08:02 – As of this morning, we have only 22 biology kits and 19 chemistry kits in stock, albeit with another 30 of each in progress. Not all that long ago, that would have been a comfortable cushion. No longer.
Homeschoolers are now buying materials for the summer session, and it seems to be ramping up. The scary part is that the real ramp-up hasn’t started yet, and won’t until August, when homeschoolers start ordering materials for the autumn semester. So, at this point, we’ll concentrate first on getting the new batch of 30 biology kits and 30 chemistry kits ready to ship. We’ll then build inventory by doing batches of 30 kits at a time, alternating between chemistry and biology kits. Starting mid- to late-July, we’ll add forensics kits to the mix until we have at least 60 of those in inventory by the time the forensics book hits the stores.
10:46 – Barbara’s going to dinner with her parents tonight and then taking her mom to a 7:00 pm appointment to get an MRI. Apparently, they run that machine literally around the clock. That leaves my dinner up to me.
As my long-time readers know, I’m mildly vegetarian. To be precise, I’m an ovo-lacto-fisho-chickeno-beefo-porko-lambo-almost-anything-that-stands-still-or-moveso vegetarian. Oh, yeah, and definitely bacono. But I do eat vegetables, so to my way of thinking that makes me vegetarian. I hasten to add that I am in no sense of the word a humanitarian.
I know you don’t want employees, but…
How much of your time does it take to assemble each kit? Could you outsource it, at, say, $5 per kit to one of the local high school science grads. That wouldn’t make them employees? It’d be like paying someone to do yard work.
Assembly at RBTs house, under his direct supervision? The help might not fit the 1099 guidelines. Maybe.
Business growing pains, every robber baron suffers them!
One of the reasons I don’t want employees is that that opens me up to all kinds of government regulation and interference, particularly since handling chemicals is involved.
Depending on how things go, I might subcontract some stuff. Really subcontract, rather than calling a statutory employee a contractor. For example, while Jaz is home for the summer, she’s working at the Y. They’re paying her just a bit above minimum wage, something like $8/hour.
If we really end up pushed, I might see if Jaz would be interested in labeling bottles for us. I’d haul a hundred sheets of printed labels and 3,000 bottles down to Jasmine’s house and pay her piece-work to label the bottles. From Barbara doing it, I know how many bottles she can label an hour, so I’d set the piece-work rate for Jas to be equal to something more than she’s getting now, maybe $10/hour or thereabouts. I’d then have Jas invoice me based on the piece-work rate, write her a check accordingly, and issue her a 1099.
I just ordered a copy of Bob’s latest book. Of all the books I’ve bought online, I think this is the first I’ve ordered before it was released. Also, this is probably the first physical book I’ve bought in a year or more.
Subcontracting: sounds right. Having employees is a huge step for a business. Assuming things continue to grow, Jaz can probably recommend classmates who are also reliable, to take on more work.
Here in the USA, those $5,000,000 MRI machines run 24×7. I’ve taken my wife to get a MRI starting at 10 pm that lasted until 1 am or so.
I read an article recently about the difference between the USA and Canada is that all the medical people are of employees of the government (and unionized). So the $5,000,000 MRI machines in Canada only run 8 to 5, five days per week.
I have Windows 8 running on a spare machine. What was Microsoft thinking? Granted this is a prerelease preview and is not finished. But the direction that Microsoft is going is an entirely different interface. Some clod at Microsoft needs to have his head busted.
I also have an Ipad and the lack of folders and the ability to figure out where files are is frustrating. Having to use ITunes to get files onto, or off, the device is frustrating. I use Dropbox for some stuff, Office To Go which uses a web server on the IPAD to allow files to be transferred. There is no consistency on the IPad and that is just annoying.
Windows 8 will not blossom on a desktop, it will be a major flop. If you thought Windows ME was bad, or Microsoft Bob, you are in for a surprise. It took me 10 minutes to finally find where some programs can be accessed after I had gone to the desktop page. Hopefully someone at Microsoft listens and provides two versions. One for a tablet, and one for a desktop with keyboards and rodents. As it is now Windows 8 interface sucks dust bunnies big time.
Here in the USA, those $5,000,000 MRI machines run 24×7.
And each time the machine is used the manufacturer gets a large cut of the money. I don’t know if the hospitals really buy the machines or just lease them.
Having had a couple of MRIs myself it was not for the claustrophobic. Especially the one on my upper back and lower neck. You are jammed into this really tiny space, shoulders wedged in, the machine about 2 inches from your face, and you have this feeling you will get stuck. There you lie for up to 40 minutes, with each activation of the machine accompanied by lots of noise. There is no pain, but it is really annoying.
Funny, my MRI didn’t bother me. Granted, it was on a knee, so my head and shoulders were out. I found the rhythmic noises somehow hypnotic, and drifted on the edge of sleep.
I will shortly be down to only one Windows machine, this desktop I’m on right now, mainly because it’s Windows 7 Ultimate running on 8GB with two 1TB drives and it’s a backup for wife’s and daughter’s laptops and I run my media server/home theater stuff from it. Nice sound system, too.
Other than that, the box behind me is of the same hw specs and runs RHEL 6.2; my netbook runs an Italian version of Lubuntu and security sw called Deft. My old state gummint laptop that ran XP long ago now runs Ubuntu 11.04 with 1GB and its old 40GB or so hard drive. I will probably run it as a firewall of some sort later.
And today the boss man down in upstate NY approved me to install RHEL 6.2 and associated corporate sw on my work laptop, hooray! I’ll probably clone the existing XP drive to an external drive for now and then away we go! What will be interesting is seeing how the corporate sw (Lotus Symphony, Notes, and Open Client) run on it, but I am not the first guinea pig there so I have some fallback for info.
Our sympathies to you, Bob, on the in-law parental stuff; it is a hard road. Esp. when they’re really stubborn and strong-willed and often seemingly uncaring or not knowing of, the impact on adult children responsible to a large degree for their care. And it is the luck of the draw when it comes to the doctors and nurses. Our best wishes, anyway, as we also have dealt with some of that, and have some more coming up, before we ourselves get all messed up. Oh wait—I’m already pretty messed up, and they’ll stand in line to tell ya that, too.
“I read an article recently about the difference between the USA and Canada is that all the medical people are of employees of the government (and unionized). So the $5,000,000 MRI machines in Canada only run 8 to 5, five days per week.”
Not true! First of all, hospital employees are not government employees. They are hospital employees and most are unionized. The hospitals bill the government (provincial government, all health care delivery is a provincial responsibility, the federal government has no direct involvement in the delivery of health care) if the recipient is a Canadian resident, and the procedure is covered, otherwise, the recipient or their insurance provider is billed. Uninsured visitors to Canada can get quite a nasty shock! However most (not all) hospitals are not for profit corporations.
The MRI machines are used around the clock, seven days a week, subject to staff availability. If you want your MRI at a convenient time, then you may have quite a wait, if you can drop in Friday evening or Sunday morning, your wait will be quite a bit shorter. This happened to me a few years ago. After waiting months to get an appointment, I was given one in about two months. About a week later I received a phone call asking me if 8pm two days later would be convenient. I took it. An acquaintance of mine has been treated for prostate cancer. He gets follow-up MRIs late Sunday morning. He never has to worry about waiting lists.
The machines also get used between 12AM and 8AM. Mostly by veterinarians. And yes, they are billed at whatever the standard rate is.
Watching the health care insurance debate in the states, both for and against, I have come to the conclusion that neither side has clue how the Canadian health care system actually works. Our system is far from perfect and it varies quite a bit from province to province, it isn’t nearly as good as its proponents claim or nearly as bad as its opponents claim.
I actually found my MRI to quite musical, but loud. Then again I like electro-acoustic, minimalism and other such odd compositions. Charlotte Gainsbourg did a song, IRM, after she had an MRI (IRM is French for MRI.)
Rolf is telling the truth, BTW.
In BC there are MRI clinics opening up, and from what I hear $1 Million is the going rate for the machines these days. The rate per scan tends to be around $1100. I know more than a few people who have elected to spend the grand at the clinic, rather than wait for dogs to get scanned through the machine at the hospital.
You just blew your linguistic geek cred. Chicken’s combining form is not “chickeno”.
I know that. Neither are any of the others, except the first two. But if I’d said, for example, that I’m piscivorous, a few of my readers would have had to use the dictionary.
Which reminds me of the discussion we had some time back about words that everyone knows but for which only a tiny percentage of people know the antonym.
New MRI machines are now being constructed with different architecture that opens them up, so the claustrophobic aspect is considerably lessened. Most of my work involves interaction with doctors, and from that, I have learned that a couple of places in Indy have been guinea pigs for the new design machines. They also run shifts around the clock almost everywhere there is a machine, but access is quick—never more than a few hours wait if a doctor orders stat. The evening and overnight shifts are not nearly as packed as day shifts, and yes, they also do animals overnight here, too. Most people are not aware that the machines are used for animals; in fact, when a conference room full of people were told that at one of my video shoots, only 1 person already knew.
The article that I read differentiated between public and private MRI machines in Canada. The public ones were “free” but only operated 8 to 5 on a five day basis. The private ones were $400 or so and ran 24×7. I read the article 3 or 4 years ago so things are probably changed for the better as apparently the public officials were embarrassed and increasing MRI access.
Gamma ray machines must be fairly cheap. My cardiologist’s practice owns two of them and they run from 6 am to 8 pm five days a week. The bunch of cardiologists (12, I think) run patients through there on a assembly line. I’ve been through it 3 times in the last 2 years as they try to figure out what to do about my missing right coronary artery. Apparently most people with this condition die before they are 20 and I am 51 so they are “watching” me.
Funny, my MRI didn’t bother me. Granted, it was on a knee, so my head and shoulders were out.
Wait until you need your kneck scanned. There is not a lot of room inside those machines.
New MRI machines are now being constructed with different architecture that opens them up, so the claustrophobic aspect is considerably lessened.
That was one of the options. But those machines are not as precise or accurate as the claustrophobia machines. I had the option of an “open MRI” but was advised against unless I was absolutely terrified. At least at the hospital I used that was the case. Perhaps they did not have the newest machine. My spine doctor basically said the same thing that the small tube machines provide better images.
“As my long-time readers know, I’m mildly vegetarian.”
Welcome to the club. I’m strictly vegetarian from 4-5 AM on Thursday mornings. I’m also a teetotaler, out of deference to our Muslim friends. I never drink alcohol between 6 and 7 AM on Saturday morning.
Ray Thompson says:
I have Windows 8 running on a spare machine. What was Microsoft thinking?
Supposedly, this is Ballmer’s farewell mandate for Microsoft. He has been quoted as saying he is betting the company on the changes in Windows 8.
I don’t own a tablet, but work with lots of people who do use them (mostly iPads). I see how the icon-oriented interface works—especially with touch-screens,—but it seems a ridiculous interface for a desktop. A year ago, a lot of people were saying that corporate IT departments would revolt against the icon interface and Windows 8 would be pretty much killed by corporate rejection.
But now, here is the conundrum: tablets are outselling desktops—and at an increasing rate. The people I see in my work are road warriors—although most of their work is in-town. While we sit through questioning, most of them are VPN’d into their corporate networks, and doing the same kind of work that they would be doing if at their desk in the office. A couple have told me that they mostly just keep using the tablets in the office, because it is too much trouble to keep switching back and forth.
In fact, in one of Dwight Silverman’s articles, he spoke of Android developers as seeing the future of Android phones as a quad-core computer that will automatically connect to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor when you are at your desk, and will be your desktop computer, in addition to your phone and mobile device on the road.
So, if tablets and Android-like devices are the future of computing, and desktops begin fading away—even in the office—maybe Windows 8 and Unity could be the most usable human interface to the future of computing?
And I not only have vegetables at *least* twice a year, ketchup being one, thanks to the great President Reagan, but I also don’t drink at all and only eat Rolled Gold stick pretzels between 5 and 6 PM. Plus I worry constantly if I am being deferent enough (yeah, I can make up words, I was an English major, I’m authorized) to my scads of muslim friends.
Those poor kids. 🙁 I thought Summer vacation was an integral part of growing up in America.
Speaking of summer vacation, many parts of Indiana are going to year-round school this year. This will be the last year of ‘summer vacation’. A couple of friends who have kids with both parents working, say this will be especially hard on them. Because college summer vacations are longer than those of elementary and secondary schools, it has been easy to get daytime kid care from vacationing college students for the whole summer. But now kids will go to school for 3 months, then get a month off—all year long. Finding child care for a month, every fourth month, will be daunting, when the universities do not have the same schedule, my friends say. TG my kids are grown.
Dump the entire publik skool system in this country and 90% of the colleges and universities. Cut DOD by two-thirds. And follow the rest of our host’s recommendations accordingly.
Do that, or reap the whirlwind.
Well, there’s a shortage of jobs so why can’t parents just stay home and look after the brats?
Windows 8 – yes, almost certainly a failure. But this seems to be part of Microsoft’s pattern in recent times. Windows ME was a flop, so was Windows Vista. They will survive to produce Windows 9, which will likely be fine.
On the other hand, Microsoft will be the kiss of death for Nokia. Having already missed the iPhone/Android bandwagon, they will limp along as a hardware supplier for Windows Mobile, which has been a zombie since it first launched. There’s not enough of a market there to sustain a company the size of Nokia.
maybe Windows 8 and Unity could be the most usable human interface to the future of computing?
Perhaps. But I know that typing on a tablet is horrible. An external bluetooth keyboard helps but even those keyboards are too small for my comfortable use. I can see people using tablets as the base computer, hooking into a docking station when at work that provides full keyboard, display and mousing features. Moving fingers across a screen all day is just not fun in my opinion.
Windows 8 – yes, almost certainly a failure.
I also think so. The interface is just too clumsy for a desktop. I need and use two monitors and NO tablet computer supports that sort of screen real estate. I installed W8 on a test machine and the interface sucks for a keyboard and mouse. As I said it took me 10 minutes to figure out where to find the program icons. I still have not figured out how to place a program icon on the desktop for ready access. I have also found no way to have metro apps interact with normal applications. I haven’t even found a way to use the clipboard between the two different application modes.
Supposedly, this is Ballmer’s farewell mandate for Microsoft. He has been quoted as saying he is betting the company on the changes in Windows 8.
I hope Ballmer sells all his stock before he releases Windows 8.
While we sit through questioning, most of them are VPN’d into their corporate networks, and doing the same kind of work that they would be doing if at their desk in the office.
I doubt they are doing a word document or a spreadsheet. I have tried and it is not easy. Unless these people are more nimble than I am I suspect they are mostly just reading information rather than composing information. Reading information on a tablet works fine, composing sucks.
Tablets are for content consumers, not creators. Given that 90% of computer-like-device purchasers are solely consumers, tablets’ success is understandable.
I do think that a tablet with better support for keyboard and better display and maybe a mouse would make tablets good enough for almost everyone. They already have more computing power than desktop computers of not too many years ago and the iPad similarly has more pixels than monitors of not too many years ago (if rather on the small side).
Given that 90% of computer-like-device purchasers are solely consumers, tablets’ success is understandable.
I will disagree. I think it is more like 89%.
Anyway, feeble attempt at humor aside, perhaps I am just not normal. I have tried photo editing apps on the IPad and they suck, big time. I can do more in 5 minutes on my desktop than I can do in two hours on my IPad. I can edit Word and Excel documents on the IPad and it sucks.
A lot of people use the devices for collaboration, reading email, messaging, etc. I also read email and respond. I have responded to email on the IPad and it sucked. The lack of a real keyboard is a very serious problem.
I find a laptop to be somewhat restrictive for serious work. I have applications, still and video, that will suck the life out of an 8 core processor on a system with 16 gig of memory and three 1TB disk drives for extended periods of time. Doing that work on an IPad would take weeks. As I said, maybe I am not normal.
I have read web pages on the IPad and it is OK. I watch movies on the IPad and it is excellent. I have read books on the IPad and it is excellent. When used for what it is intended it works well. But I really don’t see a large threat to replace the desktop, yet. A competent docking station, significantly more memory, dual monitor support and real keyboard are going to be required in my opinion.
10 years from now things may have drastically changed. I find it simply amazing that my phone has GPS, WIFI, 4G, Bluetooth, and it all works in package that is smaller than my HP-27S calculator. And I thought that was amazing when I bought it 24 years ago.
24 years in the future I will be worm food, or close to it. I cannot even imagine where technology will be at that time. Perhaps a device as powerful as my desktop in a case the size of my current smartphone. No cable connections to the docking station, you just sit at your desk and you are connected. Your life in your pocket recharged with solar cells from ambient lighting.
Hey! You pretty much just took what I wrote and rephrased it with thrice as many words. Sheesh. You must be a manager.
I suspect that you, Ray, along with RBT and Chuck and myself are in the 10% of content creators. Probably other frequent commenters here, but I’m tired and my head is fuzzy and I can’t remember.
I gotta have a man-sized keyboard and I gotta have a mouse. And the bigger the screen the better. I use my cell for phone calls and to check the time, period. I read books like people have read books since Gutenberg and have no plans to change that.
Too old and crotchety to change much of anything now and zero interest in doing so. Et apres moi, le Deluge.
The whole idea is to do away with docking plugs—just get near a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and it acquires them wirelessly.
Not sure why people limit themselves to the iPad external keyboard. Just plug in a standard USB keyboard, and you are set to go. That’s what I started doing at home after switching to 100% laptop and no desktop. Use whatever you have to when on the road in somebody else’s office, but plug in a standard keyboard wherever possible.
I do not call on a computer as heavily as Ray—except for video rendering, which it does overnight when I am not using the computer for anything else. But there is a real resistance in the video software community to recognize and deal with the fact that most of us actually doing the video/audio creation are either already on—or moving to—laptops. Friends still working in broadcast TV are moving to laptops so they can edit while still in the field, as many of them are now working as contract day workers, and do not even have an assigned space or equipment at the studio. It has really been hard finding an acceptable new laptop, as makers have really cut back on features, I guess to keep prices ridiculously low. Only gaming computers can fill video needs these days, whereas my barebones Asus laptop was very audio/video ready (for that era) when I bought it 6 years ago. Very out-of-date now, though.
One of the reasons I have loved having only 1 computer to deal with, is setup. Had to work on a computer in the studio the other day, and the whole thing has never been configured with useful shortcuts; project rates were wrong, as were export rendering parameters. It actually would have been much, much quicker for me to have brought my laptop and just networked to the files I needed, and done the work on my computer. Keeping 2 computers sync’d without losing stuff, and with duplicate setups is just too much extra work.
Meanwhile the momentum to mobile computing will increase, IMO. Mackie has just come up with a portable 16-channel mixing board that is controlled by dropping in an iPad
http://www.mackie.com/products/dl1608/media/
Images on the Mackie website are gawd awful to navigate, but this is such a new product that they do not even have the product promotion stuff built out, yet. You CAN buy it today, if you want, however.
Also, Behringer has a portable 16-channel mixer intended for live events, that will record the output to a flash drive as 16 discrete sync’d channels for mixing down later. Use the mixer for house sound, take the flash drive recording and remix it all later for CD release.
http://www.behringer.com/de/Products/UFX1604.aspx
These days, things are going unbelievably more portable. I would be glad for the day an Android can be my main computer.
Hey! You pretty much just took what I wrote and rephrased it with thrice as many words. Sheesh. You must be a manager.
Nah. But I stayed at a Holidy Inn Express last night.
For what I do I find fingering just not acceptable. More control with a mouse, more speed with a keyboard, more monitor real estate.
Not sure why people limit themselves to the iPad external keyboard. Just plug in a standard USB keyboard, and you are set to go.
I did not know that you could do that. I thought you had to use the Apple bluetooth keyboard. I will try that as I have the USB connector for the IPAD. I got that to allow photos from my camera to be downloaded onsite for preview. The images are the JPG portion of the raw images and I cannot do anything with them. But it does allow people a larger preview than the camera screen.
What I would like on my IPAD is camera control. I see the image on the IPAD screen, along with access to all the camera controls. A few touches and I could change everything. A single touch and the camera takes the image and immediately makes the image availabe on the IPAD.
This is going to take an effort on the part of camera makers to standardize on an interface standard. Don’t think that will happen. Perhaps it is available for another brand of camera and I am just not aware of it. I have seen it for specialty, and costly, cameras, on a full sized PC and I suppose a laptop. It would be kewl on an IPAD.
Well, the fact that Mackie has made the iPad an interface for a mixing board, indicates it is possible. Maybe you photogs should get together and demand that same thing from your camera makers.
How many companies make mixing boards versus how many make digital cameras, or at least cameras other than cheapie consumer models? How standardized are mixing boards, or at least their external hardware interfaces? That might explain the software for boards but not cameras?
I tried a quickie internet search on that, but in the time available I couldn’t even get a handle on question, let alone approach answers. With luck Chuck knows two thirds of the answer and RBT knows the other third off the top of their heads.
Actually, there are probably more mixing board manufacturers than camera makers now.
Audio mixing boards are seriously standardized, and have been for years. They’ve even merged XLR and 1/4″ RCA connectors so you can use either in the same connection.
I’ve played with these, and they’re toys compared to a serious mixing board. This is for the garage bands that can’t afford a $3000 mixing board.
There is a bunch of stuff being made for the iPad, and I hate it. I’m forced to buy from a computer company I don’t like so I can use certain audio products? I remember when Apple was sued, successfully, to stay OUT of the music business. Funny how that didn’t stick for very long.
I thought Apple was in the grocery business. (I learned that from the movie Forrest Gump.)
I would guess that there are significantly more cameras out there than mixing boards. Right now, there are zero effective competitors to the iPad. Not sure when there will be, but I doubt it will be soon. Funny how other companies are just plain scared to even try to compete with Apple in that space. Several makers have even withdrawn their production efforts after marketing trials. It will probably take Google to challenge Apple. In the meantime, everybody is stuck with the iPad.
How hard is it to come up with effective competition to Apple? Reminds me of SanDisk, who made the MP3 player I bought for Jeri. What a piece of crap compared to my iPod. Controls so tiny that I have to use my fingernails to make them work. After being universally criticized for that, what did they do? They came up with the Fuze, which is even smaller, with even smaller control buttons. With genius moves like that, sometimes I have to applaud Apple.