Category: Uncategorized

07:47 – In the past, I’d filled bottles myself, but yesterday we tried working together, with me filling while Barbara capped. The two of us working together can fill about 2.5 times as many bottles per hour as I can do on my own, so that’s the way we’ll do it from now on. This week, I’ll make up the solutions we need to fill bottles this weekend.

I ordered a 24″ 1080P IP-TV from Costco yesterday. I’ll set it up on the table we use for filling bottles so we can watch Netflix/Amazon streaming video while we’re filling. The TV can also serve as a decent spare computer display.

08:40 – I’m now running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my main system. At the moment, I don’t care much for it–they seem to take pleasure in making simple things difficult–but it’s supported for five years and I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Fortunately, the Firefox and Thunderbird data transferred seamlessly. I just fired them both up and was back where I was.

Linux Mint 15 shot craps on me late yesterday afternoon. Suddenly I had no network connection. At first, I thought our Internet connection was down, but it wasn’t. So I rebooted the system, and it still didn’t work. At that point, I began to think that the Ethernet adapter had died. Only a couple days ago, I’d downloaded the ISO for Ubuntu 14.04, so I stuck the DVD in the drive and rebooted again. Ubuntu came up in try-before-you-buy mode, and was able to access the Internet with no problem. Okay, enough of Linux Mint, which has always been flaky anyway.

I had multiple recent backups, both to external hard drive and USB flash sticks, but I decided to pull another full copy to another hard drive. That ran overnight. This morning, I disconnected the external hard drive, rebooted the system to the Ubuntu 14.04 DVD, and installed. That took only a few minutes, and I was up and running. I still have to transfer over the bulk of my data, get printers configured, and so on, but on balance I’m glad to be back on Ubuntu.

Kit-wise, this has gone from a slowish month to a reasonable one, all because we just got an order for 30 CK01A chemistry kits from a Florida state university. Unfortunately, we have only a couple dozen of those kits in stock at the moment, so I’m just going to build another batch of 30 specifically for this order.

08:02 – Incredibly, USPS did not deliver mail on our block yesterday, despite the fact that the roads were clean and dry and that they delivered elsewhere in our neighborhood, both yesterday and Friday. I saw a mail truck two blocks down our street at about 4:00 p.m. yesterday, and assumed that they’d be getting to us soon. But no. I finally gave up at 9:00 p.m. and turned off the porch light. Barbara’s sister, who lives in a similar residential neighborhood across town, with similar street conditions, got delivery Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, as have others in our area. But we’ve been without service since Wednesday.

This catastrophic service failure is simply unacceptable. The postmaster responsible should be fired. I’m going to mail our congressman and the Postmaster General demanding that he be held accountable. On Thursday morning, we had about 6″ of snow on the ground. I halfway expected delivery that day–USPS delivery vehicles have chains–but I wasn’t really surprised when it didn’t happen. On Friday morning, things had improved, so I processed kit shipments as usual and had them waiting for pickup. I was expecting USPS to be running late, but I was shocked when they didn’t show up at all. Yesterday, the roads were clear and dry. Ordinary cars had no trouble on them. I was stunned when USPS didn’t show up. With Monday being a federal holiday, we’ll have to wait until Tuesday for mail service. Being without service for five days is simply unacceptable. Heads need to roll.

08:32 – USPS did not deliver or pick up here Thursday or Friday, the first time that’s happened in 27 years. I’ve had kits sitting in the shipping queue since yesterday morning. I hope they’re picked up today, because USPS is off on Monday for the federal holiday.

It’s not just USPS. FedEx and UPS weren’t running yesterday here, and the county officially closed its offices for the first time in 20 years or more. There’s still a lot of ice and snow on the roads. We’ve yet to see a plow in our neighborhood. Fortunately, we have no need to go out today.

09:26 – I was wrong. They actually have plowed the streets in our neighborhoods. Now that I think about it, I remember kind of waking up at 3:00 a.m. to the beeping of the plow truck. Now USPS has no excuse not to run today. Barbara is out shoveling the drive. I’m not sure why, because most of it should have melted off by Monday morning.

18:37 – I pretty much took the day off.

12:06 – We shipped more chemistry kits this morning, so we’re now down into single figures on CK01A inventory. Fortunately, we also just shipped the remainder of the virtual school AP chemistry kits, so that frees up my time to get more chemistry kits built.

It’s looking pretty certain that we’re about to attack Syria, again putting our troops in harm’s way for no discernible purpose or benefit. So I’ve come up with a modest proposal: put the names in a hat of every politician from Obama on down who supports deploying our troops abroad. Each time one of our troops is maimed, draw a name from that hat and maim that politician. Each time one of our troops is killed, draw a name and kill that politician. It’s only fair. If they support putting our troops in harm’s way, they should have to take the same risks. If my proposal is implemented, I predict that US forces will soon no longer be deployed abroad. In fact, I predict they’ll leave skid marks as they depart for home.

10:31 – Yesterday, I finally got around to ordering some stuff from Costco that had been on my to-do list for a week: a CyberPower PC, a Brother multi-function printer, and a DeLonghi dehumidifier. The dehumidifier kills two birds. It’ll make it a lot more comfortable to work in the unfinished area of the basement, and it’ll produce several gallons a day of distilled water for making up chemicals.

I’m debating with myself about introducing an AP Chemistry kit for autumn semester in 2014. I’d actually considered doing it for 2012, but it just wasn’t worth the effort. College Board was in the midst of revamping AP Chemistry for 2013, so a 2012 kit would have been obsolete after a year. They did the same thing with AP Biology last year, shifting from procedural labs to “the Big Picture” and “inquiry-based” labs. That’s fine for a classroom environment with a qualified AP chemistry or biology teacher directing things and keeping students from going off the tracks, but it doesn’t translate well to a homeschool environment.

The other problem with the current AP Chemistry labs is that they’re very equipment intensive. The $20 milligram balance I mentioned yesterday solves one of the problems, but the current AP labs as specified require quite a bit of other expensive equipment, most notably a decent pH meter and at least a colorimeter if not a spectrophotometer. Now, you can buy a pH meter with 0.1 pH resolution for $25 or $30, but the problem is that these cheap meters are notorious for requiring constant recalibration. Decent pH meters with 0.01 pH resolution are available for $75 to $150, but that’s not a minor expense for many homeschoolers, particularly for just one instrument. The real show-stopper is the colorimeter/spectrophotometer, which is used heavily in AP chemistry. Typical dedicated 3- or 4-color colorimeters cost $500 to $800 or more.

My first thought was that we should open-source this hardware, kind of like my $50 Dremel ultracentrifuge, which does pretty much the same thing as a commercial $5,000 ultracentrifuge. But only a tiny percentage of homeschoolers would be willing to “roll their own”. So my second thought was modular hardware designed for education, such as the product line from Vernier. You start with an interface, the simplest of which is a $61 unit that simply connects sensors to a USB port on your computer. You then install logging software, which ranges from free for a basic package to $200+ for their high-end package. You then add sensors, such as a $79 pH sensor, a $115 colorimeter sensor, a $29 temperature sensor, and so on. It’s still not cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than buying dedicated units for each function. I’ll have to think about this for a while before I decide what, if anything, to do.

Oh, yeah. That iodine that I ordered on eBay showed up yesterday, or at least I assume that’s what’s in the small box I received from an address in the Ukraine. The small box weighs 320 grams, so I suspect there actually is the 250 g of iodine I ordered in there. Geez, that probably puts me on yet another list.

19:59 – Our power failed at about 3:48 p.m. yesterday when a strong windstorm popped up. It lasted all of ten minutes, but by the time it had blown through power was down all across the northwestern part of the county and some other areas as well. Our power just came back on about 7:00 this evening.

This morning, Barbara and I hauled out the generator. For some reason, the last time we used it (some years ago) I hadn’t run it dry, so there was gunky fuel in it. We siphoned out the bad gas and put in fresh gas and then tried using ether-based starting fluid to get it running. No deal. Fortunately, our neighbor Steve, who’s a master mechanic, was available. He ended up having to tear down the carburetor and clean it out, but he did get the generator running around noon. We connected just our upstairs refrigerator and the big freezer downstairs, both of which ran for several hours. I just went down and shut off the fuel to let the generator die. Tomorrow, I’ll siphon out what’s left in the tank and let it dry out completely.

17:01 – We were under a severe thunderstorm warning yesterday afternoon. About 1600, the storm blew through, with about 1.5″ (3.75 cm) of rain in less than 10 minutes and winds gusting to probably 50 to 60+ MPH (80 to 100 KPH). We had no damage to speak of to our home and yard, but a lot of big trees went down around the neighborhood. Our power went off when the storm hit and remained off until about 0120 this morning. Our cable TV/phone/broadband service just came back up, a bit more than 24 hours after it went down.

16:26 – Barbara cleaned house this morning and then we made a Costco run sans Paul and Mary. Otherwise, we’ve pretty much taken the day off.