Font Size:     

Month: February 2015

Sunday, 8 February 2015

09:27 – How can you tell when Brian Williams is lying? His lips are moving. It’s no wonder that sensible people ignore network and cable “news”. Even when the anchors aren’t flat-out lying, they’re pushing their progressive agenda. Other than the morning of 9/11, I haven’t watched a network or cable newscast or paid any attention to major newspapers in more than 30 years, and I haven’t missed anything. When politicians, bureaucrats, churches, corporations, or the MSM say anything, it’s a safe bet that they’re lying. So why waste time listening to anything they say?

More kit stuff today.

Read the comments: 32 Comments

Saturday, 7 February 2015

08:13 – Things always seem to slow down in February. Not just slow kit sales, but slow everything. Not much email. Not even much spam. Not many comments here. Not much of anything going on.

The fact that we’re shipping only one kit per day or so gives us the chance to build inventory for when sales pick up again. Barbara filled and labeled several hundred RIA vials yesterday with gelatin powder and activated charcoal. Today, I’ll have her fill and label several hundred more with oxytetracycline powder and neomycin powder. Meanwhile, I’ll be filling bottles she’s already labeled. Many of the chemicals in the kits are stable enough that I don’t worry about filling them well in advance. Those will last for at least several years without degrading. The ones that are less stable I fill closer to the time we’ll actually need them.

Read the comments: 31 Comments

Friday, 6 February 2015

09:23 – Yesterday was three weeks since Barbara’s knee-replacement surgery. The physical therapist says she’s doing amazingly well. But sitting around the house reading and watching videos is getting to her, and she’s really looking forward to being able to get back to her regular routine. At least I can keep her busy labeling bottles for science kits until I run out of bottles.

The paper this morning reports that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction has released its ratings of individual North Carolina public schools. Only 59% of Winston-Salem schools received a C or better grade. As bad as that is, the reality is worse. Under the stricter grading that will come into use next year, only 34% would have received a C or better. And even those new standards aren’t rigorous enough. Our public schools, like nearly all public schools nationwide, are not just failing but failed. That’s one of the main reasons why so many millions of kids are now being home-schooled.

I was surprised that the paper pointed out the extremely high correlation between each school’s grade and the percentage of poor and minority students in that school. The higher the percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches, the lower that school’s grade. No surprise there for people who see things as they are instead of how they wish they were. In other words, only progressives are surprised. And, given the intellectual dishonesty of progressives, even they probably aren’t really surprised.

On a related note, several of my readers have recommended Matt Bracken’s work. After reading two of his non-fiction articles, here and here, it was clear to me that Bracken is a smart guy who’s read a lot of history. So I decided to give his fiction a try. Yesterday, I bought the Kindle version of the first book in his Enemies Trilogy, Enemies Foreign and Domestic. I got through the first couple hundred pages last night. The guy thinks clearly and writes reasonably well. Recommended.

Read the comments: 20 Comments

Thursday, 5 February 2015

08:56 – Barbara continues her recovery. She’s doing very well according to the physical therapist, but she’s frustrated because she’s not yet back to her normal abilities and forced to sit around much of the time. At least I have kit stuff for her to work on.

I see that the FCC is moving toward enforcing net neutrality, which is a good thing. Foxnews is screaming about new “burdensome regulations”, but then Foxnews always favors the interests of big corporations against the people. Just to be clear here, this isn’t about free enterprise and capitalism. Broadband providers in most of the country operate under government-granted monopolies or duopolies, so it’s only reasonable that the government enforce regulations to control their pricing and behavior. Treating broadband providers as common carriers like the phone company is perfectly reasonable.

The morning paper reports that the Triad region is now at “full employment”, which is completely bogus. As usual, the official unemployment figures exclude anyone who’s given up looking for work and completely ignore the quality of the jobs in question. A Ph.D. engineer who’s serving coffee at Starbucks part-time is counted the same as a Ph.D. engineer working full-time as an engineer at $150,000 per year. What actually matters isn’t the unemployment rate; it’s the full-time non-government employment rate, which is now at historic lows. Working part-time shouldn’t count, and “working” for the government certainly shouldn’t.

Read the comments: 45 Comments

Wednesday, 4 February 2015

10:14 – Barbara is going out this afternoon to pick up the sticks and small branches that fell during the wind storm the other day that caused our power to fail. Right now, she’s in the den watching The Killing on Netflix streaming while she fills 150 bottles of heirloom lima bean seeds for biology kits. After that, I’ll have more bottles for her to label, thousands of them.

Read the comments: 9 Comments

Tuesday, 3 February 2015

08:31 – When Barbara mentioned to her physical therapist yesterday that she planned to go back to work four weeks after her surgery, he said that just didn’t happen with knee replacements. At least six weeks, he said, and often eight. Four was unheard of. She told him that she’d gone back to work four weeks after her first knee replacement in October 2011, and he was very surprised.

The refrigerator is doing fine, so far. Of course, it hasn’t had time for much frost to form and for the auto-defrost function to melt the ice and let it run down into the refrigerator section.

I read a short article on Obama’s proposed $4 trillion budget. I think he needs to simplify things considerably. What if everyone’s paycheck, dividends, interest, profits, and so on just went directly to the federal government, which could then just give each person whatever it thought they deserved? That would eliminate the “income inequality” that progressives are so concerned about, because everyone would have nothing.

12:35 – Well, I’m now running Linux Mint 17.1 KDE, which is an LTS version. The system had been acting hinky for several days. Yesterday the power failed for an hour or so. When I tried to reboot the system it gave some disk errors before it finally booted. I made backups of all my data while it was still limping along. This morning it died completely. The drive was a Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB that had about 18 months of run time on it. I wish I’d had a Hitachi spare, but all I had was an unused Seagate Barracuda 2.0 TB drive, so that’s what I installed.

I had been running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS because Linux Mint didn’t have their LTS version available when I installed Ubuntu. I checked and found that their 17.1 is an LTS version based on Ubuntu 14.04, so I went ahead and installed the 64-bit KDE version. It’s updating right now. I’ll get my data restored to the new drive this afternoon.

All of which reminds me that I need to do a section in the prepping book on using Linux on desktops and notebooks. In a situation where the Internet may be down, the last thing anyone needs is a computer running Windows that decides it has to phone home to Microsoft before it’ll work.

Read the comments: 34 Comments

Monday, 2 February 2015

09:18 – Barbara is doing well, but I think she’s going stir crazy. She has a doctor appointment in about 10 days. Assuming he approves her to drive, she’ll be going back to work the next day.

We cleaned out the upstairs refrigerator/freezer yesterday morning, stored all the stuff in large styrofoam coolers with ice packs, and let the thing defrost completely. It has been leaking water from the freezer compartment down into the refrigerator. You can find anything on YouTube. I did a Google search for ‘Whirlpool gold leaking water from freezer to refrigerator’ and found a couple of videos that illustrated how to fix it. I’m hoping that the drain line was simply blocked with ice rather than foreign material. This morning all appeared dry, so we plugged it back in and reloaded the contents of the freezer and refrigerator. If it does it again, I’ll take more serious steps.

I’ll spend today building subassemblies and science kits.

Read the comments: 25 Comments

Sunday, 1 February 2015

08:10 – Barbara may have overdone it a little yesterday. Her knee is bothering her more than it has been lately. Last night, she tried using 50 mg tramadol rather than 5 mg oxycodone. She said that one tramadol didn’t do much for the pain. Taking a second one helped some, but not as well as one 5 mg oxycodone. But the pain is gradually decreasing and she thinks she has enough oxycodone left to cover the worst of it.

I didn’t get around to doing laundry yesterday, so I’ll do it today. I’m sure Barbara will want to clean house, but she won’t over do it.

Kit sales have slowed down a lot, as expected for this time of year. We did about 73% of our total January revenue in the first half of the month. If history is any indication, this slower pace will continue through June. In the third quarter, our revenue should be more than the first two quarters combined. The good news is that the slower pace will give me more time to do things other than building and shipping kits.

10:48 – I noticed that I’m running low on Zippo lighter fluid. As a pipe smoker, I go through a lot of it. I have to refill my lighter every day or so. I’ve been using actual Zippo-branded fluid, but in the past I’d used everything from 95% ethanol to wood alcohol to Coleman fuel to unleaded gasoline to VM&P naphtha.

The real Zippo fluid comes in 12 fluid ounce cans that cost $7 or $8. Looking at the Zippo MSDS, their fluid is indistinguishable from VM&P naptha, which costs about $8 per quart or $15 per gallon at big box home centers. So, rather than paying three to five times as much for the Zippo-branded stuff, I just refilled my lighter with VM&P naphtha. As expected, it burns indistinguishably from the Zippo fluid. Same flame height and color, and if anything it actually ignites more easily than the official fuel.

I carry a Zippo lighter (or two) routinely, and gave Barbara one of the propane-fueled Zippos to keep in her purse. There’s also a liquid-fuel Zippo lighter in each of our car emergency kits, along with a 4-ounce can of Zippo fluid. But I think for routine use I’m going to keep using VM&P naphtha.

Read the comments: 14 Comments
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- // end of file archive.php // -------------------------------------------------------------------------------