Month: July 2012

12:07 – My life has become a steady stream of building science kits, processing orders for them, and shipping them. Not that I’m complaining. I wish it could be like this all year long. Instead, it’s semi-crazy in July, full-on crazy in August and September, and back to semi-crazy in October. Still, as long as we can continue to build enough kits to meet demand, and assuming the current sales trajectory holds up, it looks like we’ll reach my goal for the year in September, if not August. The remainder of the year should allow us to exceed the goal comfortably.

And to think that back around April/May, I was seriously considering starting another book in the DIY science series and designing another kit. As it is, I’ll be hard pressed to get the first batch of forensic science kits ready by the time the book hits the bookstores in about a month. I haven’t even started making up the solutions, of which there are a large number, other than in prototype quantities. As a very smart friend of mine once commented, “We can do anything, but we can’t do everything.”

08:55 – It’s still early July, and the rate of kit orders is starting to scare me. We’re already shipping them faster than we can build new ones, and the rate of orders is accelerating. We’ve had four kit orders so far today, and it’s not even 9:00 a.m. From everything I’ve been told, the order rate in August and September is likely to be at least three or four times what it is now.

I remember laughing to myself when I read the USPS page about scheduling pickups. It said they didn’t need an exact package count, but they needed to get some idea so they’d know whether or not they needed to send out a separate truck. At this point, that may not turn out to be funny. Those 30 chemistry kits in final assembly and 60 more chemistry kit currently a-building may not last long. I was planning to do 30 more biology kits next, but we may do 60 more instead. And we’re down to less than 200 shipping boxes, so I need to re-order those from USPS.

10:18 – I got the first kit shipped to Canada yesterday. Per the advice of the woman I spoke to on the USPS toll-free support number, we hauled the kit out to the local post office to have them weigh it and look over the paperwork. I told the guy at the counter not to print postage because I was going to take the kit home and use Click-and-Ship. He said that the paperwork looked fine, but mentioned that Click-and-Ship did all that for me for international shipments.

So I took the kit home, hit the USPS Click-and-Ship web site, and told it I needed to ship a Large Flat Rate Priority Mail box to Canada. Sure enough, rather than the four or so screens that I see for US shipments, there were eight or ten screens, most concerned with customs issues. The only strange part was that when I filled out the manual six-part paper form, per the instructions I’d gotten on the phone earlier, I entered “30.37a” in the EEL field. On the web form for that field, there was a drop-down list, and the only choice was “NOEEI 30.36”. So I did the best I could, and eventually got to the part where I pay and generate the postage label.

I paid (with Barbara’s AmEx because I still don’t have my replacement card) and told it to generate the label. For US shipments, the postage label is a half-sheet. I can choose to print a full sheet with half being the postage label and the other half the receipt, or simply print postage labels two-up if I have multiple kits to mail. I always download the label as a PDF and then print it. In this case, the PDF was three full pages. Two pages of two-up labels and a third page of instructions, which weren’t all that helpful.

I had four half-sheet labels, all of which looked very similar but with minor differences. They all had the same barcode, but one had a second barcode and a “postage paid” line on it. I assumed that was the one I was supposed to stick on the box and the other three were to go into the clear plastic envelope. Just to make sure, I called USPS International Mail support and spoke to a woman who clearly had no idea what to tell me, nor later did the mailman when he picked up the box.

The manual form 2976-A had six parts, with the original being “1 – Manifesting/Scan Copy”, the second and third pages being “Customs Declaration”, the fourth “Dispatch Note”, the fifth “Post Office Copy”, and the sixth “Sender Copy”. The web-fill version had only four parts, “1 – Customs Declaration” (with the postage barcode), the second “Customs Declaration”, the third “Dispatch Note” and the fourth “Sender Copy”. The “Manifesting/Scan Copy” was missing, as was “Post Office Copy”. I assumed that those were taken care of by the Click-and-Ship automation, so I stuck “1 – Customs Declaration” on the box, since it had the postage bar code, and put the other three copies in the 2976-E clear plastic envelope.

11:03 – We’re shipping our first chemistry kit to Canada today. I’ll haul it out to the local post office and ask them to take a look at it and the paperwork, and to weigh it just to make sure what it actually weighs. Then I’ll haul it back here, print the Click-and-Ship postage label and hand it to the letter carrier this afternoon.

I also need to stop by the lawn and garden store and pick two or three bags of vermiculite. One bag is four cubic feet (100+ liters). To meet shipping regulations, we pack chemicals in gallon (3.79 L) ziplock bags with a liter scoop of vermiculite added to serve as cushioning and absorbent, so one bag suffices for about 100 kits.

I spent most of yesterday making up solutions for chemistry kits. Barbara spent the day labeling, finishing 1,590 containers, which gave us 30 forensics kits’ worth. That’s one set of 30 labels for a 125 mL bottle, 20 sets for 15 mL bottles, 15 sets for 30 mL bottles, six sets for 30 mL widemouth bottles, and 11 sets for envelopes. She’d previously labeled a dozen sets of envelopes, so that means the forensics kits total 65 containers each.

And I just got off the phone with Crucial. Apparently, someone attempted to use my credit card number to place a $585 order on Tuesday. The Crucial rep said their internal security flagged the transaction immediately. They hadn’t actually run the charge through, but had only placed a query with AmEx to verify the card was valid and place a $585 reduction in our available credit. The rep said that they didn’t actually charge a card until the order shipped, which it obviously never will, so AmEx would automatically remove that $585 placeholder.

I wish our legal system would begin dealing with thieves as they used to be dealt with; at least as severely as murderers. Britain used to hang thieves, which unquestionably had a deterrent effect on the particular thief being hanged as well as on other would-be thieves. I’ve always thought Winston-Salem would be a much better place if, one weekend, we had a mass execution and hanged, say, the worst 1,000 people in Winston. Thieves, rapists, child molesters, politicians who lie or steal, scammers (particularly those who focus on the elderly), spammers, and so on.

As you celebrate Independence Day today, please take a moment to think about the men and women of our armed forces, past and present, who have willingly risked, and all too often lost, everything to defend our freedom. I worry about America, but there can be nothing very wrong with a country that continues to produce men and women like them.

08:43 – Today also marks eight years for us being Microsoft-free. We’ve been using free software exclusively since 4 July 2004.

Today, Barbara will get started on labeling close to 4,000 containers, enough for 60 more chemistry kits and 30 forensics kits. Meanwhile, I’ll be downstairs, packing up the 30 chemistry kits that are in-progress and making up solutions for 60 more, as well as the first group of solutions for the forensics kits.

15:39 – AmEx security just called me to report that there were questionable charges made on my card. They’re issuing me yet another new card. This happened Christmas Day of 2011, and it’s getting to be really annoying. The questionable charges both occurred yesterday: a $1 charge by Groupon and a $585 charge by Crucial/Micron.

The Groupon charge is completely fraudulent. I have never charged anything with Groupon or given them my card number. The Crucial/Micron charge is fraudulent in the sense that I didn’t make it, but because I have done business with Crucial using that card, AmEx couldn’t void the charge. I’d ordered a $30 memory kit from Crucial/Micron a couple of weeks ago. So tomorrow I have to call Crucial/Micron and give them hell. They weren’t supposed to retain my card number. If they didn’t, how could they have placed that $585 charge yesterday? And why did they place a $585 charge when I hadn’t ordered anything?

09:35 – We’re officially out of chemistry kits, in the sense that the last assembled kit in inventory is spoken for, although not yet actually shipped. Fortunately, we have 30 more chemistry kits sitting partially-assembled, so I can put together kits on-the-fly as needed. We’ve also started on new batches of 60 chemistry kits and 30 forensics kits, which we’ll work on over the holiday. Meanwhile, UPS is supposed to deliver several thousand bottles and caps today. And Barbara’s new system is still sitting partially-assembled on the kitchen table.

16:48 – UPS showed up a couple hours ago with eight cartons of bottles and lids–several thousand of them. That’s fortunate, because I just finished printing about 4,000 labels.