the bouncey zone

My old Airport base station (one of the original graphite types) started rebooting itself every few seconds again. Last time this happened was a few years ago, and it was due to defective capacitors. After some repairs it had worked again, and continued until today.

I really wasn’t in the mood to disassemble the base station again today. So I took my Airport Express from the living room, where it was just being used for music streaming, and brought it to the computer room. Within a few minutes it was configured as the main base station. It works pretty well so far.

Apple’s product info page has a lot more information about it. At least until they change its features again…

Last saturday night we went to a magic show!

Greg Davidson’s show was hosted by a baptist church in OKC. Not our usual church, but some friends were going and invited us along. So we dropped Scott off at the nursery room and found some seats.

The actual magic show was very funny. Mr. Davidson really knows how to surprise a crowd. His sermon and altar call afterward weren’t funny at all, though, and took almost as long as the magic part.

The illusionist was there all weekend, but I missed the other nights’ shows. I think I would’ve enjoyed Friday night, which was about psychics, the occult, etc. I just didn’t know about it in time.

The church was distributing a book about the occult that night. Unfortunately, I don’t recall the title or author at the moment, and I didn’t take home a copy.

Which reminds me: Last night I finished reading the first Harry Potter book! Tonight I start reading the second book.

This month I’m trying to organize our company’s books and records. There weren’t many transactions last year, so in theory it shouldn’t be very hard.

Not very hard if I already had experience operating a corporation and running QuickBooks Pro… I’ve almost figured out how QB is supposed to work. Let’s just say I’m learning to both admire and loathe that crazy program. It looks like it’ll work okay for our software business. More or less.

Configuring it to track soap sales is going to be much trickier. Apparently it never occurred to Intuit that a small business might actually want to make things, rather than just reselling already-finished products. There seems to be no way to track the production process from purchase of raw materials onward, automatically calculating cost of goods sold and triggering alerts when a component needs to be reordered. Nope, gotta do all that in a separate spreadsheet. Oh well.

(Note that we have QuickBooks 2005. I haven’t tried the 2006 version yet.)

I’m also spending a lot of time figuring out what paperwork needs to be filed with which government agencies, both to finish up last year and to prepare for this year. Income taxes, franchise taxes, sales taxes… I’m just afraid that I’ll miss something obscure and accidentally step on a petty tyrant’s toes.

Then there’s the required corporate record keeping — official meetings and such. I’m still learning my way around all that. Several books are available with helpful fill-in-the-blanks forms, but I’m not sure if they’re worth the money yet.

There’s so much that they didn’t teach us in MBA school!

I want to start selling my soap. This means increasing the rate of production, reducing the cost per bar, and making the finished soap more consistent. The only way to do all that without wearing myself out is to get better equipment.

Several companies sell excellent soap-making gear online. Unfortunately, they want more money than our little company can spend right now. So I went up to Scott Lagaly’s place in OKC for some carpentry.

Scott is the one who made the baby’s changing table last year. He has access to good tools, and he knows how to use them.

We made two box molds and a cutting device. Okay, Scott really did most of the work. I helped a little. The cutter is designed specifically for logs of soap that come out of the new molds. This should greatly reduce the amount of work needed to cut identical bars. It uses guitar strings for the cutting wires and has a hinge on the back. Imagine a cross between a hammered dulcimer and an egg slicer.

I put a picture of the cutter and one mold in the photo gallery. It’s in the soap album. Not pictured are the other mold and their mylar liners.

With this new equipment and my silicone cupcake pans ($5 each at Albertson’s), I should be able to make about 10 pounds of soap per batch. The planned result is 24 bars in each of two different sizes. It’s a start anyway.

That was the easy part. Here’s the big question: What should we use as a trade name? Are there any suggestions? We need to develop a good brand image.

Lttle Scott learned how to crawl a few weeks ago. Around the same time, he also learned to pull himself into a standing position. Since then he’s been zooming around the house, getting into everything, trying to figure out how the world works. I installed a baby gate between the TV room and the living room to limit the damage.

At the moment he’s trying to flee down the hall from his bedroom. Occasionally he pauses to give me one of those “catch me if you can” looks. Better go get him before he eats any paperbacks…

Apple has a video stream available for those of us who weren’t in San Francisco for Steve Jobs’s keynote address yesterday. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it yet, because at that resolution Apple’s fancy new codec has choppy playback on my iBook. I’ll have to watch it on my Windows PC later. (It’s okay to laugh.) What I’m about to say comes from secondhand reports and Apple’s own web site.

Aside from the expected software updates, Jobs announced two new computers. One was an Intel-based laptop patterned after the 15 inch powerbook. This was widely expected, yet he treated it as the “one more thing” surprise.

The real surprise was done as the main announcement — an Intel-based iMac! It apparently looks and acts just like the recently redesigned PowerPC model, only faster. The price is quite reasonable too.

Okay, so the iMac is almost tempting. Really, though, I wish Apple would’ve included a new consumer-class laptop in the announcements. The new MacBook Pro is about $500 more than I’d like to pay for a new laptop with those features. I was also hoping for something with a smaller screen. Yet the MacBook is so thin…

I’ll reserve some judgment until I can see these new computers in person. Maybe I’ll have to start setting aside money for one.

One feature of both models that’s sure to annoy some people, and is already causing some grumbling in various forums, is the built-in camera. Some organizations won’t allow any kind of camera on their property other than their own surveillance cameras. Thus, adding a camera to Apple’s “Pro” level laptop is going to cost them sales in security-minded organizations.

And Charlie says: I understand keeping cameras out of workplace bathrooms. But if a government agency or a large corporation is that secretive, if they don’t want any “rogue” cameras at all, even on a five-pound-plus computer, and if they aren’t actively involved in making top-secret military hardware… They’re probably up to something.

There’s a very good book by David Brin that explains this point of view more fully. I’ll have to write a review sometime.

Back on topic though… I think the camera sounds like fun.

Macintouch has a special report about MWSF 2006. I’d suggest starting there if you want to read more about it.

Tomorrow morning Steve Jobs is scheduled to do the keynote address at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Apple tends to use his public appearances to announce new products. This is especially true at the Expo, which happens soon after the Christmas buying season.

It’s a very exciting time for Apple fans. Steve jobs puts on a good show, and he always has surprises for us. Even if the surprise has already been leaked or independently predicted, typically there is some amazing detail that everyone completely missed.

Example: Last year word got out that Jobs would announce a “headless” (no built-in monitor) Mac aimed at the low-end market. We knew the basic internal specs. Even with that much advance leakage, nobody was really prepared for just how tiny the Mac mini turned out to be. Oh wow.

Here are some comics to help you get into the Apple holiday spirit:

The Joy of Tech! – 28 Nov 2005
The Joy of Tech! – Today

This time the experts are talking about laptops with intel processors. We’ll find out tomorrow…

Happy new year!

Last night we left Scott with his grandparents and went to see King Kong with Dana’s brother. I liked it. Unfortunately, so did an annoying family who sat a few seats down.

They talked constantly, treating the theater as their own private living room. The worst offender was a grown woman, well-dressed, apparently the mom of the family. She was VERY LOUD!

After about 45 minutes of unwanted commentary, Dana finally asked them politely if they could please be a little quieter. The main talker was baffled. Surely Dana couldn’t have been talking about her.

When the message finally sank in, the talker was ticked. She’s a grown woman, and we don’t have any right to talk to her that way! She can talk anywhere she wants! Then she moved over two seats and groused about how rude we were for several more minutes.

Then she talked for the rest of the movie. Confronting her again an hour later didn’t help. Other people in the area were drifting away for other seats. There were no other blocks of 3 seats available for us, so we were stuck there.

It made sense from her perspective. The movie speakers were technically louder than her voice, so what was the problem? It simply never occurred to her that what she was doing was socially unacceptable.

Some people shouldn’t be allowed in the theaters.

As for the movie itself: It would have been a good show even if no other King Kong movies had been made. It’s even better, though, because it’s very faithful to the black & white 1930s version. In fact, before you go see Kong in the theaters, you really should watch the original first. [1933 version on IMDb] [Buy it from Amazon]

Pay attention to the details. The natives’ costumes and dance, the advertisements in lights, the battle with the dinosaur, Fay Wray’s dresses… Then go watch the new version. It’s great fun.

My only complaint about the new King Kong movie is that it’s too long. There are many overwhelming action scenes set on Skull Island that could have been left out. Some of the quiet ocean time could have been trimmed a bit with no overall change to the story.

But even at 3 hours, it’s worth seeing.

The flight back to OKC boards in two hours!