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Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
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3:38 am - PIckled fingers
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So, I went to the Manhattan Reefs frag swap in Brooklyn on Sunday, and bought a whole buttload of coral. I spent the last two hours gluing frags to rocks, and rocks to rocks, and mt fingers to rocks .... my fingers are all pruny, where you can see the skin around the scabrous coating of cyanoacrylate glue, anyways....
I have a feeling that I'm going to wind up rearranging a lot of things once they grow a bit more, but, meh. Shit happens. My cyano's finally dying down, and pics will be forthcoming in the next few days.
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| Sunday, March 28th, 2010
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4:24 am - I would just like to state:
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Ragging on hairy men dressed up as the hot chick from Coyboy Bebop in no way discrimination against the gay or transgendered community. It's a natural reaction to the fucking horriffic, unshaven sight that has been blasted into my retinas. I'm gonna call a spade a spade, or in this case, a fucking ugly-ass 'chick' a fucking ugly-ass chick. I'm moderately sure Fae didn't have back hair. Not to mention, most of those guys aren't gay or transgendered or anything but cosplay cross-dressers. Which makes it even more reprehensible. An actual M-F transgendered person would most likely shave or otherwise depilate before a cosplay occasion. God, buy a razor. So screw you (hah! More LGBT insensitivity on my part!), crazy LGBT-power girl.
That being said, Icon sucks in most of the ways that it usually does and rocks in most of the ways that it usually does. IMO a much better con experience this year, but you can tell that last year hurt attendance.
current mood:  chipper
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| Sunday, March 21st, 2010
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6:22 am - Update
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Argh, been fucking around with the fishtank until far too early in the morning. Got my anemone moved over, along with several other corals, and the fish. The cleaner shrimp were too wily for me today.
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| Sunday, March 7th, 2010
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11:23 pm - Tank Update
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So, yesterday, I added a trio of Yellowtail Damselfish and ten grass shrimp (10/$1, whoot!) to the 65. The yellowtails are neat little fish that both hang out together and go off independantly, and they scream "OH MY GOD! I'M BLUE! SO VERY FUCKING BLUE!" As I particularly like this color -- a blue approaching indigo -- this is what drew me to consider these fish a while ago. I also rather like the general body-shape; I had considered green chromis as a schooling fish, but they're so generic-fish-lookin' and kinda look like they were lobotomized at birth. Unlike most damsels, the yellow-tailed blues have a reputation for not turning into assholes when they get larger.
The grass shrimp were, frankly, an extremely cheap clean-up crew/test for organic and inorganic contaminants that I don't test for. Since they didn't die, that means that my tank water probably won't kill anything else that I may put in there, and they serve as an excellent clean-up crew in a tank just out of cycle; they're active, quickly target food particles, and they can live off what they glean from what's left over from your fish feedings. And, they're ten for a buck, so if they die, or if something eats them, or if they launch themselves out of the tank, it's no real loss.
The CBB is actively feeding both off of live rock and out of my feeder. The clownfish is learning that the CBB is Where Food Comes From Sometimes (since it drops bits when pulling things out of the feeder, and the clowns are downstream,) so it seems to have stopped harrassing it quite as much when the CBB is in the Clowns' space. Still, the CBB moves -very- quickly when it has to go close past the anemone, but I noticed that one time when the clown nipped it it whirled and tried to get the clown back. %) This is about the perfect level of aggression, once I get them into the 65; they'll tolerate eachother, but the clowns will still keep the CBB away from their host anemone. (CBBs have been known to nip at anemones; with my clownfish, I knew this likely wouldn't be a problem, since they'd defend the anemone.)
I'm going to do a water change tonight on all of the tanks. 5g new artificial saltwater -> 29G -> 5G 29g's water -> 65G -> 5G 65g's SW -> toilet. I'm also going to syphon some sand out of the 29G and get it into the 65.
Oh, I got a new bunch of Elos test kits -- NH3/NH4, NO3, & PO4, which I find to be significantly more precise than the API kits I was using -- and as far as parameters I care about at this point go, I'm at 0 ammonia, 15ppm nitrates, and about .01 phosphates -- very good for a tank at this point in the cycle. People've said that Marco Rocks may be phosphate bombs, but, although I'm running a decent amount of phosphate-removing media, this doesn't seem to be the case with the new, pre-cooked rocks. Heck, I'm annoyed there hasn't been a massive algae bloom in my tank yet. It's gotta happen eventually. Oh well, I guess that's when I'll get the blue tang and flame angel. %)
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| Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
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5:30 am - More tank info
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Whoot. Got my Vortech pump, slapped it on the tank. This thing's neat, and moves absolutely huge quantities of water without a thrashing core of flow. And it pureed the rotting shrimp corpses, so things should proceed more quickly as far as curing goes. And it's just so much fun to play with.
I've been trying to figure out how I'm going to transfer my existing livestock, liverock, and live sand to the new tank. Oh, and the lighting. It's sort of a slow-motion version of one of those transporting-chickens-grain-and-foxes-across-a-river-in-a-tiny-canoe puzzles.
My next construction push is to get the tank's hood completed. I need to put some sort of back on it, since it's currently open, and that'll just lead to a loss of fish through autodarwination. Similarly, I need to screen off two holes on the side that apparently were for fans; I'm going to cut new holes in the top of the hood and put new fans on top, blowing down and in, in order to properly cool the T5s. Finally, when I no longer have anything with a significant light demand in the 29g, I'll move the T5s in there over to the new hood and take the metal halide the hell out. (It creates far too much heat and doesn't produce nearly enough lumins/watt; with the acceptance of high-output LEDs and the new plasma arc LIFI lighting that's coming out, Metal Halides are a technology as antiquated as leaded gasoline. The work, but why the fuck would you want to deal with them? Shit, you can't even turn them on or off at will; you need to give them a cooldown time. The only reason I'm going to use this thing is because it's a temporary measure.)
Later this week I'm actually going to test my NH4/nitrite/nitrate levels, and attempt to get some green hair algae growing if it's not already by then, along with seeding the tank with coralline scraped off the sides of the current tank. Hopefully, by the end of next week, I'll actually be ready to start transferring livestock.
At some point I'm going to have almost everything out of my main tank except for some acropora colonies; they've got red bugs. I'm going to dose them with Interceptor over three weeks to kill the red bugs, and any red bugs in the 65 should starve to death in that timeframe too. The problem is that the medicine, Interceptor, which kills the red bugs also tends to kill off many other small crustaceans, copepods, shrimp, crabs, etc. Given that all those small copepods, crustaceans, shrimp, crabs, etc are vital to the healthy functioning of a reef tank, I have to get pretty much everything else into the 65 first.
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| Monday, March 1st, 2010
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12:33 am - There comes a point ...
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...in many hobbies and passtimes that I engage in, it seems, particularly the ones that revolve around biology, where you you can become inordinately pleased about rather gross things.
In this case, the fact that my room smells vaguely like hot garbage from the rotting shrimp in the 65g is a good sign! It's not hugely strong -- I've heard of horror stories with some people who were putting large amounts of live rock in their tank -- just ... omnipresent within the room.
...Unless something's festering in the pile of laundry on the floor or something.
...But I'm pretty sure it's from the rotting shrimp. This doesn't smell like old BO funk.
...So....hooray! The nitrogen cycle's starting! And I found my incense! YAY!
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| Sunday, February 28th, 2010
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8:36 pm - Whoot!
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So, it looks like the CBB wasn't a terrible mistake, as far as I can tell thus far, at least. It's a very spastic, takes-its-time-and-gets-spooked-by-anything feeder, so, although I did watch it take a couple of pieces of mysis when I fed it earlier, I decided to rip off an idea I saw online the other day and make a feeder for it out of a piece of 3/4" PVC, two caps, and with a bunch of holes drilled in it. I stuffed this full of mysis shrimp, and after about an hour of dangling in the tank, the CBB seems to have figured it out.
Starvation, even if the fish wasn't eating prepared foods at all, wouldn't be a danger for a few weeks in my current tank; there's plenty of worms and such living in there that it'd find edible and palatable. Now I'm fairly well sure that this fish won't starve to death, at least, and the use of the little feeder lets me stuff other things in there too to get it used to them. Plus, the fact that it's habituated to the feeder will help out when I transfer everything to the larger tank, since not all of my current live rock is going in there, and the new rock won't really be populated with anything at all. Being able to use the feeder makes it easier to feed a couple of times a day to make up for the fact that the fish won't have all that much in the way of snacks available.
The critter's also very active, and was cruising around the tank all night. It hovers in one spot more than anywhere else -- right in the middle of the tank in front, right in front of the only cleaned patch of glass. I'm going to take this as a good sign, since a lot of keepers report that the fish will just hang out in one corner under a rock or something until they either get over being freaked out or die.
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| Saturday, February 27th, 2010
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10:52 pm - Progress!
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Okay, so I've finally got a heater int he tank and the circulation running. The water's almost clear again, and it's got three pre-cooked cocktail shrimp rotting away in it to cycle the dead rock. I've got the PVC to finish off the last little bit of apparatus on the end of the overflow to silence it (I'm essentially building a second durso -- sorta -- at the end of the line.)
I went into the fish store looking for a heater, a bucket of salt, and a couple of filter socks. I came out with a heater, a couple of filter socks, and a copperband butterflyfish. It's been actively out in the open and investigating my tank, and was eating frozen mysis and clams at the fish store, so hopefully this won't wind up being the usual CBB sob-story. Hopefuly it'll start dining on all the fucking aptasia in my 29.
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4:38 pm - Anybody who wants to watch a tsunami hit Hawaii live ...
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| Monday, February 22nd, 2010
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1:39 am - Progress!
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So I've done a quick-and-dirty leak test (just filling the rear portion of the overflow, where the pipes are plumbed through) and there're no leaks in the system as far as I can tell. I'll check again tomorrow to see if there's any salt creep under the tank, otherwise, I'm good to go to fill the thing. So I'll be doing that over the next ... several days. The slow rate of RO/DI water production kinda sucks. I wish I had a way to, say, make a 100g reservoir somewhere.
I got the rockwork in and adjusted, and laid down half the sand to stabilize everything. This shit's starting to come together. :)
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| Sunday, February 21st, 2010
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1:26 am - Tank update
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As many scratches as are coming out are out. I've siliconed in the bulkheads and basic tank plumbing, cut out the center prace, and epoxied in a lexan replacement.
Tomorrow: last-mile plumbing BS, test fill, and getting the base rockwork setup, hopefully.
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| Friday, February 19th, 2010
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4:31 am - Many shims later...
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...The tank is level. Why the fuck do I always live somewhere where the builder who was responsible for handling the level was both drunk and dyslexic?
I've got the plumbing mostly in, but I've gotta open up one of the holes in the top of the stand a bit more for it. Out comes a rasp, or possibly the jigsaw, but that can damned well wait for tomorrow. I'll probably cut out the old center brace and epoxy in a new one at the same time.
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| Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
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3:47 am - Update.
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Finished the stand, managed to cram the fuge into it (from the bottom ... it wouldn't fit in any other way. Whoops.)
There're a couple unsightly but very, very shallow scratches on the inside of the tank that I couldn't see until I cleaned the sumbitch. I'm ordering some cerium oxide buffing compound and a buffing wheel to take care of those. I find it neat enough that I'm going to handle a sample of an element that I"ve never encountered before in an isolated form that I don't mind the effort. Much. ;)
Once I get the scratches buffed out, I'll cut the carpet out from under the stand, level it, silicone the bulkheads, install the plumbing, and play with the rockwork. I'm praying that I can get all this done by the weekend, so that I can start filling the damned thing. I'm already about two weeks behind schedule.
The winter olympics have been interesting. I think my favorite sport so far is the new snowboard thing, where they've got four boarders at once going over a long track. Plenty of wipe outs and interference. %)
On that note, I still think it was a mistake to put the summer and winter olympics offset by two years rather than happening during the same year. You lose the whole Olympic Year momentum. I didn't even realise that the winter olympics were this year until about two weeks ago, and I didn't know when they actually were until about four days before.
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| Friday, February 12th, 2010
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9:08 pm - Yay!
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The stand is fundamentally done. For something slapped together out of structural plywood, 2x4s, and more goddamned screws than I could ever care to count, with no particular attention being paid to making it purdy, it looks pretty decent. With the tank and hood in place, it's pretty monolithic. I forgot to cut out holes for cords, but, meh, that's three minutes' work and it'll be in the back where you can't see it anyway.
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1:49 am - If you don't get a kick out of this, you probably don't belong here.
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| Sunday, January 31st, 2010
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4:22 am - Update
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After a burst of construction today, my new fish tank stand is about 85% completed, requiring only a couple more short struts and its plywood being cut and tacked on.
I am astonished by the number of screws I've put into the thing. And the amount of wood. (Probably about 65-70 feet of kiln-dried 2x4.)
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| Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
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1:27 am - Updates and Rambling
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I haven't precisely been doing a lot, but I've been doing a lot of getting ready to do stuff. I recently bought a 65 gallon tank, stand, and hood (used,) and right now I'm taking a break from re-arranging furniture and crap so that I can fit it in here. Then I'm going to have to make a stand, 'cause, after consideration, the one that came with it is far too short for my liking. Fortunately that's a relatively simple affair involving a lot of 4x4s, plywood, and screws. I think my engineering skills are up to the task. However, locals may want to keep an eye on the obituaries for "Man Killed in Strange Fish Tank Accident" headlines.
I do already have most of the rockwork together, yay. Marco dry rocks, well, rock.
I'm thinking about picking up an Arduino board and playing about with microprocessors and electronics. It's astonishing how cheap and how good some of the components have become. I mean, you can get MEMs-based gyroscope chips that NASA engineers would have killed for fifteen years ago. And interfacing them has become a lot easier; you can wire up just about any sensor or gyro with a one-dollar chip and a few components -- and a bit of programming -- so that it's about as close to plug-and-play as you can get with hardware at this level. Even the programming has become easier, with open-source libraries available to handle most of the things you would want to do with readily-available hardware, and high-level programming languages like Processing.
Anyway, it seems like something that I might have some fun with.
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| Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
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11:02 pm - Reef Tank Pics
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| Saturday, November 21st, 2009
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5:00 pm - Hooray, echinoderms!
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I love echinoderms. I think it may have something to do with the tube feet. Or the catch collagen. Or their lack of bilateral symmetry. Anyway, I got the neatest little red-spined blue tuxedo / pincushion urchin yesterday. It's about the size of a quarter. The unusual red spines -- they're usually brown -- are what made me buy it on impulse. I'd done research on them previously, so I knew that the worst it could do is pick up some polyps and possibly eat some coralline algae.
I may take some new pictures of the tank, and post them, later tonight.
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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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