Month: January 2012

10:14 – I’ll finish my final pre-editing pass on the lab sessions today and get them off to the reviewers. At that point, I jump back into the early narrative chapters to do clean-up and rewrite. I should finish that in the next few days. I also have a dozen or so images left to be shot, which I’ll do this weekend. So, for the next ten days or so, I’ll be busier than the proverbial one-armed paper hanger, incorporating edits and comments from reviewers and getting the manuscript ready to go to production on 31 January.

I was about to order gelatin and yeast on-line, until I realized that it’d be cheaper and faster just to make a visit to the supermarket. Sure enough, the local Lowes Foods has yeast for $0.59 for eight packets of 8.75 grams each, so I’ll just buy enough of those to make the first batch of kits. Same thing for gelatin, cheap and readily available. I’ll just buy a couple pounds of unflavored gelatin and repackage it for the kits.

12:52 – I’m uploading the last of the lab session chapters to the server right now. That takes a while, given that Time-Warner caps upload speeds around 125 KB/s (still an improvement over the 45 to 50 KB/s we got until a few months ago) and some of these chapter directories are rather large. Even with thumbnailed images, some of the chapters are 10 to 15 MB, and the scores of high-res images tend to add up. I think this batch totals something like 1.5 GB.

I’m going to reward myself by taking a ten-minute break and then jump back into the early narrative matter. Most of that doesn’t require tech review, so I wanted to get the lab session chapters available first to the reviewers.

I’m in my usual worry mode now. For some reason, I always think that the material I’ve submitted is going to end up after formatting and lay-out as a 30-page pamphlet or something. Of course, that’s ridiculous. No book I’ve ever written has come in under the allotted page count, and some have been significantly larger. Oh, well. I covered what I wanted to cover, and soon it’ll be on to building biology kits and starting on the re-write of the forensics book. I already have an idea for a lab session I want to add to that, but I’ll have to do some experiments to see if it’s practical. (Hint: it involves raw meat and flies.)

08:46 – I’m in heads-down mode on the biology book chapters, doing a final pass on them and sending off several a day to the editors. I’m also updating and annotating the bill of materials for the biology kits as I go along.

Some of the BoM changes are pretty trivial. For example, we’ll use ordinary unflavored gelatin in a couple of lab sessions. Until now, I’d included gelatin in the You-Provide list, but yesterday I decided to make it an Included-in-the-kit item. It’s certainly no real hardship to have kit purchasers buy a pack of unflavored gelatin at the supermarket, but including it means there’s just one less thing for them to worry about.

Other BoM changes have implications. For example, one of the lab sessions involves growing lima beans with and without Rhizobium, which is a nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and then comparing growth in the test specimens grown with and without nitrogen. That’s an interesting experiment, but the problem is that I can ship kits with the Rhizobium to 49 states, but not Hawaii. (Apparently, Hawaii is worried about a pestilence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.) So, I had to update the BoM to make two kit versions, one for Hawaii and one for the other 49 states. That raises the issue of what Hawaii residents should do for this lab session. I decided to include a bottle of ammonium nitrate with only those kits shipping to Hawaii. Geez.

09:35 – I was going to black out this site today in sympathy with the SOPA/PIPA protests, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn the whole page black. If SOPA/PIPA does pass, I’ll have to make some changes around here, starting with disabling comments.

I’m still cranking away on my final pre-editing pass of the lab sessions. There are quite a few missing images, which I’m just putting in placeholders for for now. I created a to-be-shot images list, and I’ll go through and shoot those in a batch.

USPS introduces a new regional-rate box today, to join the current RR Boxes A and B. The new RR C box is considerably larger—12x12x15” (30.5×30.5x38cm)—and might actually have been useful had the USPS not priced it ridiculously high.

The smallest RR box, A, requires postage at the Priority Mail 2-pound level, and can be used for up to 15 pounds. The mid-size RR box, B, which is what I use for kits, requires postage at the Priority Mail 4-pound level, which means it costs me $5.81 in postage for relatively nearby destinations up to $14.62 for zone 8 (the west coast, Hawaii, and Alaska). It can be used for up to 20 pounds. The new RR Box C is priced at the Priority Mail 17-pound level, which means it would cost almost $15 to send to nearby destinations and about $45 to send to zone 8. It can be used for up to 25 pounds. That’s not a very good deal, considering that the large flat-rate PM box (12x12x5.5”, up to 70 pounds) costs only about $15 to send to any address in the US, including zone 8.

There’s a lot of discussion about this new box on the forums frequented by eBay sellers and other vendors. Many people thought the 17-pound rate was a typo, and that USPS really meant to say the 7-pound rate. That might have been reasonable, but as it turns out they really did mean the 17-pound rate. In effect, the USPS has made this new box useless other than for a very small percentage of shipments: those that weigh between 18 and 25 pounds, are too large to fit a large flat-rate box, and are going to distant addresses. Otherwise, it’s cheaper to use UPS or FedEx. Sometimes far cheaper.

If USPS had been smart, they’d have made the RR box C a 12x12x10” box with a 25-pound limit and priced it at the PM 7-pound rate. That box would have been very useful and very widely used. But a RR box C that costs from $14+ to $45 is simply a non-starter.

12:00 – I’m still cranking away on the final lab session, which I should finish up today or tomorrow.

Barbara disassembled 600 15 mL dropper bottles yesterday, which means unscrewing and removing the cap and then pulling the dropper tip plug. That’s a lot of work that wouldn’t be necessary if our supplier shipped those bottles already disassembled. These are Chinese-made bottles, and the supplier says they’re shipped that way to save shipping costs. I suggested that since bottles must be disassembled to fill them, they might want to package the bottles, caps, and dropper tips separately, even if that raised the price a bit.

Before I ordered these bottles, I seriously considered buying the equivalent bottles from one of my other suppliers. Those bottles are US-made and cost about 25% more than the Chinese bottles. Although the cost of bottles is not an insignificant percentage of component costs, the extra cost of the US-made bottles wasn’t really the deciding factor. Other than having to disassemble them, I actually prefer the Chinese bottles. The body of their dropper tips is about two or three times longer than the body of the US-made dropper tips. The Chinese tips are a tight friction fit in the mouth of the bottle, while the much shorter US tips are a snap fit. To me, the Chinese tips seem more secure. I’m afraid that if I use the US bottles someone will squeeze a bottle too enthusiastically and pop out the dropper tip. That wouldn’t be good, particularly if the bottle contained a concentrated acid, strong ammonia, or a similar chemical. So for now I’m sticking with the Chinese bottles and hoping I can convince my supplier to package the bottles, caps, and tips separately.