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Category: science kits

Sunday, 25 March 2012

09:12 – We made a lot of progress on the first batch of biology kits yesterday. We’re making up the final subassembly, the non-hazardous chemicals, today, and we should have the first batch of finished biology kits in inventory and ready to ship by 1 April. If necessary, we could actually assemble and ship a few kits starting tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we’re working on the re-write of the forensic science book, and prototyping a forensic science kit as we go along. We’re shooting to have the forensic science book and kits ready to roll by August, in time for the autumn semester. After that, it’ll probably be physics or earth science, although AP Chemistry and AP Biology are also on the waiting list, as is environmental science. Eventually, we want to have labs for all of the high-school sciences covered in both standard/honors and AP forms.

11:20 – The biology landing page and the BK01 biology kit ordering page are now live. You can actually order a kit right now, if you want to, although despite what it says on the order page it’ll be a week before we’re actually ready to start shipping kits in volume. Still, if anyone just can’t wait to get their hands on a kit, go ahead and order it. We’ll build it and ship it as soon as possible.

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Saturday, 24 March 2012

08:50 – I finished the QC2 review on the biology book and sent off my comments to the production editor. We’re finished with this book. It goes to the printer on 3 April. Barbara and I are doing final preparation on the biology kits this weekend, and will start assembling finished kits next weekend. And I just got email from my editor yesterday asking about image(s) for the cover of the forensics book, which they’re fast-tracking.

My new cell phone showed up yesterday. I put it on the charger, but I haven’t yet activated it. It’s a cute little clamshell unit. It reminds me of my first cell phone more than 20 years ago, a Motorola clamshell model, although of course the new one is a lot smaller.

I have about had it with DreamHost, which had yet another major outage yesterday. Their promise of 99.9% uptime has become a sick joke. This is about the fourth major outage so far this year. As always, they claim that only one small datacenter was affected and that only a small percentage of their customers were affected. By some coincidence, every time they have have an outage, I’m one of that small percentage of affected customers, as is everyone else I know who uses Dream Host. The major outages would be bad enough, but even when their service is working it’s often so slow as to be almost unusable. My annual renewal is coming up soon, and I think I’m going to move to another hosting company, probably webhostinghub.com.

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Friday, 23 March 2012

08:10 – O’Reilly sent me the QC2 pass of the biology book yesterday, so I’m doing a detailed read-through to try to catch any remaining errors. If history is any guide, I’ll catch all but one of them. Then, when the printed copies of the book show up, I’ll flip open the book randomly to one page, where that one remaining error will jump out at me.

We’re just about ready to start final assembly on the first batch of biology kits. I’m creating the biology landing page and the biology kit ordering page now. Both of those will be live before the book hits the stores, which Amazon is now saying will be 2 May rather than 22 April. We’ll see.

According to an article in the newspaper this morning, North Carolina is about to get slightly larger, at the expense of South Carolina. Apparently, the border was set back in Colonial days, when surveyors marked the line specified by the King of England by cutting slashes in tree bark with hatchets. They apparently did a pretty decent job, but were slightly off in the area around Charlotte. The actual border, per the King’s specifications, has now been mapped with GPS, and it turns out that 93 property owners who thought all of their properties were in South Carolina now find that parts or all of their properties are in fact in North Carolina. One mini-mart owner is being forced to close down his business because North Carolina gas prices are about 30 cents a gallon higher than South Carolina prices, and because he made most of his profit by selling fireworks, which are illegal in North Carolina. Other property owners potentially face changes such as being in a different area code or having to change suppliers for electricity, natural gas, and even which school district their children will have to attend. The two state legislatures are cooperating to minimize the impact of such changes by grandfathering in the current status.

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Thursday, 22 March 2012

08:47 – Arrrrghhh! Leakage is the bane of anyone who ships liquids. I was making up the bags of hazardous chemicals for the biology kits the other day. There are seven of those. I’d distributed 30 sets of the first six to plastic bags. When I was about to add the seventh, Sudan III stain, I immediately noticed that the bag that contained 60 filled, sealed, and labeled 15 mL dropper bottles of Sudan III stain had liquid in the bag that had leaked from one or more of the sealed bottles. Ruh-roh.

The problem is that that stain is made up with a 50/50 mixture of 70% isopropanol and acetone. Both have low viscosity, and both are difficult to keep in a sealed bottle. The combination of the two was apparently too much for the dropper bottle cap, and several of the bottles had leaked. Dropper bottles are inherently more leak-prone than bottles with standard screw caps, so I immediately filled, capped, and taped a bottle of Sudan III stain using a standard PP cap with a PE liner. That bottle is standing on its cap right now. I’ll give it several days to leak. If it lasts until next week with no leaks, I’ll assume that that cap is good enough to prevent leaks during storage and shipping.

In fact, I’m seriously considering abandoning the use of dropper bottles entirely and shifting to using standard screw caps exclusively in all of our kits.

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Wednesday, 21 March 2012

08:46 – The Roku box is great when it’s working, but a royal pain in the petunia when it’s not. Around 6:30 yesterday evening, we had a short power outage that was long enough to cause the Roku to reboot. It took me more than an hour and probably 50 attempts before I could get it to reconnect. About half the time, it would pass the first of three steps in reconnecting, “Connect to wireless network”. About a tenth of the time, it would also pass the second step, “Connect to local network”. But it took 50+ tries before it would pass the final step, “Connect to the Internet”. What was particularly aggravating was that I was watching the AP router status screen, which told me that the Roku box was connected to the wireless network 100% of the time, with a very strong signal and at a high data rate.

I would have called Roku tech support, but I learned that lesson the day the Roku arrived, when I had similar problems getting it to connect (the dreaded 014 error). Never, ever call Roku tech support. Roku has the worst tech support of any company I’ve ever contacted, bar none. Their tech support reps are apparently in China, and do not speak understandable English. They work from a script, and their solution is always to demand that you reconfigure your entire network, despite the fact that the network is demonstrably working fine and that the problem is solely the Roku box.

If I ever need to replace this Roku box, it certainly won’t be with another Roku product. Roku sucks.

O’Reilly sent me the draft of the bio book index yesterday. In all the books we’ve done for O’Reilly, I don’t think I’ve ever made even one change to a draft index. For some reason, it just flummoxes me. They want suggestions about adding things that are missing. I can never think of any. They also want suggestions about things that are in there but shouldn’t be. I can never think of any. So I just emailed my editor this morning to say that I couldn’t find anything that needed to be changed.

Right now, I’m working on two web pages. The first is the “landing page” for the biology book. The second is the main page for the BK01 biology kit. Both of those pages need to be tested, up, and working by the time the biology book hits the stores a month from now. Which means I really need to get the biology kits costed out, so we know what to charge for them.

I talked to Barbara the other day about dropping our cable TV and VoIP service from Time-Warner, keeping only Roadrunner. The cable TV service is basic tier, which is essentially just the OTA channels. About the only use we have for them is when Barbara watches sports on weekends. We could get those for free with an antenna, and probably get a better picture. As to VoIP phone service, we’re paying something like $45/month for it, and probably use it an average of less than 10 minutes per day. Although it’s more common among young people, we have several friends who’ve already dropped their landline phone service and gone 100% cell. Given our very light usage, I thought prepaid cell phones would actually be cheaper. Assuming 300 minutes per month between us, which is probably high, prepaid cell airtime at $0.10 per minute would run us only $30, and we’d have the other advantages of cell phones, including each of us having a personal number and not missing any calls.

Barbara’s current cell phone is a Boost Mobile, for which she pays $0.10/minute, so I visited the Boost Mobile site yesterday, intending to order a second phone for myself. I found that, although Barbara is grandfathered in at $0.10/minute, the current prepaid plan is $0.20/minute. So I went off looking for alternatives and found Platinumtel.com. They get good reviews, we’re in a service area with a strong signal, and their prepaid service is only $0.05/minute. So I just ordered one of their phones for myself. If I like it, I may order another one for Barbara.

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Tuesday, 20 March 2012

08:10 – The methyl cellulose arrived yesterday, along with a bunch of other chemicals. I’ll make up the solution later this week.

Methyl cellulose is interesting stuff. It’s freely soluble in cold water, but insoluble in hot water. One might therefore reasonably assume that the way to make up a solution of it is to dissolve it in cold water, but that doesn’t work very well. No matter how careful you are, if you mix methyl cellulose powder with cold water, it forms clumps that are almost impossible to get into solution. The trick is to make a suspension of the stuff in water at about 85 C to prevent clumping, and then pour that suspension slowly and with constant stirring into ice cold water. The tiny particles in suspension immediately dissolve in the cold water, forming a homogeneous solution. Alternatively, one can simply make a suspension of the full amount of methyl cellulose powder in hot water and then stick the beaker in the freezer to cool it down rapidly, before the suspension has time to settle out.

The biology book is proceeding on schedule. We’re supposed to receive the QC2 PDF Thursday. We then have Thursday and Friday to review it and make any final minor changes. Once that’s complete there’ll be an index review, followed by the book going to the printer on 6 April.

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Monday, 19 March 2012

07:58 – Methyl cellulose, the final chemical we need for the biology kits, is supposed to arrive today. I’ll make up a couple liters of the solution, and then decide what type of bottle to use for it. (The solution is quite viscous, possibly too viscous to use a narrow-mouth dropper bottle; we may end up using a wide-mouth bottle instead.) Once we get 60 bottles of that filled, capped, taped, and labeled, we’ll have everything we need to start building finished kits. We’ll build the first batch of 30 kits this coming weekend.

Meanwhile, I’m back to working on the re-write of the forensics book.

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Sunday, 18 March 2012

08:52 – Barbara is cleaning house this morning and then heading over to her parents’ house for lunch. This afternoon we’ll do more work on the biology kits. We made up a sample kit yesterday with everything in it except the two chemical bags, which we haven’t assembled yet. Eyeballing it, it looks like we’ll be able to fit everything into a USPS Priority Mail Regional-Rate RRBB1 box, which is good. But it’ll be a tight fit, so we won’t be sure until we’ve actually made up the two chemical bags and tried it.

We’re not offering any options on the biology kits, at least initially, which means we’ll be able to assemble them and seal the boxes, and then stack finished-goods inventory to await shipment rather than doing final assembly for each kit as we prepare to ship it.

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Saturday, 17 March 2012

09:58 – More work on the biology kits today. One of the things I need to find out is what size box we’ll need. I’m hoping the kits will fit in a USPS Priority Mail Regional-Rate large box, but we may have to go to the slightly larger USPS Priority Mail Flat Rate large box. The flat-rate box costs about $15 to ship to anywhere in the 50 states, while the regional-rate box averages a few dollars less, typically $8 to $14, depending on destination. Since we sell the kits for the same price regardless of destination, the price of the kits will be about $4 higher if we have to go with the flat-rate boxes.

One of the interesting things about the Well-Trained Minds forums is that the members talk about a lot of stuff that’s not related to home schooling. There’s a current thread about washing machine odors, which apparently are a very common problem with front-loaders. We have a top-loader, but we’ve recently noticed a musty odor. Running loads with lots of bleach hasn’t helped, nor has leaving the lid open so that the machine can dry out. I told Barbara a couple weeks ago that there’s apparently mold growing in inaccessible areas of the machine, and I’d planned to take the back off and see what’s going on in there.

But someone mentioned an easier solution on the WTM forums. Apparently, there’s a product called “Smelly Washer” or something like that. It’s “all-natural”, so I have no interest in using it. I prefer products that are all-artificial, such as good old sodium hypochlorite, AKA chlorine bleach. Apparently, the trick is to overfill the tub, so that lots of water gets splashed around and slurps over the inner tub to reach the mold growth areas on the outer tub. So, after I finish doing our actual laundry today, I’m going to run a large load without clothes using hot water and adding a few gallons of hot water manually to the tub after it’s filled to the regular large level. I’ll add half a liter or so of chlorine beach to that load, and hope it’ll slurp over and get the mold or whatever is causing the odor.

14:31 – Ruh-roh. Barbara just stuck her head in my office door and asked me if it was okay if she moved some of my clothes from our bedroom closet to other closets in the house. My mouth said, “Sure,” but my mind was screaming, “No! No! A thousand times, no!”

The problem is, I (and those clothes, no doubt) am afraid that this is just a way to gently ease them into the trash or Goodwill pile. I have yet to meet a woman who really understands that most guys (including me) form deep and abiding relationships with our clothes. They’re kind of like our dogs, except that they live longer. Women are ruthless and utterly emotionless about clothes. Something has a small hole in it, throw it out! Something has an indelible stain, throw it out! Something doesn’t fit quite as well as it used to, throw it out! Something is out of style, throw it out! Geez. Women have no loyalty whatsoever to clothes. I mean, throwing out an old friend just because it’s a little worn is like shooting a dog because it lost a leg.

Of course, I freely admit that men’s and women’s definitions differ somewhat. What a woman calls “a little worn” a guy calls “almost new”. What a woman calls “worn out” a guy calls “broken in”. And what a guy calls “a little worn” a woman calls “disgraceful”.

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Friday, 16 March 2012

07:59 – The final chemical we need for the biology kits is to arrive Monday, which means we’ll be ready to ship kits by 22 March, right on our projected schedule. I still haven’t costed out the kits or shot images of the final kit, but once I’ve done that we’ll be ready to start selling them.

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