10:46 – Ever since I can remember, I’ve used the 3D organization system for physical items. That is, I stack them, and simply remember which stack each item is in, and how far down in the stack. Although this is probably the most common organization system among scientists, college professors, engineers, and so on, it doesn’t work particularly well for what I’m doing now. The three science kits we’re currently selling contain a total of more than 200 items, and that’s only finished-goods items. If you break out the bill of materials, it’s more than 1,000 items. For example, the finished-goods item “Biuret Reagent” is a 30 mL bottle of biuret reagent. That in turn is made up of a 30 mL bottle, a cap, a label, tape to seal the cap, and 30 mL of the solution itself. The solution, in turn, is made up of distilled water, copper(II) sulfate, sodium potassium tartrate, potassium iodide, and sodium hydroxide. In other words, that one finished SKU is actually made up of 10 separate SKUs, all of which have to be kept track of, and many of which are also components of other finished-goods SKUs.
So far, I’ve been keeping track of all of this stuff in my head. And, if I do say so myself, I’ve been doing it pretty well. I just remember, for example, that I have 268 thermometers and 322 24-well reaction plates in stock, and when we built the last batch of 30 biology kits, I mentally decremented that to 238 and 292 remaining. Barbara gets annoyed with me when we run out of something, but that doesn’t happen often, and about 90% of the time it does it’s because an item is backordered from a supplier rather than because I forgot to order it. But, at age 59, my memory is a pale shadow of what it once was, and I’m trying to force myself to get better organized using traditional methods.
One of those traditional methods that’s been in use for hundreds if not thousands of years is to use inventory bins. So this morning we made a Home Depot run, and I looked at the storage bins they had on offer. I ended up buying 37 plastic shoeboxes with lids, which are stackable, chemical- and leak-resistant, a good size for many of the items we inventory, and reasonably cheap. I would have bought a couple hundred of them to get started–in fact we drove the Trooper instead of Barbara’s car just because we wanted more room to haul stuff back–but 37 was all they had.
Yikes! Farming in northern Vermont must be stressful.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19112837
Geez, that story not only made the local papers and their net sites here, but also the Daily Mail in London and Drudge.
Local dirtbag, not a real “farmer” like the reports have been saying. Lucky also he didn’t get shot off his tractor; blueshirt huckleberries up here are trigger- and taser-happy. They gotta torch open all the car trunks to retrieve their arsenal of rifles, shotguns, etc.
W. W. Grainger has a branch office in W/S; that would be where I’d start for bins, cabinets, etc. When I had my business I used a lot of their cardboard bins, available in a large variety of sizes. My older sister uses a lot of plastic shoe boxes that she gets at Target – very convenient size for her needs.
http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/wwg/search.shtml?searchQuery=storage+bin&op=search&Ntt=storage+bin&N=0&GlobalSearch=true&sst=subset
http://www.target.com/QuickInfoView?partNumber=14089591&catEntryId=204888354&categoryId=4257&productId=204888353&overlayId=QuickView&validation=true&position=targetCenter&omnitureSuperCatgValue=&lnk=srch_qi_grid_1_2
A WordPress question to ask: why don’t the long URLs wrap all the way instead of splashing to the right across the screen?
I’m looking at trying it out myself here for various purposes but also get told that gee whiz, Tumblr is what all the kidz use nowadays, etc. Tumblr looks to me like just another Twitter-type thing, a vanity press for the net.
Any other ideas on this, seeing as how WP has its share of glitches and hassles?
Every platform has its glitches. The trick is to find one whose glitches you can live with.
True, you can in theory modify an open source platform, but in practice even those who can, don’t.
As for Tumblr, yah. It’s a vanity press for dipweeds who think everyone is just fascinated by their duckface self-shots. It’s also a major free porn server.
The best thing about Tumblr is that “dot tumblr dot com” has replaced “sounds like a good name for a band” when mocking things people say. “Sorry I’m late. My worthless junker of a car broke down again.” “Hmm. broken-down-junker dot tumblr dot com.”
Very good; that is about what I thought. Will take the plunge at some point here. OFD’s fingers are in a few pies right now, not sure where we will end up. Being an IT drone pays da billz but there is more to life.
Hey, bowler hatz off to the UK’s Jessica Ennis; what a priceless keg of dynamite she turned out to be: half my weight and a foot shorter but she blew them all away. Amazing.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/other-sports/athletics/olympics-2012-jessica-ennis-produces-1220288
I do not know a thing about all this blogging stuff. Most of the people I know who blog, use WP. I know my son uses Tumblr, but for what, I know not. Twitter, of course, is for instant news—better than listening to all-news radio, so I am told.
What I have heard, is that for people who hosted their own website, before switching to WP, their hits are waaay down with WP. Not sure what our host has found. A couple of technical forums I frequent, still use the old self-hosting, but they are semi-commercial sites these days, so I doubt there is a motivation for them to change.
That bit about long lines in WP is not something I have seen here. pcb’s long links above wrap quite nicely; maybe it is your browser. I am still in Windows for most of my work (the transition is very slow) using Firefox with AdBlock Plus 2.1.2, NoScript 2.4.9, TabMixPlus 0.4.0.3, OldBar 1.2, BritishEnglishDictionary 1.19.1, DownloadHelper 4.9.9, and Readability 2.3.
On the infrequent occasions I use Firefox at home, I have AdBlock Plus and NoScript running with it, but I have used Chrome now almost since it originally came out and been very happy with it; much faster than any other browser and on a grade scale I would give it a solid ‘A.’
I may be an IT drone, but know zip about hosting a web site; how does one do such a thing these days?
OFD, your question cannot be answered definitively from the information provided. Questions to ask yourself include, What is the purpose of the site? Do I expect make money, meet costs through ads or donations, or cover the costs myself? What is the expected traffic volume? Is the content primarily static (such as papers you have already written in which you want to make available), added to regularly (such as this blog, with its daily posts), or primarily user created (such as fan sites, wikis, forums, and so on). Will an application be doing all sorts of work behind the scenes before the page is presented? How do you expect most users to get to your pages, conventional web browsers, RSS feeds, mobile devices, or what? What skills do I have or can I obtain at an acceptable cost for writing content, customizing appearance, developing applications, and assembling the user interface (“user experience” or UX) as my expected users expect?
I don’t mean to overwhelm you with too many choices. Quite likely what you’re looking for is on the simple side of things, or at least will start small and can grow* later as interest or money allows. On the other hand, maybe what you have in mind is actually big and complex and you hadn’t thought about it yet.
* I’m writing this comment with voice dictation software. It thought I said “grope” there. I was tempted to leave it.
Feel free to ask clarifying questions, here or by e-mail. There might be some lag in response because my time is committed somewhat over 100%.
Damn. I was hoping for a Chuck-length response but I was nowhere close. Wish me luck for next time.
Oh man, you got a loooong way to go before you hit the Chuck-level. Thanks for the info; and apparently your voice-dictation sw works very nicely. I will ponder these questions and others I have been collecting so far.
One thing I will not do, however, is go over the 100% mark for my total time commitments, such as they are, and certainly not the 200% that our host evidently maintains. Events and various members of homo sapiens sapiens conspire to do so, but I resist.
The temp here has dropped drastically to 73 from a high of 90 today, and although I saw brilliant lightning bolts in west earlier, we got nada for a t-storm; maybe tomorrow. I will know well in advance, of course, because once a cloud appears on the distant horizon, our internet goes down for hours and hours. Which is why we pay the big bucks.
“the” west, of course. I love it when my fast typing produces typos that make me look like I am an ESL person. And no edit capability is the frosting on my cake.
I use Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking, version 11.5. It’s pretty good but makes a fair number of mistakes. I just have to correct, either on the fly or on a proof-read. Error rate is actually higher than when I type and the effective words-on-page rate is lower, but the process is less fatiguing to my hands. That’s important when I’m spending the entire evening or a weekend day writing. (On top of my day job, which is also spent on a computer.)
This blasted software is also the only reason I’m using Windows at all personally. My wife and one son prefer Windows to Linux because they’re more used to it, but that’s their problem. I haven’t found any voice dictation software for Linux which is actually usable; everything I’ve tried is more in the proof of concept stage, not even alpha.
I read somewhere recently that the original Dragon couple got bought out or something a while back. I forget the gist of the story but it was kinda sad.
Linux does not do a fair number of things well for certain classes of desktop users, and it has tended to be things like that. Word is out, however, that a bunch of Linux people are really ramping up the desktop development and also the games, finally, at long last. I know I could fart around here and set up our home theater stuff with Linux totally but I just don’t have the time and frankly don’t wanna spend the effort, when I can just whip it up toot-sweet on this Win7 box. During the day I am somehow trusted with a couple of thousand RH servers that run classified stuff, and at home I have it on one desktop for RH cert purposes, and Ubuntu on an old laptop, but Mrs. OFD needs Windows on her machines for work and this in the only such machine I have now. At some point maybe I’ll mess around with setting up the tee-vee infrastructure with Linux and finally dump Microslop for good, although to be fair, I have had zero issues with this Win7 machine in almost two years.
Did you have to train Dragon to recognize your speech? Several years ago I used a rudimentary speech recognition system for something with a severely limited vocabulary, nothing as up to date as Dragon. I had to train it first by reading a variety of provided material. By chance I had to repeat the training (start over from scratch) and it worked far better the second time. The initial training left it with a sort of hair trigger than would interpret the least sound as a word but that was fixed the second time around when I trained with the air conditioning providing a sort of white-noise background.
Yes, there was an article in the NY Times on 15 July about the originators of the tech behind Dragon and their problems. The article seems no longer to be available, but I found one excerpt…
James and Janet Baker spent nearly two decades building Dragon, a voice technology company, into a successful, multimillion-dollar enterprise. It was, they say, their “third child.” So in late 1999, when offers to buy Dragon began rolling in, the couple made what seemed a smart decision: they turned to Goldman Sachs for advice. And why not? Goldman, after all, was the leading dealmaker on Wall Street. The Bakers wanted the best.”
Sounded like they got robbed by “the best”.
Here’s the link to the article
Goldman Sachs, PWC, and the rest of the big consulting industry – pure poison. Their executives are climbing a vicious, back-stabbing career ladder, and have no time for something as mundane as serving their clients. The actual work is done by young, inexperienced people running themselves to exhaustion, in hopes of joining the executive ranks. I have never understood why anyone would entrust anything of importance to the big consulting houses.
At the end of the article, one of the Goldman Sachs consultants testifies that they “did a great job”. Even though their clients lost everything, they were successfully “guided to a completed transaction”. In other words, he got his bonus, therefore the contract was successful, who cares what actually happened to the customer.
Huh. Thanks for the info on Dragon’s corporate issues. That explains a couple of minor oddities I’ve noticed – not the software but the marketing and a few other things.
Roy, yes, I needed to train the software a bit. Out of the box it wasn’t bad and it’s it’s getting better. One problem is that I write text in several languages plus Americanized Hong Kongese for martial arts terms. The former screwed up the English voice recognition and I needed to go back to an earlier, saved profile to un-screw it up. The latter doesn’t really work but at least hasn’t screwed up the profile. I’ve tried setting up custom vocabulary words and other recommended techniques, but none really works. The non-English sounds are processed as if they were English and the closest English words are stuffed in. I’m not complaining. I know enough about the voice recognition technology to realize that this is a marvel.
That’s true only in the sense that I commonly work 80 hours a week. On the other hand, I’m working at something I really enjoy doing, so it’s not like I’m putting in 80 hours a week doing something I dislike doing for someone I don’t enjoy working for.
Strictly speaking, I’m not committed over 100%. Some time ago I added up my “commitments”, with the quotes denoting the inclusion of what my wife either expected me to do or had told others that I would do: day job, moonlighting, family stuff, house and yard chores, helping her brother start a business, helping old people get or move or dispose of furniture because I have a van, shuttling people around because I have a van, etc. It came to over 168 hours per week. Note that no time was allotted for sleeping, eating, and other “me” things. After a rather contentious discussion concerning expectations she cut back somewhat on what she told others that of course I’d be happy to help with.
I’ve used the 3D stack system to keep track of parts for a long time, but it’s breaking down for me as well. Each electronic kit I sell has a “build sheet” in Excel with the identity of the parts and the quantity and an ID number identifying the box each of the parts are in. Each box has 17 small compartments. (I buy these at the local Michael’s craft store – in the beading section.) There’s a lot of commonality between kits so this system works better than, for example, putting all the parts for each particular kit in a single box.
But other things, such as experimental parts, test fixtures, cables, and miscellaneous junk have built up to the point where it became overwhelming. I’ve put them into cardboard boxes, and the like.
So the last week has seen me move these miscellaneous things to clear plastic boxes, about shoebox size, with labels on the outside. Can’t find anything. But I suppose it will get better with time.
Costco has a good deal on boxes. About shoebox size, nearly transparent plastic with snap on lids. 14 boxes for a bit under $20. Bought 6 packages of the storage boxes. Only problem with the Costco boxes is that the plastic is slick and stacking them vertically isn’t as stable as might be desired.
My son showed me this awesome video about The Goldman Sachs and Quantitative Easing by the Fed.
“They are The Goldman Sachs. They make their money ripping off the American people”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k&feature=plcp