09:13 – Our overnight low was 31.0F (-0.6C), not much under freezing, but enough to make sure that any bugs that somehow survived the previous night froze to death unless they were deep underground.
A lot of people scoffed at my comment that Windows is on its way out. All you need to do to verify that that’s true is go look at some screenshots of Windows 8. This is not an OS intended for desktops and notebooks. Microsoft must be fully aware that the Windows franchise is nearing its end. They’re trying to reposition Windows as an OS for mobile devices as well as traditional PCs, kind of the “Windows Everywhere” redux. It’s not going to work any better this time than it did the last time. If Microsoft is smart, they’ll realize that Windows is the past. They need to get their real cash cows–Office and Outlook–ported to run on Linux, Chrome, Android, and all the other Linux-like OSs. They haven’t done that so far because they’re convinced that Windows and Office support each other. That’s true so far, but the big danger is that the world will leave both behind. What Microsoft should really be aiming at is corporations continuing to run Exchange Server as a backend for Outlook running everywhere. Trying to keep the OS business is likely to cost them both the OS and app business.
I thought November would be a very slow month for science kit sales, and so it’s turned out. Still, slow is relative. In November 2011, we shipped maybe half a dozen kits total. In November 2012, we’ll ship four or five times that number. Of course, we now have three different kits available, versus only one last year. Still, my master plan, such as it is, had us shipping twice as many kits in 2012 as in 2011, and twice as many kits in 2013 as in 2012. It doesn’t look like either of those goals will be difficult to meet. In fact, we’ve already far exceeded our goal for 2012. We plan to add at least two and possibly three new kits for 2013, which should help us make the 2013 goal.