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Category: writing

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

07:36 – I just responded to what I think (hope) are the last couple of queries on the biology book. It’s scheduled to go to the printer today, so that should be that. Melanie, our production editor, should be sending me a link to the final PDF today so that I can have it available to answer early queries. Inevitably, even though O’Reilly always FedEx’s us an early copy of the print book, we end up getting a query or two from a reader before we get the printed book. Those queries are always in the form of “in the third paragraph on page 208 …”, which of course we need the actual book to respond to.

Work on the forensics book continues. I just finished the final lab session in the forensic drug testing group. On to something else today. I’m not doing the groups in order, instead just jumping around to whatever I feel like working on.

14:45 – This is very, very strange. I think I mentioned here that I got a call on Christmas Day from AmEx security saying that there’d been suspicious charges made on our card. They described several of those, which I confirmed that we’d not made. They canceled the card on the spot and sent me a replacement with a different number.

So, I just visited my Netflix queue page, and a box popped up to say that the credit card they were charging the service to would soon expire. The only card we had that expired this month was the old AmEx. So I updated the information with the new card number, and then immediately went over to the billing history page. Sure enough, Netflix has been charging to that “canceled” card on the 26th of every month, including December, January, February, and March. So how did they do that without AmEx refusing the charge? The only thing I could think of was that AmEx continued to honor the old card number because Netflix had been billing that number every month for years. So I just called AmEx, and they confirmed that was indeed the case.

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Monday, 2 April 2012

07:49 – It’s that time again. Time to start thinking about doing tax returns. That means I’ll be in a bad mood for the next couple of weeks. I’ll accumulate forms and get the paperwork together this week and work on the taxes this coming weekend.

Work on the forensics book continues, as does work on assembling a new batch of chemistry kits.

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Sunday, 1 April 2012

08:06 – It’s official. In yesterday’s mail, the contract showed up for our next book, The Illustrated Guide to Homeopathy Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture. We hope to have it in print before the end of this year.

As always, we’ll be putting together a custom kit to go with the book. That kit will include volumetric glassware, a small rubber mallet, and the other equipment needed to make up homeopathic remedies, along with the dozens of tinctures and extracts necessary to make up literally hundreds of different totally ineffective homeopathic “drugs”. Because homeopathy teaches that the more dilute a solution is the more potent it is, we’ve decided to simplify matters by pre-diluting the tinctures and extracts so that the kit contains only the most potent raw materials. In other words, all of the bottles will contain only pure distilled water, without so much as even a single molecule of their supposed contents.

This one should be a goldmine.

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Friday, 30 March 2012

08:03 – The EU must think everyone else is stupid. Fekter announced today that the EU is boosting its “firewall” to $1 trillion+. The problem is, that’s a complete lie. The EU hasn’t boosted anything. The size of the “firewall” hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that the EU is now using accounting smoke-and-mirrors to make its nominal €500 billion look like €800 billion. They even added in the €110 billion from the first Greek bailout. All this in an attempt to convince markets that a real firewall exists and, more importantly, to convince the IMF (read, the US) to contribute an additional $1 trillion to bailing out the euro. Fortunately, the G20 in general and the US in particular aren’t going to fall for this cynical attempt to shift EU debts onto other countries’ taxpayers. And the sad truth is that that “€500 billion” fund actually has maybe 1% of that amount available. The remainder is essentially IOUs, promises to pay by countries that, other than Germany and Finland, can’t pay their own bills. This will not end well.

Work on the forensics book continues, as does work on a new batch of chemistry kits.

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Monday, 26 March 2012

08:06 – It’s official. We’re now shipping the BK01 biology kits.

For the next two months, I’ll be working heads-down on the re-write of the forensic science book and prototyping the forensic science kit. The goal is to finish the book in May and have the book and kits available in August, so there’s a lot to be done between now and then.

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Sunday, 25 March 2012

09:12 – We made a lot of progress on the first batch of biology kits yesterday. We’re making up the final subassembly, the non-hazardous chemicals, today, and we should have the first batch of finished biology kits in inventory and ready to ship by 1 April. If necessary, we could actually assemble and ship a few kits starting tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we’re working on the re-write of the forensic science book, and prototyping a forensic science kit as we go along. We’re shooting to have the forensic science book and kits ready to roll by August, in time for the autumn semester. After that, it’ll probably be physics or earth science, although AP Chemistry and AP Biology are also on the waiting list, as is environmental science. Eventually, we want to have labs for all of the high-school sciences covered in both standard/honors and AP forms.

11:20 – The biology landing page and the BK01 biology kit ordering page are now live. You can actually order a kit right now, if you want to, although despite what it says on the order page it’ll be a week before we’re actually ready to start shipping kits in volume. Still, if anyone just can’t wait to get their hands on a kit, go ahead and order it. We’ll build it and ship it as soon as possible.

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Saturday, 24 March 2012

08:50 – I finished the QC2 review on the biology book and sent off my comments to the production editor. We’re finished with this book. It goes to the printer on 3 April. Barbara and I are doing final preparation on the biology kits this weekend, and will start assembling finished kits next weekend. And I just got email from my editor yesterday asking about image(s) for the cover of the forensics book, which they’re fast-tracking.

My new cell phone showed up yesterday. I put it on the charger, but I haven’t yet activated it. It’s a cute little clamshell unit. It reminds me of my first cell phone more than 20 years ago, a Motorola clamshell model, although of course the new one is a lot smaller.

I have about had it with DreamHost, which had yet another major outage yesterday. Their promise of 99.9% uptime has become a sick joke. This is about the fourth major outage so far this year. As always, they claim that only one small datacenter was affected and that only a small percentage of their customers were affected. By some coincidence, every time they have have an outage, I’m one of that small percentage of affected customers, as is everyone else I know who uses Dream Host. The major outages would be bad enough, but even when their service is working it’s often so slow as to be almost unusable. My annual renewal is coming up soon, and I think I’m going to move to another hosting company, probably webhostinghub.com.

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Friday, 23 March 2012

08:10 – O’Reilly sent me the QC2 pass of the biology book yesterday, so I’m doing a detailed read-through to try to catch any remaining errors. If history is any guide, I’ll catch all but one of them. Then, when the printed copies of the book show up, I’ll flip open the book randomly to one page, where that one remaining error will jump out at me.

We’re just about ready to start final assembly on the first batch of biology kits. I’m creating the biology landing page and the biology kit ordering page now. Both of those will be live before the book hits the stores, which Amazon is now saying will be 2 May rather than 22 April. We’ll see.

According to an article in the newspaper this morning, North Carolina is about to get slightly larger, at the expense of South Carolina. Apparently, the border was set back in Colonial days, when surveyors marked the line specified by the King of England by cutting slashes in tree bark with hatchets. They apparently did a pretty decent job, but were slightly off in the area around Charlotte. The actual border, per the King’s specifications, has now been mapped with GPS, and it turns out that 93 property owners who thought all of their properties were in South Carolina now find that parts or all of their properties are in fact in North Carolina. One mini-mart owner is being forced to close down his business because North Carolina gas prices are about 30 cents a gallon higher than South Carolina prices, and because he made most of his profit by selling fireworks, which are illegal in North Carolina. Other property owners potentially face changes such as being in a different area code or having to change suppliers for electricity, natural gas, and even which school district their children will have to attend. The two state legislatures are cooperating to minimize the impact of such changes by grandfathering in the current status.

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Wednesday, 21 March 2012

08:46 – The Roku box is great when it’s working, but a royal pain in the petunia when it’s not. Around 6:30 yesterday evening, we had a short power outage that was long enough to cause the Roku to reboot. It took me more than an hour and probably 50 attempts before I could get it to reconnect. About half the time, it would pass the first of three steps in reconnecting, “Connect to wireless network”. About a tenth of the time, it would also pass the second step, “Connect to local network”. But it took 50+ tries before it would pass the final step, “Connect to the Internet”. What was particularly aggravating was that I was watching the AP router status screen, which told me that the Roku box was connected to the wireless network 100% of the time, with a very strong signal and at a high data rate.

I would have called Roku tech support, but I learned that lesson the day the Roku arrived, when I had similar problems getting it to connect (the dreaded 014 error). Never, ever call Roku tech support. Roku has the worst tech support of any company I’ve ever contacted, bar none. Their tech support reps are apparently in China, and do not speak understandable English. They work from a script, and their solution is always to demand that you reconfigure your entire network, despite the fact that the network is demonstrably working fine and that the problem is solely the Roku box.

If I ever need to replace this Roku box, it certainly won’t be with another Roku product. Roku sucks.

O’Reilly sent me the draft of the bio book index yesterday. In all the books we’ve done for O’Reilly, I don’t think I’ve ever made even one change to a draft index. For some reason, it just flummoxes me. They want suggestions about adding things that are missing. I can never think of any. They also want suggestions about things that are in there but shouldn’t be. I can never think of any. So I just emailed my editor this morning to say that I couldn’t find anything that needed to be changed.

Right now, I’m working on two web pages. The first is the “landing page” for the biology book. The second is the main page for the BK01 biology kit. Both of those pages need to be tested, up, and working by the time the biology book hits the stores a month from now. Which means I really need to get the biology kits costed out, so we know what to charge for them.

I talked to Barbara the other day about dropping our cable TV and VoIP service from Time-Warner, keeping only Roadrunner. The cable TV service is basic tier, which is essentially just the OTA channels. About the only use we have for them is when Barbara watches sports on weekends. We could get those for free with an antenna, and probably get a better picture. As to VoIP phone service, we’re paying something like $45/month for it, and probably use it an average of less than 10 minutes per day. Although it’s more common among young people, we have several friends who’ve already dropped their landline phone service and gone 100% cell. Given our very light usage, I thought prepaid cell phones would actually be cheaper. Assuming 300 minutes per month between us, which is probably high, prepaid cell airtime at $0.10 per minute would run us only $30, and we’d have the other advantages of cell phones, including each of us having a personal number and not missing any calls.

Barbara’s current cell phone is a Boost Mobile, for which she pays $0.10/minute, so I visited the Boost Mobile site yesterday, intending to order a second phone for myself. I found that, although Barbara is grandfathered in at $0.10/minute, the current prepaid plan is $0.20/minute. So I went off looking for alternatives and found Platinumtel.com. They get good reviews, we’re in a service area with a strong signal, and their prepaid service is only $0.05/minute. So I just ordered one of their phones for myself. If I like it, I may order another one for Barbara.

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Tuesday, 20 March 2012

08:10 – The methyl cellulose arrived yesterday, along with a bunch of other chemicals. I’ll make up the solution later this week.

Methyl cellulose is interesting stuff. It’s freely soluble in cold water, but insoluble in hot water. One might therefore reasonably assume that the way to make up a solution of it is to dissolve it in cold water, but that doesn’t work very well. No matter how careful you are, if you mix methyl cellulose powder with cold water, it forms clumps that are almost impossible to get into solution. The trick is to make a suspension of the stuff in water at about 85 C to prevent clumping, and then pour that suspension slowly and with constant stirring into ice cold water. The tiny particles in suspension immediately dissolve in the cold water, forming a homogeneous solution. Alternatively, one can simply make a suspension of the full amount of methyl cellulose powder in hot water and then stick the beaker in the freezer to cool it down rapidly, before the suspension has time to settle out.

The biology book is proceeding on schedule. We’re supposed to receive the QC2 PDF Thursday. We then have Thursday and Friday to review it and make any final minor changes. Once that’s complete there’ll be an index review, followed by the book going to the printer on 6 April.

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