 – Of the many social-engineering features of Obamacare, here’s the one that offends me the most: ObamaCare slams smokers with sky-high premium costs, could backfire

Under Obamacare, you pay the standard premium if you’ve had eight heart attacks. You pay the standard premium if you are an alcoholic with terminal liver failure. Even if you’re still drinking a bottle of hard liquor a day. You pay the standard premium if you’re a heroin addict with AIDS and multiple organ failure, even if you’re still shooting heroin. But don’t dare use any tobacco products at all, or you’ll be assessed a 50% premium increase, and subsidies, even if you’re otherwise eligible, cannot be applied to that 50% increase. FTA:

“In a worst-case scenario, an older couple who smokes could be “literally impoverished” by ObamaCare premiums, said the report. That couple could pay an $11,352 health care premium, or one-half their annual income of $23,000. By comparison, a non-smoking person over 59 years old would pay 90 percent less, or just $952 after federal subsidies.”

What particularly annoys me is that I smoke a pipe, but they’ll lump me in with cigarette smokers. As any honest actuary will tell you, pipe smokers have fewer health problems than non-smokers, and pipe smokers live longer than non-smokers. That’s why, before political correctness and the demonizing of tobacco, insurance companies did not charge pipe smokers higher premiums for health or life insurance than they charged non-smokers. For that matter, they rated people who smoked 10 cigarettes a day or less as non-smokers, because there is absolutely zero evidence that people who smoke half a pack a day or less are any less healthy than non-smokers. That’s reality. But that son of a bitch in the Oval Office wants me to pay 50% more for health insurance. Not that we’d even be eligible for any subsidies, of course. Bastard.

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Sunday, 24 November 2013

10:36 – I’d thought we had enough kits on hand to cover us through the end of the month, but we’re now down to five each of our flagship chemistry and biology kits. Those might last through the end of the month, but it’s also possible they could all disappear tomorrow. So we decided to do short runs of kits just to get our finished goods inventory up to more comfortable levels. We built a dozen biology kits yesterday, everything but the tubes. Because, as I discovered, I’d forgotten to order more tubes. So we decided to leave the dozen biology kits tube-less, along with the dozen chemistry kits we’ll build next. That way, we can allocate our inadequate supply of tubes to biology kits or chemistry kits, as the need arises.

I just cut a PO for cases of test tubes, 15 mL centrifuge tubes, and 50 mL centrifuge tubes, all of which we use in all of our kits. Fortunately, our usual vendor for these generally has them in stock and ships quickly, so we should have them by the end of the week. What annoys me is that the last time we built major batches of kits, I made a mental note to order these things and then promptly forgot to do it.

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Saturday, 23 November 2013

09:11 – Kit stuff today, along with regular Saturday stuff. And we need to get Barbara’s new Kindle Fire HDX set up and working.

We just got another kit order from a customer in southern Alberta, which is Heartland country. This one was from a little hamlet about 10 or 12 miles from Okotoks, one of the primary shooting locations for the program. That’s five in the last year to this rural area south of Calgary, three that we shipped direct and two that we shipped to a receiving service just over the border in Montana. Given the relatively sparse population density, that’s pretty intense penetration. Homeschooling must be big in that area. It’s interesting to watch Heartland and know that people around there are using our kits.

12:35 – Very strange. I just had Barbara filling iodine solution bottles. We use 30 mL amber glass bottles for that. She ran out of bottles, so I went downstairs to bring up another case. The bottles are shrink-wrapped in sets of 168. As I cut the shrink-wrap, I noticed it was labeled “Made in Austria”. That’s simply weird. It’s weird enough for me to be ordering glass bottles from New York and having them shipped here, but I get free shipping. Ordinarily, low-value, high-mass items like glass bottles are produced and purchased locally. But these come from Austria? Geez.

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Thursday, 21 November 2013

09:45 – We’re running low on finished kits again, so we’ll spend some time this weekend building batches of chemistry kits and biology kits. I’ve intentionally run down our inventory of sub-assemblies because for 2014 ktis I intend to reduce the number of subassemblies by one by combining items that formerly went into X subassemblies into X-1 subassemblies. I’m also working hard on the earth science manual, with the goal of having a prototype kit/manual ready in time for the SPARK competition, which is to say by year-end.

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Saturday, 16 November 2013

10:48 – The phone rang at 0215 this morning. Barbara’s mom had pushed her Lifeline button to summon the EMT’s. She was having chest pains and difficulty breathing. So they hauled her down to the hospital, where they checked her over and eventually sent her home. Barbara and Frances met at the hospital and waited to find out what was going on. From what Barbara told me, it sounds like it was just a panic attack, but as the doctor told Barbara, at her mom’s age one can never be sure. Frances took their mom home, and Barbara got home about 0655. Barbara slept for a while and then headed out to do errands. She’s downstairs now, defrosting the big freezer and filling baggies with sand for the earth science kit.

I ordered Barbara’s birthday present from Amazon yesterday. She doesn’t want to know what it is. I just gave her a hint. They’ll deliver it on a large truck.

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Tuesday, 12 November 2013

08:20 – They’ve called off the blizzard. Until yesterday, the forecasters were saying that we’d have flurries today. Now, they’re saying it’ll just be a 50% chance of rain with a high today around 50F (10C) and low tonight of 21F (-6C). Oh, yeah. And winds at 16 MPH (26 KPH). A good day/night to stay inside.

I just checked our kit sales by type for the year to date. About 38% of the kits we sell are life science or biology, 50% chemistry, and 12% forensic science. That gives me an idea of what to build for inventory. If we want 125 kits in stock going into December, we’ll need about four dozen biology/life science kits, five+ dozen chemistry kits, and a dozen+ forensic science kits.

09:39 – Here’s a very interesting kickstarter project: Heirloom Chemistry Set They won’t be shipping until March of next year, but this would be an ideal gift for a teenager (or spouse) who’s interested in science.

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