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.
so I disposed of the aging solution
Down the house drain and into the sewer system? Is the city OK with you dumping chemicals into their system even if the chemicals are harmless? Or is it a matter of what they don’t know won’t hurt them.
I ask because I have had problems with my pool water being discharged onto my property.
I comply with all laws and regulations regarding disposal of hazardous waste. We actually don’t have much of that to deal with. The nastiest things are lead and hexavalent chromium solutions, which we precipitate and dispose of the solids as hazardous waste. Anything that goes down our drain is non-hazardous and completely legal to flush.
Ah, today sucks. A former employer of mine has gone bankrupt:
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2014/04/29/texas-power-company-files-for-bankruptcy/
I worked for them from 1982 to 1989. We generated 40% of the electricity used in the Great State of Texas. Nowadays, I suspect that they generate about 25% of the electricity used in Texas.
EFH (TXU) owns twelve coal / lignite power plants of the size 550 MW to 880 MW each. It is my understanding that the Sierra Club is going to try to get these coal power permanently shutdown during the bankruptcy for greenhouse gas emission violations.
TXU also owns two nuclear power plants, 1200 MW each, and many natural gas power plants. We could and did make 20,000 MW on natural gas alone while I was there. I remember watching us make 34,000 MW one summer day in 1989.
This just in: an internal memo circulating at the highest levels:
They’ve decided to quit incinerating aborted infants and other human body parts for electric and heating power around the country now and will henceforth use all Caucasian males over fifty instead, most of them full-grown and decidedly obese, and thus a more viable power alternative.
We’re supposed to get RFID chips implanted as part of ObummerCARE sign-up and then we’ll be directed to regional staging areas for transportation, which we will be charged for, of course.
Seriously; I’m pretty sure this question has come up here before, but let me just throw it out there: What experience/recommendation do folks here have, if any, for a household finance management software package? Mrs. OFD is an independent consultant and she’s paid without any taxes or SS being deducted; she’s supposed to take care of that end herself. I’m an occasionally employed IT drone. And we own a house with a kid in college across the border. I can get a nice discount on TurboTax, which we’re using anyway, and some variation of Quicken. I also have gnucash installed on this Windows 8 machine currently. What to do, what to do, because our current situation is a dysfunctional version of anarcho-capitalism.
Low 60s here today, mostly sunny, light rain enroute; the bay looks like an ocean harbor on a windy day.
I used Quicken when we were sole props. It handled the Schedule C well. I then imported all into Turbo Tax. This was 13 years ago, though. I recommend doing that. Get anal about data entry.
Now that we are Inc., we use Quickbooks Online. I do the accounting and bring in a CPA once a quarter to review everything before forms are submitted. He also does the corporate return and our 1040. Too much trouble to do the 1040 these days. I have a pro do it. Never been audited either.
That makes your wife an independent contractor. The IRS has strong feelings about independent contractors but only from the employer side. Mostly.
I use an excel spreadsheet for my rental property. I could easily move to an accounting package but I only have about 70 transactions per year. The only problem is printing it out in a legible format. And forgetting to add transactions such as the dumpster bill that I pay quarterly.
My bookkeeper uses Peachtree XXXX Sage 50 for our business. We have 100 to 200 transactions per month so we need it. Works well and uses double entry accounting for that professional look. Has lots of pretty reports that it can dump straight to an excel spreadsheet.
I use TurboTax for our personal income tax. Works well. I like the interrogatory mode as I go, “oh yeah, I forgot about that”.
My accountant uses TurboTax Corporate for our Corporate income tax. You cannot buy it in a store as he does 50+ tax returns a year.
Sounds like a plan; our tax chit should be fairly simple from now on; it was an unholy nightmare for the past ten years, with the year 2004, of the previous house sale, standing out most nightmarishly, due to stock and bond sales, older kid in college across the border, lies and mistakes by lawyer bastids, etc., etc. Infernal Ruination Shit-heads had us owing a quarter-million, which was dead wrong. Seized our bank accounts and threatened jail. Finally put that one to bed a few months ago, and now paying off 2009 and owing about a tenth of the previous amount.
I figure we may as well just use this Winblows machine for crap like this and the media streaming; the Linux route is just too lengthy and painful, don’t have the time to screw with it at home when I do it full-time at work, when I have work, that is.
They’ve decided to quit incinerating aborted infants and other human body parts for electric and heating power around the country now and will henceforth use all Caucasian males over fifty instead, most of them full-grown and decidedly obese, and thus a more viable power alternative.
So that is how they are going to balance Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and PBGC. Kind of an older “Logan’s Run”.
We’re supposed to get RFID chips implanted
If you have a phone, you already have an RFID chip.
I met a Jewish man twenty years ago who had a tattooed serial number from WWII. He wore his number with pride and you could still read it. He was the only surviving member of his family.
American citizens are not the USPS’s customers. (via)
Summary: the bulk mailers are the USPS’s customers. The US citizenry is the product.
Just like Google and Facebook and many other much-maligned services. Except, of course, the USPS is a government agency and part of its charter is to serve the US citizenry. All of the citizenry, not just those who send bulk mail. And then there’s the special regulatory breaks the USPS gets, like emissions standards for their pollutionmobiles.
Who woulda thunk the USPS thinks US Citizens ARE junk mail. No wonder the USPS has armed Postal Inspectors. To threaten us junk mail citizens.
What I find interesting is that the people who make up the USPS, the NSA, the Feebies, and all the rest of the gummint organizations and agencies and departments, are our fellow Murkan subjects/citizens. They are born, raised, married, give birth and eventually die just like us. Yet they are willing to inflict all this shit on us, and we have only to look at the examples of other totalitarian regimes like Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or Red China to see how it worked/works in real life. On the hand, they’re *paid* to do it; on the other, in some cases, and more often in those other places, historically, if they didn’t do it to us it would be done to them.
It’s a lot like those old psych experiments that Dr. Philip Zimbardo did; in one, he had people go on city buses and trains and simply demand that someone give their seat to them. Most of the time they did. In another study he had people pretending to be prisoners under interrogation and other folks sitting outside pushing buttons that inflicted various increasing levels of pain on the first group, unseen. But heard; because with each increase, the people in the first group would yell, groan or scream, in apparent agony. Yet on the orders of the “supervisors” the second group would keep jacking up the juice.
And now for the last three episodes of Season Three, the last season, of “Deadwood.” I used to watch Ian McShane in “Lovejoy” and this has been quite a switch. Callie Dayton as Charlie Utter when I saw him last as the pot-smoking sheriff in “Sons of Anarchy.” And Anna Gunn as the sheriff’s wife here when last seen as Mrs. Walter White.
Mrs. OFD is trying to kick the nasty virus that leveled her mom, her aunt, and two cousins down there in South Burlap the past several days. She plans to fly out tomorrow afternoon for Maryland and at least cover the last half of the week’s gig down there. I was at the house and near them but have not exhibited any symptoms as yet. So fah, so good.
That sounds bogus to me, as some of the comments point out.
If I have hexavalent chromium that I want to dispose, then I just drive out to Hinkley, CA, and pour it on the ground. 😉