Month: April 2014

10:05 – Among other things yesterday, I filled and capped several hundred bottles for biology kits. I’ll do several hundred more today.

First up is Seliwanoff’s Reagent Part A, which is simply a dilute solution of resorcinol (AKA 1,3-dihydroxybenzene or m-dihydroxybenzene). I had two liters made up, but I didn’t like the looks of it. When I made it up some time ago, it was colorless, indiscernible from water. It now has a very pale tan cast. Upon reflection, I realized that the other two isomers of this chemical, 1,3-dihydroxybenzene (AKA catechol or pyrocatechol) and 1,4-dihydroxybenzene (AKA hydroquinone), are both used in developers for silver halide black-and-white film and paper. As anyone who’s done black-and-white darkroom processing will remember, film and paper developers oxidize and turn brown as they age.

So I did a quick check and found that the Seliwanoff test worked properly with the tannish solution. Still, better safe than sorry, so I disposed of the aging solution and made up fresh.

12:00 – I just issued our first-ever response to an RFQ for someone who intends to buy our kits via purchase order. We’ve never sold on credit before, but I’m tired of turning down business. The exposure on this one isn’t huge, 30 chemistry kits ($5,220 worth) to a state 4-year college that has 20,000+ students. So I decided to offer them 30-day terms. I’ll do the same for other public and private institutions that appear credit-worthy. In other words, I won’t sell on credit to, say, the bankrupt Detroit public school system, but I’ll happily sell on 30-day terms to, say, Penn State University or Cal Tech.

We’ve sold a lot of kits to public and private high schools, community colleges, four-year colleges and universities, and various local, state, and federal government agencies, but always either via credit card or on a pro-forma invoice and pre-paid by check. The problem with that is that it’s a major hassle for the would-be buyers, who simply want to get their purchasing departments to buy the stuff. Many of them simply can’t do it other than by purchase order, so we end up missing out on hundreds of kit sales.

I’m fully aware that we’ll probably end up writing off a few bad debts or submitting them to a collection agency, but as long as I use reasonable judgment I don’t think that’ll be a major problem. When we started this business we had no credit history, but our two major wholesalers automatically granted us credit lines of $1,000 to $2,000 without any kind of formal credit application. At this point, I could probably issue a purchase order to either of them for $5,000 without anyone blinking an eye. They know we pay quickly. So, I figure if they can trust us, we can trust public universities and similar organizations.

08:15 – Yesterday, I signed up for stamps.com after talking with one of their reps. I told her that I was running Linux, so I couldn’t run their software. No problem, she said, their software runs only under Windows, but they have many Mac customers who use their web-based service. And, she told me when I asked, their site provided the labels as downloadable PDFs rather than using a server-side script to send the label directly to my printer. So I signed up, logged on to the web site, signed in, and promptly got an error message that I was running an unsupported OS. Crap. So I changed the user agent to tell their site I was running Mozilla 26 under Windows. I was then able to use the site, until I tried to print a label. It then told me that I needed to install a plug-in and to click the icon to install it. No icon was visible, of course.

So, at least until my Windows laptop arrives, I’m stuck trying to generate labels on the USPS site. Sometimes that works, but very seldom. Meanwhile, I have kits stacking up in the shipping queue. I’m going to try wiping out everything Chrome has stored and see if that’ll let me generate labels.