08:20 – We’re hoping that today will be the first “normal” day in a long time. No doctor appointments, no unexpected trips over to Barbara’s parents’ place. We’ll see. Barbara and Frances both need a break from the constant turmoil.
As of this morning, we have two BK01 biology kits, three CK01A chemistry kits, and zero FK01 forensic science kits in stock, and we got an order overnight for a biology kit. Fortunately, I spent yesterday building kit subassemblies. At this point, we have everything needed to build 14 more BK01 biology kits, 8 more CK01A chemistry kits, and half a dozen FK01 forensic science kits, which should be enough to carry us into next month.
I’m also issuing purchase orders, and they’re typically considerably larger than the ones I issued in the past. For example, we buy pocket magnifiers and alligator clip leads from one of our wholesalers. The last time I did a PO to them, I ordered 100 pocket magnifiers and 200 each of the black and red alligator clip leads. I issued a new PO to them yesterday, ordering 300 pocket magnifiers and 500 each of the alligator clip leads.
I have no clue how many kits we’re going to sell this year. In the first half of this month, we sold more kits than we sold in the first three months of 2012 combined. Annualizing that yields a very scary number. I guess all we can do is keep building kits as fast as we can, and hope we can keep up with demand.
Speaking of which, Brian Jepson, our O’Reilly/MAKE editor called yesterday just to touch base. During the conversation, I said, “I hope you’re not going to tell me you want another book out of us.” He said, “Whenever you’re ready.” I told him that Barbara really wanted to focus on kits, but I’d mention it to her. When I did that this morning, she said it was up to me. She knows I like doing books. But she also said that her strong preference was to spend our time doing kits rather than a new book. As she said, we’re already covered up just doing kit stuff, so doing a new book would end up costing us a lot of money, not to mention disappointing would-be kit customers when we can’t meet demand. So it looks like we’re not going to do another book any time soon.
12:41 – Well, another order for an FK01 forensic science kit just came in, so our stock status on those just went from zero to minus one. I mailed the woman who ordered the FK01 kit to say we couldn’t ship it until the day after tomorrow and that we’d be happy to refund her payment if she wished. Fortunately, she’d bought one of our other kits some time ago and was very happy with it, so she was willing to wait.
I have everything I need to build another 15 FK01 kits, except I have only five FK01 small parts bags and I’m completely out of Kastle-Meyer reagent and Dragendorff reagent bottles. I made up enough Dragendorff reagent for 30 sets, but I have to make up the Kastle-Meyer reagent this afternoon or tomorrow. That involves refluxing a concentrated solution of potassium hydroxide and phenolphthalein over zinc metal to reduce the phenolphthalein to phenolphthalin, which takes a while. I’ll make up enough of that for 15 or so kits, because the solution is fairly unstable. We use amber glass bottles, add some zinc powder, and store the bottles refrigerated to prevent the solution from oxidizing, but even so it’s unwise to make up more than we expect to ship in a couple months.
Speaking of which, I need to do something about how I ship kits. In the past, we might have kits sitting waiting for pickup only two or three days a week. Nowadays, it’s a rare day that we don’t have kits waiting for pickup. The mailman generally arrives mid- to late-afternoon but when a substitute is doing the route he or she sometimes arrives before 9:00 a.m. I don’t want to leave kits sitting on the front porch, and I can’t hear the doorbell when I’m working in my lab. Colin barks every few minutes at a passing dog or even a person walking down the street. I can hear him barking from my lab, but I’d soon be exhausted if I ran back upstairs every time he barked.
I could drive out to the post office and drop off kits, but that’s several miles round-trip. Also, oddly, if I drop off a Regional Rate box at the counter, they charge an extra $0.75 postage. Talk about adding insult to injury. Driving to the post office is time and money, even before they add the extra $0.75 per box. So I think what I’m going to do is start moving boxes that are ready to ship to my Trooper and go off driving around the neighborhood looking for a mail truck. Then I can just hand the boxes to the letter carrier. That’ll take a lot less time than driving to the post office, and the letter carrier doesn’t charge the extra $0.75/box.
14:17 – Just call me Baldrick, because I have come up with a truly Cunning Plan. Last Sunday, Barbara and I did a Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul. I mentioned the stability problem with Kastle-Meyer reagent to Paul, and he suggested nitrogen-packing the bottles. The problem with that is that there’s no convenient source of pure nitrogen other than bottles, which are relatively expensive and dangerous to have around. (In college, I once saw the results of a full-size compressed gas bottle that had fallen over and broken off the valve. Instant rocket. The bottle crashed through two concrete-block walls and severely damaged a third.)
So I focused my Gigantic Brain™ on the problem, and came up with Cunning Plan A. Oxygen concentrators like the one Barbara’s dad has extract nearly all of the oxygen from ordinary air, leaving only nitrogen with tiny percentages of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and noble gases. Used concentrators are readily available and inexpensive. There’s a big market for them from people who need oxygen for stuff like micro-welding of jewelry and so on. I though that perhaps I could simply reverse the functioning of a used oxygen concentrator to collect the nitrogen and discard the oxygen. I was actually about to start searching google for used oxygen concentrators.
Then I was struck by Cunning Plan B, a great improvement over CP A. Barbara buys six-packs of Dust-Off canned “air” at Costco. The contents of the can are actually 100.0% 1,1-difluoroethane, which is a refrigerant and is essentially inert. It’s also denser than air. So, I’m going to fill the Kastle-Meyer reagent bottles normally, add a few grains of zinc dust to stabilize them against any oxygen that happens to remain, and then flush the bottles with canned air before capping them. Since I’ll also store them refrigerated at near 0C, their shelf life unopened should be at least a year and probably much more. There just won’t be anything in that bottle to sustain oxidation. I’ll put a few dated bottles aside and open and test one every six months or so to get a better idea of actual shelf life.
Hoping y’all get a normal day down there today. Those are very valuable during times like this.
Snowing steadily here now; southern areas of Nova Anglia and the Vampire State (which just put out some nice new firearms laws which will immediately stop all gun violence in that state, thank God, and serve as a shining example to the rest of Our Nation…etc.) got blasted a little this morning snarling up traffic and causing team members down in beautiful scenic East Fishkill to have to work from home.
Should be a fun drive for me today, observing all the morons who slide off into the median due to “excessive speed.”
Hi Robert,
I’m a young buck from North Dakota and just wanted to say that I found “Building the Perfect PC” to be an excellent resource during my recent build (first ever). It was a great experience and is something I definitely will do again in the future. Thank you for making your knowledge and experience available.
Sincerely,
Josh
…and I haven’t watched it, of course, but I understand Mr. Soetro has just issued sweeping executive fiat orders concerning firearms in Our Nation. Thanks, Barry; you just sent firearms and associated products and services sales through the roof again, if that is even possible.
Run some wire and put a second doorbell chime in or near the lab.
Congratulations on your first build. Barbara and I aren’t doing much PC building these days. We’re far too busy doing science kits.
Yeah, I thought about doing that or installing a wireless doorbell, but either is A Project that I just don’t have time for.
If I still had the Panasonic KSU, I’d install a doorphone and set it up to ring to the cordless phone I carry around all the time.
Our house is built in such a way (circa 1830) that anytime someone comes to either the front or back doors we either know about it almost immediately anyway, and/or the mutt barks if it’s someone he doesn’t know. The cats also go on full alert. Hell, we also know almost immediately if someone shows up at neighbors’ houses. Good luck to any wannabe burglars in our little lakeside ‘hood, and good luck also to any home invasion clowns who will likely be met by large canines accompanied by a hail of gunfire. Regardless of what that moron and his enablers and stooges in Mordor and NYC decide to enact.
Speaking of pooter builds, our son is building one from scratch for his gaming and media interests and using your book plus sites like Tom’s Hardware and Xtreme Tech and having lotsa fun. Of course he’s 27 but still digs the games and movies. And I will probably do some combination of build and cannibalization of parts, as I found out yesterday my Windows motherboard is, in fact, toast, but the hard drive is good. That has Windows 7 Ultimate on it plus a bunch of stuff OFD was too lazy and forgetful to back up properly and the bugger ought to know better by now.
So I will back up the stuff I wanna keep to an external 3TB drive and then either install the recovered drive in another machine as a second drive and dual-boot the box to either Windows or RHEL. Or I may just back it up and format it and put RHEL on it as is. Leaving us the Ubuntu 12.10 desktop w/16GB RAM as our main machine and then we have a Windows 7 netbook and a (currently but soon to be upgraded) Vista laptop, and a real old laptop running Xubuntu 12.10, amazingly, on 1GB of RAM.
“I don’t want to leave kits sitting on the front porch, and I can’t hear the doorbell when I’m working in my lab. Colin barks every few minutes at a passing dog or even a person walking down the street. I can hear him barking from my lab, but I’d soon be exhausted if I ran back upstairs every time he barked.”
What about an el cheapo miniature camera that can remotely monitor the front porch?
In HS shop class one of the compressed gas cylinders fell over, and did much the same thing. Short work of the cinder block wall, and plowed a trough the length of the football field before fetching up in the chain link fence. It still had enough forward motion to severely bend the fencing. I believe it was acetylene, but it could easily have been nitrogen. I was very impressed at the damage caused. I’ve seen propane tanks become instant rockets, as well.
Be careful buying more than one can of Dust-Off. I’ve heard that sales are controlled in some areas due to “huffing”. Note, nothing to do with reading the Huffington Post.
Yes, The Huffington Post can cause far more brain damage.
AKA the Puff Ho?
This will probably be interesting to some folks here. Over and over, I see forum entries, where mission-critical computer systems must be up 100% of the time, or else cause havoc. But the sys admins somehow have in their minds that auto updates are needed. My reference specifically relates to automation for radio stations, but I am sure it applies to others. Most people I respect maintain that audio playout machines should never face the Internet, and should never have any updates performed unless something actually breaks. But at least a couple times a month, the forum I keep up with, has some crazy soul who thinks updates are necessary, report that his station is down because an update broke something—usually the driver for the soundcard. And this is Linux, not Windows.
It is kernel updates that almost universally break things. I have had that happen myself, although I am not administering mission-critical systems. But here’s the point of this post, which I did not realize: CentOS kernel updates won’t break drivers.
“The CentOS Upstream Distributor has developed a technology that allows kernel updates to be performed (within certain well-defined limits) *without* breaking binary compatibility with third-party kernel drivers. As a result, kernel updates on Broadcast Appliance do *not* break the ASI [soundcard] (nor any other complying) driver. You can find the technical details at:
http://dup.et.redhat.com/presentations/DriverUpdateProgramTechnical.pdf
I am doing all my experiments in Ubuntu, but this looks good. Guess there is a reason Red Hat is considered the best. That still does not mean to me that updates are at all needed to mission-critical systems that do not face the Internet and are not broken.
There has also been some discussion about 48,000hz frequency rate vs. 44,100. A lot of the old guard says why does one need a frequency rate higher than CD quality? Well, it turns out that the last link in the chain of making FM transmission all digital, is the audio input to the transmitter. So far, no transmitter manufacturer provides an AES/EBU input connection (but one is working on it). When they finally do, in order to pass the full frequency range the transmitter is capable of, the input frequency rate has to be at least 48khz. A lot of the more progressive folks have been using 48k and the Rivendell automation system defaults to 48k. 48k is the DVD/video standard, and it looks like there will eventually be a real reason to abandon 44.1khz for 48k in the radio realm.
Correct me if I’m wrong, RBT, but you’ve claimed that your dog is smarter than you. You’ve also stated, IIRC, that you have or had red hair.
Hate to break it to you, but Colin is The Brain. You’re Pinky.
I never said that. I said that Colin is smarter than some people. Yes, I used to have red hair, but now it’s faded to a kind of sandy blond.
Um, I wouldn’t call it sandy blonde. More like snow white… 🙂
One of the reasons I’m not getting a BC when I get my dog later this year is that I don’t want a pet that’s smarter than me. Likely I’ll get a beagle or boxer.
Well, yah, but without that counterfactual recollection the joke wouldn’t work, so just play along.
Greg, the two breeds of dog you named come in right down the way-stoopid end of the spectrum of canine intelligence. Now, sure, you don’t want something that’s so intelligent that it tends towards hyper, neurotic or psychotic unless you have a real need for that much intelligence. On the other hand, you don’t want something like a boxer or beagle, where at the end of your third year of house-breaking them, their response is still “Duh! What? Do I know you?”
Bear in mind that one of the major reasons dogs and people were put on this planet is so that we’d each ensure that the other gets sufficient exercise. If you’re on the heart-attack end of the scale, you don’t want your dog insisting on too much exercise, too intensively. Also, if your dog will live in an urban or suburban environment, then HUGE is bad, just because. On the other hand, “miniature” or “toy” are also bad, as their ancestors have been selected with small size as the only major criterion, and stupid often runs with small on the runt end of the scale.
You can find a tabulation of canines by intelligence at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligence_of_Dogs.
As a general rule or at least tendency, dogs whose ancestors worked closely with people score higher. That tendency includes herding dogs, retrievers, pointers and setters, and some terriers. Hounds and fighting dogs are at the other end of the spectrum.
As you can see, standard poodles, a retrieving breed, are second only to border collies in intelligence as assessed there. You don’t have to give them the frou-frou hair-do. That arose when owners would trim them so they could swim more effectively. Short back’n’sides all over will do fine, and let them better cope with Adelaide summers.
Poodles have a major advantage in that they don’t readily shed the dander (skin flakes) that make some people “allergic to dogs”. This also applies to a couple of their popular cross-breeds – labradoodles and cockapoos, whose other ancestry is up at the high end of the scale too.
There’s other not-large possibilities as well, derived from herding dogs. One is the Shetland sheepdog, or sheltie. Like Shetland ponies, a full-sized power-plant in a small package.
There’s also corgies, notably the Pembroke Welch Corgi. Intelligent, much more to them than a first glance would indicate. You’d be in good company if you kept a corgi, provided you didn’t mind the occasional queen joke.
Do remember that Australia’s and other nation’s canine gene pools have been limited, and long-separated. How dog breeds behave overseas, or their physical strengths and weaknesses, will not necessarily be perfectly reflected in Australia, and vise versa.
I’d skip the Australian Cattle Dog, or blue heeler, as a pet. They are intelligent and loyal, but there’s a bit too much bite in their heeling instincts, they tend to be a one-man or small group dog, and they are a little difficult to convince of the desirability of house-breaking.
I’d also definitely skip the Rottweiler. I’ve known some wonderful Rotties, but there’s something in the breed which can just snap, totally unpredictably. Even worse, they have a strong prey drive, and form packs easily. Worse again, the breed has been contaminated by selection and cross-breeding as pig dogs, big strong fierce killers; then those genes have been re-introduced into the domestic pool. There is no way to guarantee in advance that any particular Rottie won’t be the one to eat grandma or tear the little girl next door apart.
Thanks, I’m still thinking about it. I have a friend who breeds miniature schnauzers and will go over this stuff with her.
I don’t agree about boxers. We had a boxer when I was a kid and she was so smart she did the pure maths assignments I didn’t understand for me, like Lebesgue integration. She was a bit of an intellectual snob, and didn’t approve of me doing computer science – she thought that was “trade” in the upper class English sense of the word. She said I should concentrate on theoretical physics and pure maths, but I told her I had to eat so computer science it was.
Go with the BC. They may be ranked #1 and poodles #2, but there’s a world of difference. The actual rankings should have been something like:
1. Border Collie
1001. Poodle
1002. German Shepherd
1003. Golden Retriever
…
In my estimation, BC’s rank right up there with humans, chimpanzees, and dolphins as the most intelligent mammals. I mean, BCs are capable not just of deductive logic, but inductive logic.
I don’t know if I’m fit enough for a BC, or want to take one for walks six times a day.
Just take the BC and a tennis ball to the top of a long downgrade. Throw the ball down the slope and then wait for the BC to come back with it.
I think it’s more likely that the company making the canned air will add a chemical to the otherwise pure stuff to make it less attractive to “huffers.”
“Guess there is a reason Red Hat is considered the best. That still does not mean to me that updates are at all needed to mission-critical systems that do not face the Internet and are not broken.”
The general consensus seems to be that you want RHEL for mission-critical enterprise-level infrastructures, which is what we have here at work. We do not automatically do kernel updates and we’ve disabled a bunch of other stuff, such as Yum. CentOS is actually running a cluster we only support via hands-and-feet stuff but it’s not the current version and we do watch CentOS versions closely to see what they do before upgrading any RHEL systems, and in the past eighteen months I have done only one such upgrade on a cluster.
I would certainly not bother with automatic updates on a mission-critical system not facing the net and given that everything was working properly already. Given budget and other constraints, however, I would have a “sandbox” to test those sorts of things accordingly before applying them to our biz machines.
The CentOS and Scientific Linux communities refer to RH as the “TUV” or “upstream vendor.” If I was running my own biz I’d use one or the other of those two distros.
I bought a six-pack of 12 oz Dust-Off at Costco (or maybe it was BJ’s). It is labelled to say that inhaling it is a Bad Thing, and that it contains a “bitterant” to discourage such use.
And now I saw our host’s second entry and feed stupid. But I can edit!!!!
I do wonder how, if the contents of the can are essentially inert, they can make anyone high.
A lot depends on your situation. The catch with BCs: They require a lot of attention. Ideal for our host, perhaps, because he is always home. However, these are not dogs that you can leave alone for any length of time, at least, not when they are young. They will find ways to entertain themselves.
If you can and will spend lots of time with the dog, giving it “work” to do, then BCs are indeed very good dogs. Our host may be just a bit biased, there are also other good breeds. Really depends on your situation…
The Dust-Off ingredient would be a good solvent except that it boils too easily for most purposes. Inhaling it is thus in the same category as glue-sniffing. Good for people who like dissolving their brains, which isn’t even most junkies.
By the way, speaking of boiling point, it’s high enough that a bit of pressure keeps it liquid (so the can holds a lot of it), but low enough that it comes out of the tube as gas. That’s why the can loses pressure after a while of use, and why to restore the pressure (or to, uh, turbocharge it) you can dunk the can in hot water.
By blocking the flow of oxygen to the brain?
Yep. It gets people high, as in anoxia at 10,000 or 15,000 feet.
Brad wrote:
“If you can and will spend lots of time with the dog, giving it “work” to do, then BCs are indeed very good dogs. Our host may be just a bit biased, there are also other good breeds. Really depends on your situation…”
I’ve decided that I really don’t want a BC. I adore them, but it seems to me that looking after one would be a full time job, and I don’t want a pet that will take over my life. I don’t want a completely set and forget pet, but I don’t want one that will blackmail me into playing with it/walking it/etc all the time, “or I’ll make you regret it.”
The Schnauzer breeder I mentioned says she only allows her dog in the kitchen, not anywhere else. I’d consider allowing a dog in the bedroom, but certainly not on the bed. Probably just in its own sleeping basket. As well as a Boxer (which I’m reasonably familiar with, having had one in the late Sixties and Seventies) or Beagle I’m thinking a bit about a Corgi (Long Live Her Majesty!) as relatives have one and it seems quite nice.
I have an English Cocker Spaniel (“Lady”) who just turned 10. She walks 2.5 miles with me, usually five nights a week. Lady is fairly hyper, unless asleep, and wants constant love and attention. And treats. Did I mention treats? My nickname for her is treat-girl.
And when Lady gets upset with me, she sneaks off later and pees in my closet. Yes, quite smart and vindictive at times. Lady sleeps in a crate in my study, otherwise she would be all over the house. She cannot jump on the bed anymore since her hips are starting to give out but she dearly loves to sleep there between me and the wife.
Lady loves the wife unconditionally. She never pees in the wife’s closet.
And is the guardian of the neighborhood. Nobody goes by the front door without her barking extensively at them. Or at a leaf. And still tries to run the squirrels down. She has figured out how to hit the doggie door at about 15-20 mph by sliding around the corner – makes a tremendous crash but she loves it and the squirrels know that she is coming.
From what everyone is saying about dogs as pets they’re almost as bad as teenagers… 🙁
And the last thing I want is a dog that yaps at everyone and everything.
Get a cat.
Just because I’m dismayed that dogs may be nearly as bad as teenagers doesn’t mean I want a soulless, parasitic cat, that would be far worse than any teenager.
Here’s a cat doing what a cat does best, with a dog approaching to stop it:
http://www.holygreencow.com/theycamepages/wasntmyfaultmum.html
I think you are confused about the dog selection process. If you choose a dog, you’re doing it all wrong. The best dog my wife ever had was the one that chose her. She was browsing at an antique shop with her parents. The antique shop had a couple of puppies that had been rescued. One of the puppies kept sneaking out of the pen to follow my wife around the antique shop.
So if you’re going to get a dog, let the dog choose you. Whether it’s a rescued dog or a dog from a breeder, let the dog choose you.
I agree.
Although Barbara did pick Colin, whose name at the time was Eddie. When we arrived, a couple of the puppies had already been adopted. The mother had a cluster of puppies surrounding her, with one off to the side. The owner said that Eddie was sad because his favorite sister, Dora, had just been adopted. So Barbara went over and picked up Eddie to console him. There’s a picture of him right after she picked him up here:
http://www.ttgnet.com/daynotes/2011/2011-17.html#Wed
He sure looks cute. I’ll keep what you’ve both said in mind. I’m going to ask the Schnauzer breeder I know to make time for me to ask the 50 questions I have already.