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Month: April 2014

Thursday, 10 April 2014

08:14 – I’ve finished our federal income tax return. I haven’t done the state forms yet, but they’re based on federal taxes with some adjustments so it’s a simple matter to complete them.

I see that another high school kid went berserk, this time in the Pittsburgh area. This time, the weapons of choice were knives rather than guns. I’m expecting calls for stricter knife control.

I finished watching season six of Heartland yesterday just in time for Barbara and I to start binge-watching season seven, the last episode of which airs this coming Sunday. Toward the end of season six one of the main characters, Georgie, age 11, has to deal with one of her classmates who is a mean girl. The mean girl theme recurs through many of the series we watch, and I conclude that once a mean girl, always a mean girl.

Barbara’s mother is having to deal with mean girls of her own age right now. I was stunned when Barbara told me why her mother hesitates to go down for meals. Sankie is shaky and sometimes has trouble eating without dropping food. Apparently, some mean girls (AKA vicious old bitches) at the facility make fun of her difficulties. This isn’t something Sankie is making up. Her caregiver confirms it.

I told Barbara that, although I normally go out of my way to be polite and non-threatening to little old ladies, I’d be happy to make an exception in this case if she wants someone to scare the shit out of these old bitches.

09:09 – I mentioned some time ago that Elemental Scientific had been sold to another company, which planned to continue doing business as Elemental Scientific. So this morning I got email from the new Elemental Scientific announcing a 20% off sale. I visited the site, intending to stock up on some chemicals. Unfortunately, I immediately noticed that the new company had significantly increased its chemical prices, to the point where 20% off isn’t much of a deal, if any.

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Wednesday, 9 April 2014

08:04 – Other than bottles and a couple other items, we now have pretty much everything we need in-hand or on-order to build large batches of science kits. I’ll get orders cut today for two of the remaining items, a liter of cassia oil and a couple kilos of sodium dithionite.

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Tuesday, 8 April 2014

09:49 – Spring seems finally to have arrived in Winston-Salem. All the plants are in bloom or in bud, and everything is covered with pollen. Highs for the next week are in the mid-60’s to low 70’s (19 to 21 C), with lows in the 40’s and 50’s (7 to 12 C). No rain in the forecast.

I’m still working on taxes. It’s not that they take so long to finish. I could probably complete them in one long day working straight through. But I can deal with this crap for only a couple hours at a time.

Barbara’s mom is not doing at all well, either physically or mentally. She and Frances have decided to keep Sankie in her apartment at the independent-living facility as long as the facility is willing to allow her to stay there. They’re paying for a caregiver to be with Sankie 24X7. That costs more than moving her to an assisted-living/nursing facility, but Barbara and Frances believe that Sankie can’t survive on her own in a room. Her dementia is getting worse, and she’s terrified at night. Physically, she’s in very bad shape and getting worse. She needs someone with her at all times.

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Monday, 7 April 2014

07:49 – It is pouring down outside, which is supposed to continue through mid-evening. I hope it doesn’t wash away the grass seed and fertilizer that Barbara put down yesterday.

Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul yesterday. I think it was the smallest Costco run we’d ever done. We ended up with less stuff total than we usually end up with for each of us.

I’m still working on taxes.

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Sunday, 6 April 2014

10:33 – Barbara is cleaning house. I’m working on taxes.

Other than bottles and caps, we have most of the raw materials inventory we need to carry us through autumn. I’ll need to place more large orders in three months or so to carry us through the end of the year, but we have enough in-hand and on-order to build several hundred kits.

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Saturday, 5 April 2014

10:13 – Barbara is out doing the first major yard work of the season. I’m working on taxes.

CBC announced yesterday that there will be a season 8 of Heartland. Shooting starts next month, so Heather Conkie and the rest of her team must already be working madly on scripts. CBC also renewed another of its flagship series, Murdoch Mysteries, for an eighth season. Barbara and I have already watched the first five series on Amazon streaming, which is all they have available. Series six released on DVD last autumn, so I suspect it should be available soon on Amazon streaming. It’ll be interesting to see the first batch of episodes that were produced under the aegis of CBC after Rogers Media canceled it at the end of series five and CBC picked it up. Given the money crunch at CBC, I was a bit surprised that they elected to renew Murdoch Mysteries. As a period drama set around the turn of the 20th century, it must be very expensive to produce.

Speaking of production costs for Canadian TV series, we were discussing this recently in the comments. My position is that Canadian series pay much, much lower salaries to the actors. And that was confirmed by an interview I read recently with Hélène Joy, who was one of the lead characters in earlier seasons of Murdoch Mysteries. The interview took place four years ago, and she mentioned that her annual income had finally made it into six figures. And even with the leading role in Murdoch Mysteries, she was still working a side job of renovating houses for resale.

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Friday, 4 April 2014

09:40 – Well, someone just did to me what I sometimes do to other people. I just tried to order, among other things, 300 5/10/15X folding pocket magnifiers from one of my regular vendors. As of a week ago they had 2,000 of them in stock, but as of this morning they’re back-ordered on them. Someone swooped in and ordered all 2,000 of them, and it’ll be a couple months before the vendor can get another batch from their factory in India. Fortunately, I have enough remaining in stock to hold me for a couple months, I hope. One of my other vendors also carries them, but at more than twice the price.

I’m still working on taxes. One bright spot is that North Carolina still has a huge small-business deduction in effect. It goes away starting this year, but for 2013 taxes small businesses can still deduct up to the first $50,000 in profits for an individual or $100,000 for a married couple. In other words, a married couple whose only income is from the business can earn up to $100,000 without having to pay any state income tax. That’s $100,000 net, not gross. I still can’t believe this deduction exists, but it does. Alas, it was too good to last. The legislature repealed the deduction for tax years 2014 and after.

Several people have asked if I planned to publish the contents of our vehicle emergency kits. I’m still working on the list, but if people who’re interested send me their email addresses I’ll send them a PDF of the list once I’ve finalized it. You can download the current version of the list here.

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Thursday, 3 April 2014

09:00 – Amazon’s new video streaming box looks interesting. If I hadn’t just bought a Roku 3, I’d probably buy the Amazon Fire TV instead. In video streaming, the Roku 3 is the box to beat, and Amazon’s box is serious competition for the Roku, especially for those who want support for casual gaming. We don’t, so I’m perfectly content with the Roku 3.

I’m going to work on taxes today. Grrrrr.

10:44 – One of the aggravating things about working from home is that many/most chemical vendors won’t ship to residential addresses. I run into this problem frequently. A couple of months ago, for example, I was trying to order three kilos of bacteriological-grade agar from one vendor. They refused to ship to me because the ship-to address was residential. Geez, the stuff is edible. It’s not like I could use it to take down a building or something.

Fortunately, some vendors are reasonable about it. I just realized that I was very low on methylene blue, so I went over to p212121.com to order 250 grams. This is one of those sites that I can never get to accept my login credentials, so I called them to place the order. He warned me that there might be a problem because my ship-to address was residential, but acknowledged that they’d shipped other stuff to me and that methylene blue shouldn’t be a problem. Indeed, about 45 seconds after I finished the phone order I got an email confirmation that my order had been accepted and will ship immediately.

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Wednesday, 2 April 2014

07:55 – Barbara is taking the day off work today to make a day trip up to Virginia with her friend Bonnie Richardson. As usual, I tried to convince her to take Colin along. As usual, she deemed that suggestion unworthy of a reply.

I did a phone interview yesterday with Lauren Wolf of Chemical & Engineering News about the S.P.A.R.K. Competition, mostly about the disappearance of real chemistry sets since the 60’s and what S.P.A.R.K. might do to improve the situation. She asked if I knew of any scientists who got their start with a chemistry set, and I told her that she’d be hard-pressed to find any scientist of my generation who hadn’t gotten started in science with a chemistry set. Lauren’s Ph.D. is in physical/bioanalytical chemistry, so I asked her if she’d had a chemistry set as a kid. She hadn’t, but she said she had spent some time in her grandmother’s basement mixing detergents and other chemicals she found there. Of course she hadn’t had a chemistry set. Lauren is young enough to be my daughter, and by the time she should have gotten her first chemistry set, such things no longer existed. More’s the pity.

10:11 – Kit sales still “feel” slow subjectively, but I just checked the figures. In Q1 of this year, our revenues were about 10 times those of 2012Q1 and 1.8 times those of 2013Q1. If that trajectory holds, we’re going to sell a lot of kits this year.

I’ve boosted our batch sizes accordingly. Originally, we made up and bottled chemicals for batches of 15 forensic kits and 30 each biology and chemistry kits. As of now, we’re making up and bottling chemicals for batches of 60 forensic kits and 120 each biology and chemistry kits. The larger runs use our time more efficiently. Which reminds me that I need to get the last half dozen or so solutions made up that we need for another batch of biology kits. And I need to get started on the taxes.

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Tuesday, 1 April 2014

10:33 – We’re back at comfortable inventory levels on all our kits, so I can spend some time today placing orders for more components.

In fact, I just cut a PO for a bunch of components. In what must be a corollary of Murphy’s Law, the one line item we really, really need (we’re down to two in stock) was for 480 10 mL graduated cylinders. That, of course, is the one item the vendor is back-ordered on. Oh well, I’ll pick up a few from another vendor, enough to hold us until the back-order ships in about 30 days.

For ten years our computers been running Linux exclusively, but I’m about to bag Linux in favor of Microsoft Windows. Don’t get me wrong. I still don’t like Microsoft, but I dislike it less than I dislike Apple. And what other realistic options are there for the desktop? I’m tired of desktop Linux “upgrades” that break things that used to work. I’m tired of not being able just to plug in a mainstream scanner and have it work without hours of screwing around with manually loading drivers and editing configurations. I’m tired of entire classes of application software disappearing. Right now, for example, there is no longer a WYSIWYG HTML editor that runs on Linux Mint. And I’m tired of mainstream applications like Firefox and Libre Office that crash frequently and remove useful features with every “update”. I’m just tired.

And, no, this is not an April Fools post. I’m seriously thinking about bring up one Windows 8/8.1 desktop system just to see if I can live with it. But I think I’ll wait and give Linux one more chance. When Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu LTS releases later this month, I’ll take a look at them and see if I can live with one of them.

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