Month: April 2013

Wednesday, 10 April 2013

08:38 – Barbara is taking the day off and driving up to Mt. Airy with a friend. They’re going to spend the day visiting antique stores and doing other girl stuff. They’ll have a nice day for it, with no chance of rain and a forecast high of 84F (29C). Yesterday’s official high was also 84, although it actually touched 90F (32C) here.

Yesterday I had to mail a replacement for a broken Petri dish. As usual, I sent that first-class mail rather than Priority Mail. Sending parcels by first-class mail is less expensive, although it’s limited to packages of no more than 13 ounces and doesn’t offer tracking. But the USPS Click-and-Ship website lets me generate postage labels only for Express Mail and Priority Mail, so for first-class parcels I use regular stamps. The postage for the package I sent yesterday was $2.41 (versus $5.15 for Priority Mail). Five first-class stamps are $2.30, so I had to add a sixth, for a total of $2.76.

I was already on the USPS website to find out how much postage was required, so I decided just to order a roll of lower-denomination stamps. They had rolls of a hundred $0.20 stamps for $20 plus $1.25 shipping, so I decided to order two rolls. I added them to my cart and tried to check out. Everything seemed to be going fine. I entered the CVN for the credit card number I have on file for them and clicked the Submit Order button. It came back to the previous page and displayed a message in red that said I hadn’t entered my telephone number, which was required. Nowhere on that page was a field for telephone number. Geez. I guess I’ll just pick up a roll of $0.20 stamps the next time I’m at the post office.

The taxes are finished, although I won’t mail them until the 15th. I plan to spend some time today cleaning up my lab and making up more solutions for kits.


12:09 – I see that a New York City councilwoman is pushing hard to get a law passed to make it illegal to buy “counterfeit” purses and watches. Not sell them, you understand. Buy them. And the law she proposes has teeth: up to a $1,000 fine and one year in jail. Geez.

So-called “counterfeit” consumer products are not a societal problem. If someone wants to buy a “counterfeit” purse or watch, whose business should that be? Certainly not the government’s. In effect, we have the government police doing the companies’ jobs for them, at public expense. If Louis Vuitton or Coach or Rolex is concerned about people buying and selling “counterfeits” of their products, it should be up to them to do the policing. Let them sue the sellers.

This is a civil matter, not a criminal one, unless the sellers are falsely (and convincingly) claiming to be selling the real product. If a seller offers a fake Coach purse for $100, for example, it’s clear to any reasonable person that this could not possibly be the genuine $1,500 Coach purse. It’s either fake or stolen. On the other hand, if the seller attempts to sell a fake Coach purse for $1,200, a reasonable person might believe it to be genuine. That’s fraud. Let the police concentrate on real crimes like fraud, not pseudo-crimes like violating someone’s copyright. And, before anyone mentions it, I am aware that there are times when fake products can indeed be a societal problem. Criminals regularly sell fake products that do matter–things like pharmaceuticals and aircraft fasteners and automotive brake pads–where lives are actually at stake. But no purchasing manager is going to buy a fake $50 aircraft bolt if the price is suspiciously low. Buyers of this type of item are being defrauded, and the sellers should be prosecuted on that basis, not for copyright violations.

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Tuesday, 9 April 2013

08:05 – Barbara and I had finished the other series we’d been watching, so we rotated series five of Mad Men and The L Word into the on-deck circle. Mad Men is as good as we remembered it to be; The L Word is excellent.

Who knew? Contrary to the opinion of some of my readers, who believe gays make up only 1% of the population, if you watch The L Word you’ll learn that nearly all single women in their 20’s and 30’s are either lesbians or thinking about becoming lesbians. And that women frequently switch teams.

Peggy: I was a lesbian in 1974.
Bette: Just 1974?
Peggy: Just 1974. That was all I needed.
Bette: Well, you know, that is what we refer to as a hasbian.

As is usual for Showtime series, women will enjoy the excellent cast and writing. But the series has something for us men, too: lots and lots of simulated sex and boobs.


Work on taxes continues, as does shipping kits.


14:33 – I finished the federal and state income tax returns. I am taking the rest of the day off.


15:02 – I just stumbled across this on YouTube. Pretty cool. The Left Banke doing Walk Away Renée 45 years after it charted. They don’t sound bad for old geezers performing live, either.

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Monday, 8 April 2013

13:41 – I’m still working on taxes. Grrrrrr. As is true every year, I find myself wishing that I could visit the graves of everyone who was responsible for creating state and federal income taxes, dig up the bodies, and urinate on them. In my fantasy, we all get one email a year from the federal and state governments, saying “just send in whatever you think is reasonable, if anything”. Instead, I have to waste lots of time complying with IRS and NC Department of Revenue record-keeping requirements and then waste lots more time getting that mass of data together at tax time, and then waste yet more time organizing it and running the numbers, all to find out how badly they’re going to rape us this year.

Oh, well. At least 2012 was an okay year, and 2013 is shaping up to be much better than 2012. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky. Our house is paid for, we have money in the bank, we have no debt other than a small car loan, and we don’t have to choose which bills to pay and which to put off paying or to lie awake nights worrying about money. There are an awful lot of people out there who wish they were in our shoes.


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Sunday, 7 April 2013

08:48 – We decided not to continue our subscription to Acorn TV beyond the 30-day free trial. There’s just not enough content there to make it worth our while. It’s not the price, which is only $3/month or $30/year. It’s the hassle of figuring out what’s on when on Acorn and keeping track of what we’ve watched on Acorn streaming versus what we’ve watched on Netflix streaming. If Acorn had any sense, they’d offer to merge their content with Netflix’s in return for a small monthly license payment, maybe $0.10/month per Netflix subscriber. Acorn would make more money without having to run its own streaming operation, and Netflix’s catalog would improve. My guess is that Acorn hasn’t done that because they have the rights to stream the material themselves but not to sub-license it. None of this would be a problem if the powers that be would just rationalize copyright, reducing it to one year at most and then putting everything into the public domain.

Colin has a new little friend. He now likes to visit Sophie, Kim’s five-month-old Yorkshire Terrier puppy. The two of them go tearing around in circles in Kim’s front yard, with Sophie chasing Colin and Colin trying to herd her. She’s fast for a little girl. The expression on his face the other day was priceless when Sophie ran between his front legs, underneath the length of him, and back out between his back legs. At first, Kim was afraid Sophie would get hurt playing roughly with Colin, but he’s very careful not to step on her. She’s about the size of Colin’s head, maybe four pounds or so, but she’s fearless. Periodically, the action stops when Colin goes into his herding crouch. Sophie walks over to him and they touch snouts. Then she reaches up and licks his nose.


11:30 – I see that the Portuguese government is on the verge of collapsing, which calls into question the Troika’s continuing bailout. If Portugal, like Italy, is unable to form a new government quickly, it’s likely that Draghi’s promised unlimited backstopping of Portugal’s sovereign bond yields will not be honored, thereby putting Portugal quickly into default. Germany is fed up with paying the bills of the southern tier, and at some point will simply refuse to continue doing so. Merkel wants the election this autumn out of the way first, but her voters are growing increasingly restless. At some point, the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down. It’s possible that Portugal will cause that to happen, but I think it’s more likely that Italy will be the straw that breaks the camel in half. An increasing number of economists are betting that Italy will be the first eurozone country to depart the euro, although Portugal, Spain, Cyprus, and Slovenia are also likely candidates. Greece, of course, is hanging onto the euro for dear life. Without the euro, Greece is completely toast. Of course, with the euro, Greece is also completely toast.

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Saturday, 6 April 2013

07:51 – Barbara and I were watching Inspector George Gently episodes last night. One of them starred a young Australian woman named Ebony Buckle, who performed two Celtic songs called Matty Groves and Silver Dagger. She has an extraordinary voice, classically trained, so I emailed her last night to ask if she has an album or MP3s available for purchase.

We’re doing the usual Saturday chores, and working on building kits.


08:45 – I just shipped a chemistry kit to fill an order that came in overnight. I always check to see the expected delivery date, so I can let the buyer know when to expect the kit to arrive. Here’s the information for this kit, shipped to the west coast.

PM-vs-XMThe kits usually ship in Priority Mail Regional-Rate Box B, except those to zone 8 (the west coast). For those, the larger PM Large Flat-Rate Box costs $15.30, versus $16.13 for the smaller RRB B, which also has a lower weight limit. It makes no sense, but I’m used to that. But the really weird thing here is the delivery dates. I could have sent this kit by Express Mail for $39.95, and it would arrive Tuesday. Or I can send it Priority Mail for $25 less and it’ll arrive Monday. Geez.


12:10 – This “natural” products crap has always annoyed me, but it’s getting worse. Just try finding plain old vitamin C tablets. I don’t want “natural” vitamin C tablets with rose hips or who knows what else crap in them. I want 100% all-artificial, pure white, plain old vitamin C tablets. They used to be widely available and cheap, but I can’t find them now, at least a reasonable price. I used to buy them in bulk at Costco. They don’t carry them now. I used to buy them at Walgreens. They don’t carry them now.

I checked the Walgreens web site this morning, and thought they still carried them. Their generic vitamin C tablets looked ordinary. White bottle with no flowers or leaves or other “organic” crap. They had bottles of 400 for $6 or two for $9. Barbara needed something at Walgreens anyway, so we drove over. They had bottles in stock, but for $10 each with no discount for multiples. I bought one bottle, just because we’re out of 500 mg vitamin C tablets and I need to make up some more packets of them quickly. Oh, yeah. The small print on the label mentioned rose hips. Oh, well, It’s not that having rose hips or whatever in there is a problem. It doesn’t interfere with the experiments. It’s just gratuitous.

When we got home, I got back on the Walgreens website and ordered ten more bottles for $45 total with free shipping. I guess 4,000 tablets will hold me for a while, even though our run rate on kits is increasing fast.

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Friday, 5 April 2013

09:25 – As of this morning, our April 2013 unit sales and revenue are already at 67% of total April 2012 numbers. That makes me nervous, because about 85% of April 2012 sales occurred in the second half of the month, leading into May, when the serious ramp-up started. Extending that out tells me that our ready-to-ship inventory may not be sufficient to last the month.

So I’m madly building more kits, less the parts that I don’t have. For now, that’s 50 mL and 100 mL polypropylene beakers, of which I have 600 each on order, and the thick cavity slides, of which I have 200 dozen on order. Building partial kits is dangerous, because in the past a boxed-up kit was always ready-to-ship. I’ll have to be very careful to label the stacks of semi-complete kits “Missing Beakers” or whatever to make sure that we don’t accidentally ship incomplete kits because we mistook them for finished kits.


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Thursday, 4 April 2013

09:01 – Interesting article in the paper this morning about the costs of various diseases. Dementia, including Alzheimer’s, is by far the most costly, at around $1,000/year for every man, woman, and child in the US. And no possibility of a cure. Neil Young’s lyrics kept running through my mind: “And once you’re gone, you can never come back, when you’re out of the blue and into the black.” People with profound dementia are in a very real sense brain-dead. Even if our medicinal chemists come up with a miracle cure, at best it will stop the progress of the disease. It won’t reverse the physical damage to the brains of people who already suffer from profound dementia. A person without a functioning brain is no longer really a person. The kindest thing we could do is euthanize them.

Work on kits continues.


15:40 – The weather around here this time of year is highly variable. Yesterday, for example, it was sunny and the high according to our thermometer was 74.3 F (23.5C). At this moment, it’s 36.4F (2.4C) and there’s frozen precipitation falling. And it’s of a sort that I don’t remember ever seeing before: snleet. Or perhaps slnow. It’s simultaneously snowing and sleeting.

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Wednesday, 3 April 2013

07:48 – The city of Stockton, California is declaring bankruptcy, driven under by the costs of government services, primarily pension and retiree health-care costs. It’s not the first, and won’t be the last, city or state government to find itself in that position. What we’re watching is just the early manifestations of a phenomenon that’s going to come back to bite us. Unions, particularly public-employee unions, have extracted promises to pay that are unsustainable. They would be unsustainable even in a good economy. In the bad-and-getting-worse economy we’re in now and likely to remain in for at least the next several decades, believing that these commitments will be met is delusional.

Here’s what I think is going to happen. Ultimately, all of these government pension and health-care promises will be broken, and all of them will be transferred to the existing Social Security and Medicare programs. Retirement and health-care programs for all federal, state, and local government employees–including military and congressional retirees, post office employees, and so on–will be folded into Social Security and Medicare, along with all resources that have been set aside to fund these separate programs. Nor will government programs be the only ones affected. Most or all private retirement programs will also be folded into the big tent of Social Security and Medicare. Ultimately, it’s not going to matter what you were promised. What you’re going to get is what everyone else gets: Social Security for a pension and Medicare for retiree health care. And that’s all.


14:05 – In breaking news, CBC has renewed Heartland for a seventh season.


I’ve always hated manual labor, and I despise getting sweaty. When I was a kid, my mother used to tell people that after he’d had a bath and a change of clothes my brother could walk out the back door, stand on the porch for 30 seconds, turn around, and come back in filthy. I, on the other hand, could play all day in a mud puddle and come back in cleaner than when I’d started.

So what I’ve been doing this morning, assembling chemical bags for the chemistry and biology kits, is not one of my favorite jobs. But at least I now have most of what I need to take our finished goods inventory on both kits to between 40 and 50 each. Except, of course, beakers. I was expecting those to arrive right around now, but when I talked to our supplier last week she told me they’d not gotten them in as expected and that she hoped they’d arrive this week. Oh, well. We have a dozen or so of each kit in stock, which’ll hold us for some time. If the delay gets much longer, I can always cancel the beaker order and get them from one of our other suppliers that does have them in stock.

And I’ve changed plans for the antibiotic test papers that we are including in the life science kits. Originally, I planned to run 8.5×11″ sheets of chromatography paper through one of our laser printers to cover the paper with edge-to-edge labeling in a small font: “SUL” for sulfadimethoxine, “NEO” for neomycin, and so on. The problem is, running that paper through the printer changes its absorption characteristics, and what’s worse it changes them unpredictably. I’d done some testing on an unprinted sheet (which absorbed about 8 mL of solution) and made calculations accordingly. Each sheet is about 600 square centimeters, and I wanted a concentration of 100 micrograms per square centimeter. It was easy enough to figure out how much solution I needed and of what concentration. Until I found out that apparently the fuser of the laser printer messes up the absorption characteristics of the paper. Crap.

So I went to Plan B. Costco sells 12×18″ sheets of construction paper. It’s acid-free and heavy weight. It’s also about a tenth the price of chromatography paper. At first, I ordered white construction paper, intending to trim it to 8.5X11″ and try running it through the laser printer to see if the fuser affected it. Then I realized that there was a potentially much easier solution. Instead of using the laser printer to label the different kinds of antibiotic test papers, I’ll simply use different colors of paper for different antibiotics. So I ordered three different colors. The minimum order from Costco was three 50-packs of each, which should be a lifetime supply of construction paper. I’ll have to test the paper to make sure that the dyes have no effect on bacterial growth, which I’m guessing they won’t.

Sometimes I wonder how Costco does it. The construction paper colors I bought cost $1.39 per 50-sheet pack, with a minimum order of three packs. So each of the three colors was $4.17, for a total of $12.51. That included free shipping. This paper isn’t light. IIRC, it’s 76-pound basis weight, so nine 50-papers of 12×18″ paper has some heft to it. I know UPS would charge me more than $12.51 just to ship that much weight. I’m sure Costco gets a better deal from UPS than I do, but that much better? And, to top it off, Costco didn’t combine the order. I ordered the nine packs yesterday. UPS just showed up with one of the three-packs a few minutes ago. The other two three-packs are supposed to arrive tomorrow. I can’t help thinking that Costco must have lost money on this transaction.

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Tuesday, 2 April 2013

08:41 – The penultimate episode of Heartland series six was broadcast Sunday evening. Yesterday morning, I BitTorrented the SD version, just in case. The HD version usually isn’t available until late Monday or early Tuesday morning. It’s available this morning, and I’m sucking it down as I write this. As always, to stay completely legal, I keep my upload speed set to 0.00 and just leech the torrent.

Unfortunately, this is the only way we can get the series in a timely manner. I do wish that the series producers would join the 21st century and sell HD copies of the series for immediate download. I’d have happily paid them, say, $15 for a license to do that, which is a whole lot more than they make from selling a DVD boxed set. Heck, I’d happily pay them $15 right now in advance for series seven. So would many other people, I suspect. The series is immensely popular, not just in Canada and the US, but in the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and elsewhere.


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Monday, 1 April 2013

07:46 – We finished the first quarter of 2013 with kit sales about 5.5 times those of Q1 2012. Of course, we’re now selling three major kit types, versus only one back then. Still, we’re far ahead of our original goal of a 2X increase in overall sales for 2013 over 2012.

And, although I never thought I’d find myself saying this, the only Cypriot leader with any sense appears to be its religious leader. Archbishop Chrysostomas II, who last week called for the Cypriot political leadership to refuse to kowtow to the EU and to depart the euro, has now called for the resignation of the Cypriot political leadership. And for Cyprus to depart the euro. This while, in an incredible irony, the Cypriot political leadership is now begging Greece (Greece!) to bailout Cyprus with a €2 billion loan. Greece! Good luck with that.


09:56 – Hmmm. Our new neighbors, Grandon and Shanee (shaw-nay; she’s part Shawnee), were pruning the maple tree in their front yard yesterday afternoon while I was walking Colin. As they stacked branches at the curb for pickup, I got to thinking that a tree-ring section might be a good thing to include in the life science kit. So I just went over and carried a nice-size branch back home. It’s roughly 1.5 meters long and ranges from about 5 to 7.5 cm in diameter, with at least a meter of the length usable for sections. I’m not sure if I’ll include a tree-ring section in the kit, but at least this way I have the raw material at hand.


14:55 – In a shocking development in the Cyprus crisis, senior Cypriot politicians are now being accused of moving their own assets abroad before the bailout/haircut/capital controls were announced. Apparently, dozens if not hundreds of individuals and accounts may be involved. A special three-judge panel has been created to look into these allegations. How could anyone believe that honorable politicians would use insider information to protect their own assets, knowing that everyone elses’ were going to be confiscated? Oh, wait.


16:00 – Netflix has really refined their suggestions of what we might like to watch. Not just the individual series, but the categories they sort them into. When I checked the Netflix streaming home page a few minutes ago, looking for new stuff we might like to watch, I was surprised to see a new category.

pissed-off-wives

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