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Thursday, November 19th, 2009
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4:59 am - *sigh*
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I'm turning into a recluse. I need to change my life. And I need to find more people who'll give me a reason to drag my ass out of my terrible little hole -- geographically and interpersonally -- more often.
All the people I used to hang out with have either moved off the Island or suck even more than I do at being social. Shit, I can't even get myself to update LJ regularly.
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| Saturday, November 7th, 2009
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7:27 pm - What kind of maintenance does a saltwater tank take?
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Feed twice daily.
Empty skimmer overflow & replace with fresh saltwater when necessary, about once every two days.
Supplement alkalinity when it needs it -- about once every four days.
Once a week, or therabouts, refill my top-off bucket and mix in kalkwasser.
Scrape the tank walls once or twice a week, depending on how lazy I am.
Make new saltwater when necessary, about once every two weeks.
Check salinity, calcium once a month.
Once a month, clean the filter sponge on the return pump.
5 gallon water change once a month or two.
Once every three months or so, clean out circulation pumps.
Note the nearly-complete lack of testing or daily maintenance other than feeding. I used to do water changes once every two weeks, but by emptying the skimmer overflow and replacing that with new saltwater, I effectively do small, rolling water changes over the course of the week.
I ~never check alkalinity; I just go by the pH and the amount of fluctuation that occurs due to the day/night cycles in the display tank. Since pH is linked to alkalinity levels, it serves as a reliable indication of when it's too low -- but you can't tell anything from a point test, you need to look at the trends. What this generally means is that when the pH goes below 8.1 in the middle of the night, or if it's not up to about 8.45 by the end of the day, I add alk. Both calcium and alkalinity are provided through the kalkwasser in the top-off water; however, the tank seems to lose alk faster than it loses calcium.
Oh, and I've gotta pull out frags when necessary -- about once every month and a half to two months for the Xenia, significantly less time for everything else.
...Anybody in my area want some Xenia?
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| Friday, October 9th, 2009
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11:29 pm - Oh Canada!
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You know you're not on Long Island any more when you get directions that involve the phrase "...and if you hit Canada you've gone too far."
Currently, I'm in the Comfort Inn at Niagra Falls, and while this place is a giant tourist trap, it's actually a moderately cheap one; that is, I pay about the same for stuff at home as I do here. Of course, living on Long Island, I'm used to paying more for things than a large portion of the country is. %P
I currently have a theory that Canada is a font of Gayness. You see, as I proceeded up the NY State Thruway (the whole trip took about seven hours with some stops along the way to feed and perform biological maintenance functions,) I noticed something odd at the rest-stops: as I went North, they urinals got smaller, lower, and less private.
Niagra Falls: Holy shit, big water.
Anyway, I've been up faaaaaaaaaaaaaar too long; I'm taking a bath and crashing. You may or may not get something more coherent from me tomorrow.
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, September 20th, 2009
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10:52 pm - New tank shots.
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I did some landscaping, removed the big Kenya Tree, and moved some things around. I also gave myself an early birthday present with some expensive corals (and a clam) that I bought today; Country Critters got a big shipment in from ORA and I couldn't resist. I managed to offset about a third of the price by trading in a bunch of Xenia and Kenya Tree frags.
( Whole bunch more pics. )
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| Sunday, September 13th, 2009
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3:51 am - New Tank Shots.
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Got some new pics, some new livestock, and some slightly-rearranged rockwork and such. Holy crap have I grown a lot of coralline on the back wall in the past couple weeks.
These images may also look better if you save them and view them withsomething like irfanview or something else that properly parses images.I'm not sure why, but they're not displaying the same through firefoxas they are through my other image programs; they're paler, faded. This is strange, since I'm viewing the same .jpg file, saved as 8-bit-per-channel sRGB jpgs, so it shouldn't be anything that firefox couldn't handle. Weird.
Some of the shots are pretty similar, but I'm trying to document individual specimens so I can compare shots and see how they grow.
Oh, I just fed the tank; the little orange specks you see floating around are cyclop-eez, frozen copepods.
( More Images Below The Cut )
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| Saturday, September 5th, 2009
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11:20 pm - Grrr.
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Nothing like fighting nicotine withdrawal while you're fighting your way through traffic in fucking Queens. Wound up too tired and hateful to go hang out with Josh and Danielle and folks -- and I got home about an hour and a half later than I expected.
Anyway. Quitting smoking. Hating the world.
I did get some new frags, though, while I was out there. Pics will be forthcoming in the next couple days.
Josh and/or Danielle: When d'you wanna reschedule to? :)
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| Monday, August 31st, 2009
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3:22 am - New Reef Tank Pics
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Ignore the (c)2008 tag; the first batch I did using an old macro and was too lazy to change. The sharpening is a bit much on some of the pics, and most of them are slightly overexposed. Meh. I'm just getting back into taking pics after a year, and I'm too lazy to reshoot. I'll learn my lessons for next time. ;)
( More under cut! )
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| Monday, August 17th, 2009
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1:40 am - Spawning
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So I turned on the lights in my room -- all the tank lights were off by now -- and noticed something ... odd, something large and wriggly like huge copepods. I just bought a maxima clam today, and thought, immediately: "arghnosomekindaparasitesorsomethingargh?"
Well, it wasn't that. They looked more like young mysid shrimp ... but not quite, and they didn't move through the water anything like 'em. Well, with a little more investigation, and some muttered "Show me your abdomen, baby," I see that one of my cleaner shrimp has a mass of eggs/young under there.
My corals and clownfish and goby will likely eat well tonight. I know a few of them made it into my 'fuge, where all the predators are more their size, so there's a small chance they might manage to grow to maturity. Most of them will probably suffer from powerhead deaths and collisions with hungry, stinging tentacles.
I installed my T-5 lights about a month ago; the improvements in the corals and other animals has been enormous. My Fungia coral looks a little bleached, but it will hopefully recover with a few more weeks. On the other hand, my anemone looks great, and is colouring up from its previous, bleached status, and I've noticed increased growth in most of the rest of my corals.
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| Sunday, August 16th, 2009
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2:46 pm - Outrage for the Day
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| Saturday, August 15th, 2009
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5:03 am - Silly conservationists...
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So I'm watching this "Whale Wars" show on TV, about an organization called the "Sea Shepherd Society," who run anti-whaling activities. They interfere with Japanese whalers, fouling props and attemptingto prevent them from landing whales. The captain has supposedly been doing this for a while.
They're idiots. Or rather, I should say, for someone who's supposedly been doing this for a long time, the captain has no fucking idea of timing, tactics, or supply.
Friendlies:
MV Steve Irwin, a 195-foot ex-patrol boat. Her top speed's apparently about 15 knots.
A small one-person helicopter, and
Two launches.
OpFor:
Whaling factory ship, about 33% larger than the Steve Irwin, and with a top speed of about 14 knots.
Two harpoon ships (roughly the size of the Steve Irwin.)
Well, right off, you've got a problem. You're slower than your opponent's harpoon boats, and faster than your main target by only the smallest margins. In one ep, they got into a maneuver war with the harpoon ships. The harpoon ships trailed lines to foul the Irwin's prop, and the launches carried ropes to deploy to do the same things to the harpoon boats. However, the launches apparently only carry a couple of ropes each, which is kinda silly since you can put a lot of rope on a boat, and they only radioed in regarding their fuel status when they only had 30 minutes' fuel left -- and it doesn't sound like they were keeping a reserve. And the captain was surprised by the fuel status. This necessitated dangerous maneuvers to recover the boats to refuel them -- but if they'd done a pickup a few minutes before, after they'd temporarily disabled one of the harpoon boats, they'd've had no problems. The fuel status of your launches is something I'd want to regularly verify, and this, more than anything else, makes me astonished the guy's been doing stuff like this for as long as he says.
When the japanese ship -did- get a whale on board, they closed in the Irwin and threw bottles of Buteric Acid at the ship, attempting to foul the meat. Now, the whaling ship has powerful water cannons and netting to disrupt things like this. The Steve Irwin doesn't have any kind of shielded position to launch from that I could see, and no shielding to prevent the water cannons from blinding the Irwin's cockpit. And when they did land bottles, they did it before the flensing had started -- so no meat was affected. Idiots. After two passes, they were apparently running low on buteric acid.
Also, they have a helicopter. They didn't give the guy any bottles. I find this to be a rediculous oversight. :P
Now, there's not much they can do about the speed of their ship, but I can think of a ton of things they could do to increase their effectiveness. First, pay the fuck attention to your logistics. Second, rig up some kind of shields against water cannons. Third, if you're gonna lob bottles at someone, make a catapult or pneumatic mortar to do it with so you don't have to get close to the water cannon. And, finally, if they do snag a whale, I can think of a whole bunch of things that could be done to foul or snag the corpse before it was transferred to the processing ship.
I can appreciate what they're doing, but, god, it seems like they're totally unprepared.
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| Wednesday, August 12th, 2009
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10:34 pm - Balance
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I need to balance my desire to have a social life with my enjoyment of resting/working/etc in my hole.
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| Saturday, August 8th, 2009
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11:39 pm - Any reefers?
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Just wondering if anyone else on my flist -- particularly in my area -- has a reef tank, or is considering starting one. I've got kenya tree frags coming out my ears.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, August 7th, 2009
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12:55 am - Writer's Block: I May Be Crazy
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| Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
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2:57 am - Update
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Well, thank god that's done. I've finally got my new aquarium light-hood operational. (Upgraded from a Current 2x65W Power Compact fixture to 4x39w T5-HO lights w/ individual reflectors. Hell, even without the reflectors, it looks like the tank's getting more light than it was -- so I'm going to leave the reflectors off for a couple days and then start adding them on one at a time.) Not quite completed, but operational. (Wiring desperately needs neatening up, and there're all sorts of exposed (low-power) cables running from the fans in the light hood. And I need to hinge the front; right now it's held on with masking tape.) Sorry, Zib, for disappearing, but after dinner at about 6 I started working on this and ... yeah, it's 3 AM, and I've just finished up and showered.
For those who were concerned, it was the video card; that's been replaced by a BFG Geforce 260 somethingorother that I have no complaints about.
Wargh. I think it's time to keel over.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Friday, July 24th, 2009
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1:31 am - When it rains...
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This week has kinda sucked. I splurged and bought some stuff -- upgraded lighting and a controller for my tank. Then my PC's 19" CRT exploded. (I think the flyback transformer went south in a drastic way.) So ... I went out and got another monitor. (Jesus christ was that a pain in the ass; CRTs just aren't available any more, and I had to do research to figure out what LCD panel would be at least vaguely comparable. Fortunately, advanced LCD technology has come down in price since I last looked at it, but I still dropped $540 on an HP LP2475W. A bit ow, but only a little more than I paid for my CRT.)
So, it came today, and while I was setting it up -- my graphics card blew, as far as I can tell. I pray it's my graphics card and not my mobo; everything's powered but it's not beeping and the HDs are never accessed, so I don't think it's even getting through POST.
Fuck.
Oh well. At least I could wire my cable box into it and use it as an HDTV.
So I'm going out to get a new video card, probably from Best Buy near where I work, tomorrow. From what I've seen the BFT Nvidia GTS 250 is what I'll probably wind up buying. Anyone who wants to yell at me and tell me that it's a piece of shit card and I shouldn't buy it, now's the time to do so. :)
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| Monday, May 11th, 2009
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2:45 am - Fishtank update
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So I've added a few things since I last posted. A small pulsing xenia frag, a ricordea polyp, a single head of duncan coral a, a brittle star, and the big additions, just acquired yesterday: a rose-tipped anemone and two false percula clownfish (one, certainly a male, about 1.25-1.5 inches in length, the other, certainly a female, about 2-2.5".)
If you've never had clownfish before, do some research on their absolutely retarded behavior. They commonly do things -- like swimming mostly on their side at the top of the tank at night -- that would indicate, in most other fish, that they're about to buy it. I had a couple of anxious hours there until I found a good page on clownfish behavior.
They ignored the anemone until the lights went off tonight. Then, literally minutes later -- I guess being spotlit by the moonlight called attention to it -- they both dove into it, rolling it it, flipping all around -- doing the clownfish-in-an-anemone thing. It was like cats on catnip.
ClownfishM: Dude! Lookit what I found!
ClownfishF: Dude! When did they put -that- there? Oh, awesome!"
ClownfishM: *frolic*
ClownfishF:*frolic* *chase ClownfishM away* *frolic*
Anemone: "WTF? Hey! Hey! You kids get off my me! Martha! Pack the car! The Coloreds have moved in!"
*Anemone picks up and starts racing to get away from the clownfish. Given that an anemone full out makes maybe two to four mm per minute, this is a race it's doomed to lose*
*poor fishtank keeper plucks up a bunch of sessile inverts endangered by the anemone and redistributes them, chuckles as he makes the situation into a metaphor for White Flight*
Eventually the Anemone will settle down and learn to live with the clownfish, and I can put my corals back, but right now, it's annoyed and roving. ;)
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| Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
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7:34 pm - Dammit...
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Shirley Drug & Surgical closed at some point in the relatively recent past. Now I'm going to have to find somewhere else to get, well, surgical supplies and apparatus, and who won't look at me like some kinda mega-ultra addict when I ask them for 10cc syringes and "the largest bore needles ya got." Aah, the hazards of being a DIY-er and being a science geek to boot.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
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4:36 am - What I've been up to
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Yeah, it's been forever since I've updated.
I got a new car about a month ago -- an '04 Civic. It's great. :)
Most of my time over the past month or so has gone into research and getting a tank set up. In a bout of madness, I decided I wanted to set up a marine tank -- specifically, a reef tank, one that focuses on corals and other interesting invertebrates. Of course, i'll have a few fish too, but only a few. The theme for the tank will be 'Cthulhoid Terror Field'; A pretty waving field of grasses (tentacles,) flowers (polyps and accompanying tentacles,) and ... umm, vines? (More tentacles.)
I set the tank up a little more than a week ago, and it's been going ... healthily. My water parameters are great. Of course, this may be because of the MASSIVE ALGAL BLOOM all over my glass. And rocks. And sand. So, well before I expected to, I got some hermit crabs and varied snails and put 'em in.
A few days passed and I realised that more serious measures were needed. So I got a sea hare. A sea hare looks like a combination of a slug that's had its rear end chopped offcrossed with shrek ears. It's one of those critters that goes so far past ugly it comes back to cute. It's mostly cleaned up my rocks and is starting to help the snails clear the long, waving strands of algae off the grass. With any luck I'll have to start actually obtaining algae or getting nori for it to eat in another week to two weeks.
I always seem to imagine sound effects while watching the critters in the tank. The snails basically go "gnomgnomgnomgnom". The little hermit crabs have an accent like mexicans on helium, and attitudes rather like the ones you'd see on the guys hanging out behind th ebodega in wifebeaters drinking coronas. The sea hare is the monster of the tank. About three to four inches long, its head is bigger than the hermits or most of the snails. OTOH, it's completely harmless and incapable of doing anything else other than sitting on something. I basically hear Lenny -- the version that's a dog in the old WB cartoons. Except when he's eating. Then it's *GLORMPH...GLORMPH...GLORMPH*
That leads to scenes like this:
SCENE: two hermit crabs chillin' on a rock eating algae. The sea hare comes oozing its way over the curve of the rock.
SEA HARE: "Durp durp ... doo doo doo..."
HERMIT CRAB #1: "Hey! Hey, man! Whatchoo doin'?"
HERMIT CRAB #2: "Yo, man, this is our turf!"
SEA HARE: *GLORMPH* *OOZE*
HERMIT CRAB #1: "Yo! Back of!"
HERMIT CRAB #2: "Yeah! Back off man! Back off or I'll cut you!"
SEA HARE: "Durp?" *ooze*
HERMIT CRAB #1: "WTF, man, this dude's huge!"
HERMIT CRAB #2: "RUN! It's reefzilla!"
(HERMIT CRABS exit off the sides of the rock)
SEA HARE: *GNOMPH*
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| Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
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12:18 am - Looking for reading material...
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Anyone got a full collection (at least of the early stuff) of OCRs of the battletech novels? Or have a good torrent link?
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, March 16th, 2009
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1:21 am - Feh.
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I think I'm going to need a new car in the near future. Blargh.
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(comment on this)
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