Tracking Fun

My aquarium shipped! Hooray. I still have no place to put it. But it is not here yet.

But this is the 21st Century - not the stone age! And this means....UPS ONLINE PACKAGE TRACKING! So where is the aquarium at right now? Lets check!

Location	Date			Local Time	Description
ANAHEIM, CA, US	10/31/2007			8:40 P.M.	ORIGIN SCAN
	10/31/2007			8:31 P.M.	FORWARDED TO THE FACILITY IN THE DESTINATION CITY
US	10/31/2007			8:19 P.M.	BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED

When it does get here it will just remain in the shipping box - after I check for damage of course. I may set it up with just tap water in it to check for any leaks and / or other malfunctions. And I may want to modify it slightly. I like to tinker with things.

Daily tracking updates will be posted till I get my stuff, which should be on or before November 6.

And in other news - Halloween is over. Now normally we would get a break before the "Holiday Season" begins. I remember when the "Holiday Season" did not really start till AFTER Thanksgiving.

Those days are over. Left behind in the stone age. This is the 21st Century. The information age. We do not have time to wait around for things! Hell if I could download take-out food I would.

So when did "The Holidays" start on November 1? The ads for this season's Christmas movies are already out. Fred Claus is in theaters on the 9th. Got to get that money now before people spend it on other crap! And in the next few days all the other Christmas ads will be out. Malls will drag out all those darn decorations. Festive music will be playing everywhere. And so on. All this will happen in the next few days.

OPEN LETTER TO SEARS:

Halloween is over. So please pull your Craftsman "Happy Halloween" ad where a bunch of tools form a skeleton. We want Christmas ads! So lets get on the ball. Tell marketing to stop smoking the pot and get with the program already.

And now for something GROSS! Miller Chill - a "chelada style" light beer brewed with a hint of lime and salt.

Chelada style beer? What the crap is that? I have never heard of it. So I Googled it. And I found out that this style of beer is really NOT a style of beer - it is a mixed drink. About as much of a "style" of beer as the Irish Car Bomb.

HOW TO MAKE AN IRISH CAR BOMB

1/2 pint of Guinness or other stout

1/2 shot of Bailey's Irish Creme and 1/2 shot of Jameson Irish Whiskey in the same shot glass

Take the shot glass with the Bailey's and Jameson and drop it into the 1/2 pint of stout, then CHUG IT. Do not put the glass down till the shot glass hits your nose.

Clearly not a "beer style". So anyway in Mexico at some point someone decided to mix hot sauce with beer. Think of a "Bloody Mary" only use beer instead of vodka. In Spanish this is called "cerveza preparada " or "prepared beer". One form of prepared beer involves lime juice.

So there Miller Brewing Company! You are NOT producing any "style" of beer. You are producing a wimpy version of a mixed drink. But then again - most people will not care. They will drunk your swill and think it is "beer". I however will keep drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Sam Adams. Without any lime juice or salt. Cause that is how I roll.

One more thing. I have a wild hair up my ass to make a pumpkin pie without using anything from a can. This means using a real actual pumpkin! Not some crap in a can. Well I will have to use evaporated milk from a can. But I want to use a real pumpkin. A pie pumpkin. They are smaller than the Halloween pumpkins - and sweeter.

And no, I have no idea there these wild hairs come from. They just get up there somehow.

Fish Master!

A few people commented about the aquarium photo I posted yesterday. That is not a tank I own. It is just a photo of an Aquapod 12 gallon cube. There are a few companies that make these cubes. Oceanic makes the Bio Cubes, JBJ makes Nano Cubes, Currnet USA makes the Aquapods, and Red Sea makes the Max. They all have a few things in common. They are all in one units. The filters are hidden behind a false back. Most of them feature an overflow that skims the surface water, which then goes through mechanical, chemical, and biological filters - then the water is returned to the display tank. You can hide all the equipment you add behind the false back. So nothing is in the tank.

They are all good for saltwater or freshwater setups. For freshwater the cubes are good to go out of the box. Plenty of light for anything you might want to do. For saltwater you may have to go with an upgraded aquarium from nanocustoms.com or nanotuners.com. Both of these places upgrade the lighting (even adding HQI halide lights), adding additional controls so that each light can be turned on or off independently, fixes so that the LED night lights can be put on timers, chillers in case the heat from additional lights cause problems, and so on.

But you do not need any of that stuff if you are not going to get into high light requirement livestock - like stony corals, "giant clams", sea anemones, and so on. If you do not plan to keep any of those things, then the stock light is fine.

I am looking at the 8 - 12 gallon cubes. Maybe. I just do not know yet. It is tempting, but no. Maybe later. Not now.

Are they easy to maintain? Yes and no. The important thing with aquariums is to go SSSSSLLLLLOOOOOWWWWWW. Most problems are from people trying to cut corners. For saltwater this goes double. So here is my short "how to" guide for freshwater and saltwater.

SALTWATER:
1. Start off by buying your salt water from a fish store. If you mix your own start with reverse osmosis / deionized and/or distilled water. DO NOT collect ocean water from the beach. If you collect your own water, you need to go far enough offshore to get beyond the land pollution and go deep. I would not bother collecting any water from less than 200 - 400 feet deep.
2. Decide what you want to keep. This will determine what kind of lights you need.
3. Dump the bio balls that come with the tanks in the garbage. Live rock and a deep sand bed (at least 4 inches) is your bio filter. You should have at least 1 pound of rock per gallon of aquarium.
4. Go with oolitic sand for the sand bed. Seed it with live sand from a fish store, or from an online source. NEVER clean your deep sand bed. Stuff that lives in the sand will take care of that for you.
5. Once you add the water, the deep sand bed, and the live rocks - you have to cycle the tank. This takes some time. You will be testing your water. Your starting water should have 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite, and 0 nitrate. Within a few hours of adding the live rock you should start to test positive for ammonia. If more than 24 hours passes with no ammonia, you need to throw in a half of a frozen shrimp - finely diced. That should create an ammonia spike. Then test the water daily. You will see the ammonia spike, then drop rapidly. As the ammonia drops, nitrite will spike. Once that spikes, you will start to see nitrates.
6. At this point is when the fun begins. If you let the tank continue, eventually the nitrate will drop on its own - if your sand bed is deep enough. Of not then you may want to add a refugium - but this is more advanced. You can also just do a water change to bring the nitrate down. You want to keep nitrate as close to 0 as possible. Ammonia and nitrite HAS TO BE 0 at all times.
7. Water quality is maintained by water changes, a protein skimmer, a refugium - or a combination of any of the three. You really have to keep on top of this.

That is about it. Once your ammonia and nitrite have spiked and dropped to zero, you can start stocking AFTER a water change. But you can not just buy a bunch of stuff. The general rule for saltwater is one inch of fish for every 5 gallons of WATER. Keep in mind that rocks and sand displace water, so your 55 gallon aquarium does not really contain 55 gallons of water. This means you should not stock 11 inches of fish into a 55 gallon tank. And you have to keep compatibility in mine. Some fish may be small, but they require a large space. So you really have to do your research.

And you have to go slow. It could take a year for a saltwater tank to become fully established.

FRESHWATER SETUP:
1. Start with good quality water. This means reverse osmosis deionized and/or distilled water. It is worth the extra expense to do this. If you start off with distilled water, you can make the PH any value you want and you can make the water hard or soft. Different fish like different conditions. For example, angelfish and discus like slightly acidic water.
2. If you want plants, get a good substrate made for plants. I am using the Seachem Flourish aquarium gravel now. It is loaded with cleated iron which plants love. You can also do other stuff that involves multiple layers of stuff (clay, peat moss, black dirt, different grades of gravel, and sand), but this is complicated and can go wrong if you are not careful.
3. You still have to cycle the tank to get the biological filter going. You do this the same way you do for a saltwater tank. Put a little chunk of something organic in the water and let it decompose. Or put in a little white non sudsy ammonia in, to the point where your water tests 2 - 4 parts per million. Not very much - only a drop or two per gallon. Or less.
4. Even for freshwater, your bio filter is probably going to be the gravel. If you have aquarium save porous rocks (rocks that will NOT change PH or other water parameters) then they will be a good place for a bio filter too. Otherwise, you may need some bio balls.
5. Once you are cycled, stock slowly. The slower the better. One fish at a time.

Freshwater tanks only take a few months to establish.

If you have tried to keep sea monkeys (brine shrimp) and are wondering what happened, it is probably a few things. First off, you should not use tap water. You should use distilled water. Second you have to buffer the water for a stable PH. You need to adjust salinity properly. You have to have some kind of biological filter established. You need A LOT of oxygen dissolved in the water - usually done with a simple air pump and air stone. You should have gentle water flow - accomplished with the air stone. And you need a heater to keep the temperature stable.

If all this is too much - you are trying to go too fast. There are tons of books that contain great info. The hobby really is not that hard - you just have to plan everything out and go slow. You have to know what you want to keep, what conditions the things you want to keep require, and if everything you want to keep is compatible. Then carefully set up the tank, and take it slowly.

You can also get a fish store to maintain your saltwater tanks for you. They will set it up, and maintain it. They will send people to do the water changes. And so on.

The Worthless Item

A while ago I found this nifty looking device. It appeared to be some sort of sandwich making thing. Now this device has no instructions, but I figured it could not be that complicated. It is a clam shell "George Foreman Grill" type thing but for sandwiches. From what I see it can make two sandwiches at a time. I have no idea where it came from, it is just here.

So today I butter up four slices of bread, bust out some cheese, and warm up the device, put the bread in the thing so the butter side is touching the hot parts, and close it. Cool. Grilled cheese sandwiches! This is a nifty device indeed.

But to fully close the device I have to apply some pressure. And now some of the butter is leaking out. No big deal, it was just a little bit of butter.

The fun begins when I open the thing to check on the progress. The bread has stuck to the grill, despite the butter. And the cheese has melted and is all over the place. The sandwich seems to be grilled, so I unplug it. But the bread is stuck to the grill. I use a fork to get it unstuck and the cheese is now going everywhere. Burning onto the still hot grill surface.

So I conclude that the grill sucks ass. I am going to toss it. I do not want to clean it. It sucks. From now on I will just use a frying pan like a normal person.

I want to get an Aquapod 12. Or maybe a Bio Cube 8. I think one will make me feel better. I also want to revive my empty 55 gallon aquarium as a planted angelfish or discus tank. I could get it drilled and put a true overflow type device in it, with a sump. This is not usually done with freshwater, but I do not see why not. In the sump could go the heater, the filters, and stuff. I have another empty aquarium (30 gallon long) that I could turn into a sump easy.

Or I could set up the 55 gallon as a salt water fish and live rock tank. No corals. That way I would not need fancy expensive lights.

This is the Aquapod 12 gallon cube.

Fish Master!

I am the fish master. Behold, my Eclipse System 6 mini-aquarium!

See all that green stuff? Those are real live plants. I have one large Java Fern that is taking up almost all the tank, and another smaller plant I forgot the name of. This is fairly amazing to me, because the light situation in the tank is pretty crappy. The Eclipse system is pretty neat - the filter is in the hood of the tank so nothing hangs off the back. But the light situation sucks ass. I only have a measly 8 watt fluorescent light over 6 gallons of water. That is almost nothing.

So I did the best I could. I selected plants with low light requirements. And they seem to be doing very well! Those plants were placed in the tank at least 10 months ago.

When I set the tank up, I decided to experiment a little. My last freshwater tank was a 55 gallon tank with only 40 watts of light (less light per gallon than the little tank has). With limited resources (being in high school and stuff) I could never really do what I wanted.

The gravel in the little tank is special. It is called "SeaChem Flourite Red". What makes it so special is that it is fractured clay. It is loaded with all kinds of good stuff plant root systems need. It is not treated with any sort of additional chemicals, and is Ph neutral. If you use it, you do not really have to add anything else to the substrate for live plants to be happy. But the stuff is not cheap. A 7 kilogram bag (a little over 15 pounds) costs around $16 - $20 (depending on the store) and can be hard to find. One bag is enough for roughly a 10 gallon tank. So as you can see, for a 55 gallon tank I would need 6 or 7 bags - which would be costly.

But buying one bag for a little tank is not so bad. One word of caution - if you use this stuff it MUST be rinsed very well. It will take a while to do this. The stuff is silty as hell. It is clay after all - so in packaging and shipping a lot of fine dust is created. But once you flush the stuff well with running water you do not have a problem with it.

I do use ONE other additive for the plants. This stuff called "SeaChem Excel". It is supposed to be a liquid carbon supplement. See, plants need carbon dioxide. But adding a carbon dioxide device to such a small tank is a major pain in the ass. Plus, this thing was in my little office at work. I could not have all this equipment in there. It had to be a simple setup. It is easy to keep a bottle of mystery liquid locked up in my desk - it is not so easy to try to hide a CO2 tank under the desk. I do not know if the Excel stuff works like it says it does - but the plants are not dead! NOTE - for a few months no Excel was added to the tank as I was not there to do it. I would just show up from time to time to add more water.

Other than that - the only thing the plants got was the nitrate from the natural breakdown of organic material and fish waste.

WOW that was long! Anyway, this is the quick and short story of the plants. Flourite gravel, liquid Excel additive, and nitrate levels in the 20 - 40 ppm range. When I moved the tank home Friday I did not test the water, but the nitrate levels were probably a LOT higher. No water changed had been done for a long time. There was a lot of algae, a sign of high nitrate levels.

Now back to the photo! See that pink fish? On the left side of the tank? That is my sole surviving "Glo Zebra" fish. I had three of them at one point. The Glo Zebra fish are genetically modified with jellyfish DNA to make them that color. Normal zebras are white with black stripes. Or is it black with white stripes? Who knows. But they are NOT pink with yellow stripes. Under UV light the Glo Zebras are green! Freaky huh? They were invented in a lab in Taiwan, and may be used to test water quality at some point. The lab makes them unable to reproduce so there is no danger of them getting loose in the wild. Plus - they are bright pink! In a natural setting they would quickly get eaten, as it would be hard to hide. There is a reason nature did not make fish that color.

Friday there were only two fish. The Glo Zebra and one neon tetra. So I bought more, to make the tank look more like it did when I first set it up!

These are my neons. I have 6 of them. They are native to Peru and like neutral to slightly acidic water. I keep my little tank at a pH of 7.0 - neutral.

I also got some glass shrimp. These freshwater critters stay very small and are good scavengers. They will eat algae and other stuff they find. They will not get large enough to be a problem to the fish, and the fish will not get large enough to eat them.

I also got a "peppered catfish". This is what it looks like. Upon release in the tank it vanished in the plant forest, so this is a photo I found on the net. So is the shrimp photo. And the next photo.

This is a "pleco" catfish. They are also called "suckermouth catfish". They eat algae.

So there you have it. All the inhabitants of my little 6 gallon mini world. At this point the tank is probably slightly over stocked - but the bio wheel can handle the load. The plants will help soak up some of that nitrate. And of course, water changes will be required every now and then.

By the way, because the tank is so small I can use bottled distilled water. The great thing about this stuff is that it is just water. NOTHING else is in it. If you do a test, everything is zero except for pH which reads acidic. This means I can make it anything I want! Water in South Florida is hard as a rock so having a neutral, soft water aquarium is a royal pain in the ass to pull off. By going deionized I solve all those problems. I buffer the water for a neutral pH (which also makes the water slightly on the "soft" side) and dump it in! With a small tank, this does not cost too much.

I would very much like to set up a 90 gallon freshwater planted tank at home. I could do a lot with that size tank. But it will not be cheap! The lights alone would run into $500 or more. Then add the 9 bags (at least) of Flourite, the 90 gallons of reverse osmosis filtered water from the fish store (lugged home 20 gallons at a time in clean plastic gas cans that have never been used for gas), and all the other stuff and it works out to a lot.

By The Stubbing of My Toe, Something Stupid This Way Comes

Enter MacBeth.

OH WAIT! That is not how the play begins! I must have stolen that line from Mystery Science Theater 3000 or something.

Anyhow, I am in a rare good mood. Actually it is not so rare. It just is. I went and brought my ex-office Eclipse 6 home Friday. There were still two fish alive, and the thing was only low by about a half to three quarters of a gallon or so. Of course, the System 6 holds 6 gallons totally empty and filled to the rim - so figure the actual capacity is really 5 gallons once you add all the gravel and heater and whatnot to the thing. Also you never fill a tank up to the rim - there is always an air space under the hood. Unless you LIKE the thing to spill over that is. So anyway - it needed more water. I drained it, put the fish in a plastic water jug, bagged the plants, and removed it. Good thing I saved the box huh?

In its glory days, it had a lot more than 2 fish. I had a school of 7 or so neon tetras, three glow zebra fish, and some catfish. Probably too many for such a little tank but the water quality was always good. I may get more neons today. They look cool. The low light plants I have were just going wild. You should see it. I may take a picture of it and post it here. I have NEVER had a tank with plants that have done so well. It is like a forest in there. Soon the plants will grow to the point there will be no room for fish.

In other news - I want to blow some smoke up Sony's ass. See in 2003 I bought a fancy Sony digital camera.

This is the CyberShot F717. It is cool as hell. It has a Carl Ziess lens (quality optics), night shot, night framing (so you can use the night vision to frame your shot, but when you hit the shutter button the camera switches to daytime mode and pops off the flash), several pre-set light conditions PLUS an auto white balance mode, movie mode, it will take bracketed shots, it will take multiple shots (three in rapid fire mode) it has several ISO (light sensitivity) modes, two LCD displays (one large one and one little itty bitty one where the viewfinder on a SLR would be - so on bright days if you can not see the large LCD screen you switch to viewfinder mode), and so on. It is 5 mega pixels. Today you can get more mega pixles but in 2003 5 mega pixles was the shit. If you wanted more, you had to go super high end and pay twice as much for just a camera body with no lens.

Anyway, I got it from Best Buy. I had a 10% off any digital camera priced $299 or more, and a bonus offer of no interest for 12 or 24 months (I forgot) if I bought the thing with the Best Buy credit card. So I applied for instant store credit and went looking at cameras.

Now knowing that I was going to get a bunch of free financing IF the camera was $299 or more - as well as 10% off AND a bunch of Reward Zone points (double for using the card) I was set to buy something good. And by good I mean not the cheapest thing there.

It came down to a Nikon Cool Pix and the Sony. The Nikon was actually a tiny bit cheaper. But it did not have the large lens the Sony had, nor did the Nikon have a night vision photo mode. The Nikon would also not accept standard photographic filters. The Sony is threaded for 55mm filters (or something like that).

So I buy the Sony. For a little more than $700. It was expensive as hell. The most expensive digital camera in the store. But I did not have to pay the entire $700 at once. I had 2 years to pony up before a single finance charge was added.

I paid it off over 6 or 7 months. No big deal. The financing was free. Who said department store credit cards are always the worst?

Anyway - a few weeks ago the Sony died. It just quit working. I was charging it up for the a Shark Valley ride. When I turned it on to see how much battery life it had all I got was a black screen. The camera I used was borrowed from my dad. He paid like $200 for it, it is a whole lot smaller (and therefore easier to lug around), and is 7 mega pixels.

Now where was I? OH YEA! The Sony had died. I was thinking that I would just need another camera, because as much as I paid for the F717 was it worth fixing? Yea it is nice and has a ton of features and stuff - but what if the repair bill was going to be just as much as a new camera with more mega pixels?

So I do a Google search for the camera model and the word "repair". I quickly find that Sony announced that SOME of their digital still and video cameras had a CCD chip defect. They said that effected models would just have a black screen when the camera was turned on, and that they would fix the problem for free!

Free is for me. So I email Sony with the camera model number and serial number. The next day I get an email with a link to print out a UPS shipping label. I print out the label, box the camera up, and send it off.

I got the thing back Friday. All fixed! The camera has a brand new CCD chip and works great. At least I think it does. I will not know till later today when I try to photograph the Eclipse 6.

I have a few Sony products. The company is excellent at supporting the crap they sell. When the PS2 came out, the company continued to produce NEW games for the PS1 for at least a year, and continued to print game titles for even longer. Now that the PS3 is out have they abandoned all the PS2 owners? Nope! You can still but NEW PS2 games and even the PS2 units.

And they fixed the camera. Free. No problems at all. None of this "since your crap is old, here is a voucher so you can buy another one". I did not really WANT to buy another one. I wanted the camera I have to be fixed for free. Cause free is always better than shelling out more money.