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Month: September 2012

Monday, 10 September 2012

07:52 – Today is Barbara’s and my 29th wedding anniversary. Barbara has now been married to me for half her life. I’ll have to wait until our 30th anniversary next year to have been married to Barbara for half of mine. Neither of us makes a big deal about birthdays and anniversaries, so we’ll just go out for dinner tonight.

09:25 – Back when I was in college, one of my friends had a car with a fuel gauge that was next to useless. When he filled the tank, the gauge would read full, which it would continue to read for a long, long time. Eventually, it’d suddenly drop to a quarter full, where again it’d remain for a long time. When the tank was really nearing empty, maybe a liter left, the needle would start falling precipitously toward empty, and he knew it was time to stop at the nearest gas station. Either that, or get the gas can out of the trunk and start walking.

That gas gauge was far more useful than the gauge on my Brother color laser printer. Last night, all of the status lights and the screen were perfectly normal. I printed one black-only page. As it came out of the printer, the Data fault light came on, and the screen told me it was time to replace the black toner. I powered down and powered back up. No joy. So I opened the cover, slid out the black toner cartridge, tilted it back and forth, put it back in the slot, and powered up the printer. No joy. That toner cartridge wasn’t nearing empty. It was empty.

So this morning I checked the web site where I buy most of my office supplies. Their prices are always competitive, so I didn’t bother to check elsewhere. Replacing the four toner cartridges with Brother TN210 cartridges would have cost me $213 plus shipping. That was for the Brother-branded cartridges, so I checked for aftermarket replacements. Four of those would have cost me $252 plus shipping. I thought maybe the after-market cartridges were rated for more pages than the branded ones, but they weren’t. Hmmm. So I went over to Laser Monks and ordered four after-market cartridges for $136.76, including shipping.

14:02 – Geez. Cable companies wonder why their customers hate them. We switched to PhonePower on Wednesday, 29 August. They gave us a choice of cut-over dates. I chose the ASAP option. I’m sure they sent the number porting request to TWC immediately. So, Saturday the 8th we got a bill from TWC, billing us in advance for service from Friday the 7th through 6 October. That bill included VoIP service, which they’d just increased from $35/month to $45/month. I told Barbara I’d call them and get it taken off our bill.

This morning, I called their billing support number and was told that they were experiencing unusually high call volumes and that the expected hold time was 30 minutes. I hung up and tried again periodically throughout the day, getting the same story. Finally, I decided just to hold as long as necessary, with the cordless on speaker phone while I cleaned up the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. After more than 20 minutes on hold, the call was finally picked up by a singularly unhelpful woman who claimed that there were “no notes” on our account and that as far as they were concerned it was active. I told her that was pretty strange since I was talking to her from that number using a different service provider. She finally admitted that we might in fact not be using their phone service. Finally, after much back and forth, I got her to reduce the invoice they’d just sent us from $116.36 to $73.79. I then asked her what our new monthly bill would be. She said $67.44 without tax and $68.24 with tax. I asked her why then we had to send them $73.79 instead of $68.24. She said it was because they’d been providing phone service to us from the 7th through today. I explained to her that she’d just admitted that they hadn’t been providing phone service during that period, since we’d already cut over and that we’d been using our cell phones since then because we had no service from them. She went back into her “there are no notes on your account” spiel. I finally told her that it wasn’t worth my time to argue with her for the $5.55 difference, but that this kind of shit was why people hated cable companies. I just wish we had a good alternative for broadband. Of course, people hate phone companies just as much.

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Sunday, 9 September 2012

08:51 – We’ve been working hard lately, so today we’re going to take it easy. We do need to make up three dozen small parts bags for the chemistry kits, but other than that we’ll take the day off.

Barbara’s parents are now officially moved into their new home at the retirement village. Our PhonePower VoIP service is working fine. My to-do list is still overwhelming, of course, but at this point all of the really urgent stuff is done. Except that inventory on the chemistry kits is running low, and we’ll get that taken care of.

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Saturday, 8 September 2012

09:15 – I misspoke yesterday. Barbara’s parents are actually moving into their actual apartment today, rather than the guest apartment. She left a few minutes ago for her parents’ house to start hauling some of their boxed up stuff over to the new apartment. The movers are coming later today to move the furniture and other large items. I’ll probably head over there tomorrow morning after everything is in place and they’re settled in to get the TV, stereo, and other electronics connected and working.

We started yesterday on a new batch of 30 biology kits, printing labels and labeling bottles and envelopes. Labeling, filling, and sealing containers is the bulk of the work. After that, it’s just final assembly of all the subassemblies.

Our phone service cutover happened sometime yesterday. The PhonePower adapter showed up in the mail mid-afternoon, just in time. It comes with a little folded pamphlet with installation instructions. I was delighted to see that their recommended setup put the terminal adapter between the cable modem and our router, figuring that would solve all of the problems I had with PhonePower last time. Alas, that was not to be. I connected the TA between the cable modem and router, only to find that the router couldn’t get to the Internet. Oh, well.

So I connected things using their alternative procedure, which puts the router between the modem and the TA. I also made sure to configure the router to put the IP address of the TA in the DMZ, which in theory is the same as a virtual direct connection to the cable modem. At first, everything appeared to work properly. I had dialtone and was able to dial. But all I could get when I dialed was a re-order tone (fast busy).

By that time it was late evening, so I just left things as they were and went to bed, hoping that everything would clear up overnight. That was not to be. This morning, I still had dialtone, but nothing else. So I power reset the TA, hoping that would allow it to reinitialize properly. That didn’t work, so I guess I’ll try resetting the whole network again to see if I can get service.

15:04 – I just got back from helping Barbara’s parents move to their new digs. Their TV and component audio system is now set up and working, along with two corded phones, an answering machine, and a cordless phone. The place is very nice. The dining room and other common areas are similar to those in a decent hotel. Their apartment is also nice, with a large living area, small kitchenette, two good-size bedrooms, and two full baths. The staff is friendly and helpful, and there are activities galore. I suspect Barbara’s parents are going to be a lot happier there than they were in their house. They’ll certainly be much less isolated. There are lots of elderly people around, and all of them seem friendly. The facility has a bus that makes regularly-scheduled runs to the supermarket, drugstore, Target/Wal*Mart, doctors’ offices, and so on. There’s maid service, and the dining room serves three full meals a day, with the main meal at noon. Barbara, Frances, and I had dinner there, and the food is quite good.

I left around 13:45 to come home. Colin is not used to having us both gone, but he was a good dog while I was gone. I arrived home just in time to walk him before a severe thunderstorm rolled in. That was fortunate, because unlike any of our other young BCs, Colin is afraid of thunder. All of the others have ignored thunderstorms, even quite loud ones, until they got to be eight or nine years old, when they suddenly decided that thunder was terrifying. Colin has been afraid of it since he was a pup.

I still haven’t gotten the PhonePower VoIP service working yet, and I’m about ready to give up on it for today.

15:59 – Our PhonePower VoIP service is now working properly. Fortunately, I decided to try just one more thing. The firmware in our D-Link DIR-615 router was about five years old. I visited the D-Link page and downloaded the most recent firmware, which is only about 4.5 years old. I held my breath, afraid I’d brick the router, and installed the firmware upgrade. That gave me what I needed: the ability to disable SIP in the Application Level Gateway. I disabled SIP, rebooted the router, and everything now works properly.

What a relief. It would have been embarrassing to have to call PhonePower tech support. When I created my account with them, one of the questions had a drop-down list where you could quantify how much you understood about this stuff. There were five choices. The first choice was basically for people who are completely ignorant. I first chose the final choice, which was basically “I know more about this stuff than you guys do.” I then reconsidered. That sounded a bit arrogant, although I have written books for O’Reilly about networking and TCP/IP and I did used to have primary technical responsibility for a digital phone network with 70 switches and several thousand stations. So I changed my selection to the fourth choice, which simply indicated that I knew quite a lot about this stuff. But having chosen even #4, it would have been mortifying for me to have to call tech support for help.

Now if only I could figure out how to delete voicemails on my cell phone. I need a teenager to help me, I guess. I’ve also been thinking about sending my first ever SMS.

16:08 – We really are living in a rain forest. That thunderstorm that just blew through here dumped another 3.2 inches (8.1 cm) of rain on us, and it’s still raining. That’s close to half a meter of rain in the last five weeks, or about 10 cm per week.

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Friday, 7 September 2012

09:19 – Things are slow at work, so Barbara decided to take today off. Her parents are starting their move this weekend from their house to the retirement facility. For now, they’ll be moving into a guest apartment temporarily while the one they’ll ultimately be in is cleaned and painted. We’ve been accumulating boxes for the move, which is no problem at all here, with science kit component shipments arriving frequently. Barbara just hauled a load over to her parents’ house, where she’ll spend the day helping them get some of their stuff packed up and ready to move tomorrow.

Science kit sales have been erratic. Some days, we sell only one or two science kits, or even none. Other days, we sell five or eight kits. As of now, we’re still in relatively good shape on biology and forensic science kits, but we’re down to half a dozen finished chemistry kits in stock. Fortunately, we have a dozen more that just need to be boxed up and 30 more after that in progress. The biology kits worry me a bit. We have about 20 of those in stock, but once we run dry we have to start from scratch to build a new batch. That means making up and bottling a bunch of chemicals and so on. So I guess we’d better get started on a new batch of at least 30. I’ll probably make up and bottle sufficient chemicals for 60 kits and leave the extra 30 sets of chemicals in stock when we build a batch of 30 kits. That makes it a lot quicker to build another batch of 30.

I remember the first time we had an order from the same person for both a chemistry kit and a biology kit. That happens relatively frequently, but I thought it might be a while before one person ordered all three of the kits in one order. That happened this morning for the first time. I just thought how I’d have reacted as a teenager or even an adult to have all three of these kits show up at the door. It’d be like Christmas in September.

10:39 – Wow. Drew Peterson convicted of murder on literally zero evidence. I haven’t really followed the case, but my sense of it from what I’ve read is that he probably is guilty. But this prosecution violates what had until now been a sacrosanct principle of criminal law: hearsay evidence is not evidence at all. The state had to pass a special law to allow hearsay to be admitted in Peterson’s trial. Otherwise, the prosecution had no case. Since the beginnings of our legal system, it’s been a fundamental precept that “better 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted”. It is up to the state to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. There is nothing about this case but reasonable doubt, but in its determination to convict this guy no matter what, the prosecution (i.e., the government) managed to get the rules changed. This fundamental violation of legal principles may come back to haunt us. It’s a small step from this to the Star Chamber.

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Thursday, 6 September 2012

08:52 – For about 20 years, I’ve been ordering bulk pipe tobacco from Craig Tarler at Cornell & Diehl. I order five pounds at a time, which lasts me a few months. I store the gallon ziplock bags in the freezer. So, the other day I finished off a bag and pulled a new bag out of the freezer. It felt light, so I tossed it on the shipping balance, which indicated only 14.4 ounces. The empty bag with label weighed 0.5 ounces, so that meant there was only 13.9 ounces of tobacco in the bag, more than 2 ounces short. The remaining bags weighed 15.1, 14.8, and 15.3 ounces.

I’ve been dealing with Craig for 20 years, since soon after he opened his business in 1990, so it never even crossed my mind that the shortage was intentional. I figured his balance must be miscalibrated, so I called yesterday and asked to speak with Craig. He wasn’t available, so I told the guy who’d answered the phone about the problem. He apologized profusely and said they’d ship replacement tobacco. I thought no more about it.

Then, this morning, I fished an email out of my trash folder. It was a forwarded message saying that Craig had died recently. Wow. I’d never met Craig, and spoke to him on the phone only every few months, but it still feels like I’ve lost a friend. Craig was never in a hurry when I spoke to him. We’d finish our business in the first couple minutes, and then talk for 10 or 15 minutes more about stuff in general. Craig was the last blending tobacconist left in the United States. He had thousands of individual customers like me, who ordered their pipe tobacco directly from C&D. He also supplied most of the independent tobacconists in the US, both with his standard blends and with custom blends made only for them. He produced many fine tobaccos, and was a wonderful person. He’ll be missed.

16:31 – Like many scientists, I’ve tried to take some time today to look over the results released yesterday by the ENCODE group. I’m seldom overwhelmed and intimidated by a new science paper, but this group of 30 related papers is difficult to take in, to say the least. Someone said this was the greatest breakthrough in genomics in 20 years, which I don’t think exaggerates the importance of this work.

Briefly, this massive project relates to so-called “junk DNA”, which I’ve always preferred to think of as “dark DNA”. It always seemed presumptuous to me to assume that because we don’t know what some parts of the genome do they must do nothing at all. Some evidence that that is not the case has been around for 20 years, and every year there’s more added. Until now, things related to dark DNA were murky, to say the least. This consortium of scientists has at least opened the door to starting to understand what dark DNA does. Until now, we’ve known that small parts of dark DNA–it was never really very clear which small parts–had a bearing on many things that are not well understood. Still, the assumption remained that the vast majority of dark DNA was just flotsam in the genome. As of now, we have strong evidence that the majority of “junk DNA” is anything but. It appears that at least 80% of what most people formerly called junk DNA is in fact biologically functional and important. Which begs the question, if 80% is important, why not assume that all or nearly all is equally important.

This really is a breakthrough, with potential implications for everything from cancer to Alzheimers to many other diseases that have genetic components. The work hasn’t really yet begun, but at least these scientists have shown us good places to start looking. Now, if we only had enough scientists working on all of the potential paths.

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Wednesday, 5 September 2012

09:46 – I’m still hard at work on designing new science kits for later this year and early next, not to mention roughing out documentation for them. For the time being, we’re in reasonably good shape in terms of finished-goods inventory on all three kits, although we’ll start another batch of chemistry kits this coming weekend.

Meanwhile, I’m staying indoors as much as possible. It’s miserable outside. The high temperatures haven’t been bad–typically mid- to upper-80’s (~ 30 to 32C)–but the humidity is hideous. Since the first of August, our rain gauges have registered more than 14 inches (~ 36 cm) of rain. (The official total at the airport is 10.32 inches, but we’ve gotten more.) Just as I do every summer, I think about how nice it would be to live in a cooler climate.

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Tuesday, 4 September 2012

09:53 – Kit sales have slowed down, but I’m not sure if it’s just the holiday weekend or the fact that most kids are back in school now. We sold one Saturday, two Sunday, one yesterday, and two so far today, for a total of six kits or 1.5 per day for the month to date. Of course, we’re only three+ days into the month, so even a couple more kits today could take us up to 2/day or 60/month average. My original goal for calendar year 2012, our first full year, was 250+ total kits, which we’ll make easily. Next year, I’d like to see us do 500+. Having two more kits available should help us make that.

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Monday, 3 September 2012

09:20 – Yesterday I finally got around to building a new system on the Intel Atom motherboard I ordered a couple of months ago. Ultimately, that’ll be Barbara’s new system, but for now it’s sitting in the den next to my end table. I want to get the kinks worked out before I move it to her office and reclaim the hex-core beast she’s using now. For an extremely low-end processor, the Atom does pretty well. It probably doesn’t hurt that it’s a quad-core model. I installed 4 GB of RAM, which is the most that it accepts. Performance for web browsing and email is snappy, and that’s all Barbara does most of the time. It’s running Kubuntu 12.04 LTS. Just for the heck of it, I may blow that away and take a look at Linux Mint.

We’re still getting stuff cleaned up upstairs and moving components downstairs, but we’ve already made a lot of progress. Barbara wants to have the library/living room cleaned out today, as well as the foyer. We’ll get that done, except that there’ll be a stack of boxes in the foyer awaiting pickup tomorrow by USPS.

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Sunday, 2 September 2012

13:01 – Today, in conjunction with Barbara’s regular weekly house-cleaning, we’re going to get some of the stuff cleared out from upstairs and moved downstairs. The problem is, UPS keeps showing up at the front door with deliveries of components, most recently Friday, when they delivered another 50 kilos or so. I just stack the boxes in the library, which adjoins the foyer. Eventually, most or all of the floor space in the library is covered with stacked boxes, as is the case now. Fortunately, Barbara has a sense of humor about these things, but eventually, to preserve domestic tranquility, I need to get the stuff moved downstairs to the component inventory area. Come to think of it, it might not be a bad idea to ask UPS to deliver bulk stuff downstairs to start with. Then I could just leave the boxes stacked down there until I had time to get the stuff moved and organized.

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Saturday, 1 September 2012

08:38 – We made the 31 August deadline to start shipping forensic science kits.

Barbara had a relaxing day off yesterday, and was delighted when she arrived home to find the new deck complete. We downsized significantly. The old deck was 16×20 feet (about 4.9 x 6.1 meters). The new one is 10×12 feet (about 3 x 3.7 meters). That’s big enough, because we very seldom have more than one or at most two other couples over. Mainly, Barbara just wanted room for a gas grill and and small table and chairs. She likes to sit out on the deck and read during pleasant weather.

I spent some time yesterday roughing out a couple of new science kits. I’ll have to write manuals for both, which will be the major time commitment. Mary Chervenak suggested our next kit should be one that focuses on advanced biology, with an emphasis on recombinant DNA, gene manipulation, and so on. That’s tempting from an intellectual point of view, and I suppose we could position it as an AP Biology kit, but I have to think through all the implications before we proceed with it. But it’s definitely a candidate, along with AP chemistry, first-year physics, earth science, and physical science (which is basically a combined introduction to biology, chemistry, and physics).

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