New additions

Last night was my my 3 year anniversary with my wife so we went out to Mitchell's Steakhouse and then bowling after. I didn't do terribly bad bowling but we had fun because we were able to drink a bit. My wife surprised me with a nice cake that she had a girl from her work make. Actually it wasn't my wife, Pixie and Sasha surprised us but my wife did the talking with her friend.

After waking up a bit later this morning, my wife and I ventured out to do some errands and then I stopped by a local reefer's house to trade a coral we'd previously arranged the other day to trade. This guy has a very impressive setup. He has about a 300 or 400 gallon aquarium in his den, and it is plumbed to his basement where he has a frag tank and a sump, then everything is plumbed to a drain where which he uses to do easy water change outs. Anyway, I traded my colt coral mother colony for a baseball size Tan Montipora Digitata and a same 3" piece of a Red Monti Cap.

Here is a picture of them drip acclimating to my tank water.



Here is a picture of them a few minutes after they've been added to my tank. They are just getting used to it so their polyp extension won't be at it's maximum until a few days later but I will post more pictures later.

Tan Montipora Digitata

Red Monti Cap

I also got a Red Tuxedo Urchin in hopes of helping my hair algae problem.
I'm also thinking of plumbing a closed loop as well to distribute the flow a little better but I found out today that they make a rotating nozel for $15 that distributes the flow better. I'll ponder both ideas for the next update. Until then happy reefing!


1 HOUR UPDATE:
I just snapped another photo, it seems that the digi acclimated faster to the tank then what I had though. Here's his polyps extended, more photos to come in a few days.
Oh and here are my almost 3 year old clowns posing for a picture after checking out their new corals.

Increasing calcium and alkalinity in my tank

I started to dose kalkwasser in my tank to help maintain my calcium and alkalinity levels while also increasing my pH slightly since its a bit low. Kalkwasser is white powder that when mixed with water has a high calcium, pH, and alkalinity level it is basically pickling lime water that our grandparents would use to can vegetables but the pickling lime water is very hard to find these days.
In the picture below the tube on the right is the tube used to drip the kalkwasser into my sump. Attached to that line is a plastic piece that allows me to control the speed that my kalkwasser drips at much like an IV at the hospital. To start the kalkwasser all I have to do is blow in the tube on the left and the kalk drips out the tube on the right.
The only problem with this is the kalkwasser tends to settle over a couple of hours and you need to stir it. I remembered that I have an old hard drive (which have powerful magnets inside that help spin the harddrive) and some high strength magnets encased in plastic. So I made myself a magneting stiring device, only problem is the harddrive died on me when i placed the kalkwasser on top.





Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Fish tank update

Well, I am a horrible blogger, I never write. Well here's an update on my tank since you've last visited in May. As you know I had new tank syndrome and received a diatom bloom. That diatom bloom turned into a cyano bloom much to my fault and laziness I topped my tank off with fresh water from the tap. To the non-reefers here, that is bad because it contains all kinds of impurities. A cyano bloom is a film of a red algae and it looks horrid; I battled that for about 2 months by picking it out by hand and by dosing red slime remover in my tank. I eventually won, and as a prize I bought a pump for my tank. Part of the reason why it took so long to get rid of was because I had almost no water flow in the tank which all kinds of algae like. That pump increased my water flow but I then ran into another algae bloom, this time the good old green hair algae that everyone battles.

To date, I still have not beaten the green hair algae. I bought a seahare last week to mow down the algae and after the first 3 days he had done an excellent job. Almost all of it is gone, but after the first 3 days he died. Being distraught I took a water sample to the fish store for them to test it. They said other then my pH being a little low (7.9) and my Alkalinity a bit low (8 degrees KH) my other peramaters are perfect. They informed me that the low pH and alkalinity are not low enough to kill anything and they reassured me that I have no metals in my tank because my fish and corals would be dead as well. So the seahare died of A) poor acclimation, B) old age, C) choking to death from all the fabulous food I provided him. Either way his death looked bad, when I found him his intestine were hanging out of his mouth.

Another major issue with trying to beat the hair algae is not being able to keep my big snails alive. The snails dieing and the seahare dieing are completely unrelated, and the theory now is there is some type of predator in my tank like a pyramid snail. These little guys are the size of a grain of rice and prey on, among other things, turbo snails and clams. So, I decided to get a sixline wrasse to try and reduce the population. Anyway that is about it for now, below are some pictures I just took. I'll get an image of my new sixline wrasse up, he's being shy right now and enjoying the intricate cave system i have setup in my rock formation.


During my reef association's last auction I bought this Green Bubble Tip Anemone.



Here's a close up of my Acan coral, it's called an orange crush by many because the scientific name is hard to spell. If i could find a brown one of these i can fuse these two together and call it my Cleveland Browns coral.

Bytes Me

I've been into computers ever since I was in the 2nd grade. At the time my grandfather was was sick and he was at home with us for a while. He was very generous to our family but in particular to my sister and I. Regardless if my mom said "don't buy them anything," when he'd take us out he would still get us something. In the 2nd grade they bought me my first computer; my dad wanted the Laser 386. I don't think a single person knows what that is but it's what my dad's work used at the time.

We had this computer for a long time, it didn't have a hard drive at all, but it did have a 4 color monitor. Over the years I really learned how to use it fast, to the point that when I was in the 4th grade my teachers would ask for me to help them figure out how to fix certain things that were going wrong.

Computers have been my life for a very long time and I expect that they will be for a lot longer. But I've been going through many changes in the past few months beginning from retiring from World of Warcraft. I want to spend more time with my family and less time with my computer which is why I had to give up WOW. I do have to say that I am enjoying every bit of not being addicted anymore. Filling the void that addictive computer gaming filled, now lies a number of smaller projects and a couple of computer related items. First, I'm playing a new game but I am far from addicted. I've gotten back into baseball after a 3 year hiatus, and with being into baseball again I am playing a MLB 2K7. I also still use the computer for Internet related items, like doing research on my fish tank, or reading email, or talking to friends. I've also gotten back into my anarchist punk self a bit more that was hiding as I was addicted to MMORPGs which I liked and still like because it was a more educated self. I've gotten back into reading more political things and gotten into some political debates. A couple of guys at work who where in the debate with me told other co-workers that I'm like one of those pests that you take a shot at but they still keep coming back harder then before. I take that both as a compliment and an insult to be completely honest.

But how does this political anarchy really fit in with computers? I'm all about things being free and against Corporate America ruling the roost. 90% of my computers at home are fueled by software utilities that are completely freeware. I hold high standards when anyone does something that gets paid for including when I do something for someone else. My motto is, "if you are going to do something, you do it right the first time!" With that said I hate Microsoft, I hate Myspace, I hate Dell and Gateway, and I hate each and every other software/hardware company out there that try and make a buck because they don't want to put the necessary time in to fix a problem that they created.

Why is it that I have to buy added software to protect my PC and home network because Microsoft couldn't close the holes they created in the first place? It's because they want to slap a big sticker on the next software version saying "Now with added security software," and charge $200-300 more for that "feature." We should all be referring to these $200 "features" as "bugs!" I think I've had enough of this BS, can anyone reading this tell me how many computer viruses, worms, and types of spyware that can infect Windows right now at this moment? Can anyone tell me how many viruses, worms, and types of spyware that can infect a given Linux distribution? I can, 3. All three of them were developed as "test" viruses to prove that Linux is safe and reliable. Linux doesn't have spyware software or anti-virus software.

Linux is to a salad bar as Windows is to an all you can eat buffet. If there is something for Windows to eat, it's going to pile it high and pour chocolate sauce on it and shove it in it's fat face. Linux takes the healthier route in that it will see all the delights that lay in front of it and take what it needs and leaves the rest for everyone else to have.

I've been trying to find out what I truly wanted to do, stay with Windows and feel trapped like a mime in an invisible box, or move to Linux and smash that box into a million pieces. After much reflecting a few things really are driving me towards the change. Linux is open-source (depending on the distribution you get), so I don't have to feel trapped with no hope of something getting fixed. I had to ween myself off of World of Warcraft and it seems that I'll be weening myself off of Windows as well. I don't expect it to be hard, the only thing holding me back is the games run on Windows and not Linux, but with WINE I could get them to run fairly well. I think the learning curve is going to be hard to get over at first but I'm sure I'll be fine. My plan is to run a dual booting computer until I no longer use Windows anymore. I'm not sure yet how I'm going to partition my hard drive, but I'll probably have a Linux partition, windows partition, and maybe one or two more partitions.

Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome, even if you tell me to jump off a bridge. :)

From the beginning...

In the beginning...

March 19, 2005 I started a reef tank. A friend of mine in Cincinnati really recommended that I try a JBJ Lighting 24 gallon Nano-Cube. I got one and let the system cycle (the initial periodd when setting up a marine tank that allows for the growth of beneficial bacteria to break down ammonia and nitrites into nitrates) which took about 10 weeks.


After a while I finally added my first corals, a Kenya tree coral and a green star polyp. I've added many since then and moved everyone of them from Cincinnati to Columbus. I had a horrible diatom bloom for 3 months from the move but I still didn't lose a coral or fish in that process.

As my tank got better I added more corals to it. I attended Phishybusiness's store opening and bought a fox coral. I ended up losing that coral which I'm still not sure the reason but I think it's because the skeleton was damaged a bit. The other coral I lost was a candy cane coral. That one I lost because I had surgery and was in bed for a week before I can walk on my own. During that time my echinophyllia coral dismounted and landed face down on the coral. From there on out it was war between the two for about a week. I rescued the candy cane coral but it was too late for it, the echinophyllia was just too strong for it.


Onto the present time....

I obtained a great deal on a 50 gallon tank and 20 gallon long tank so I decided to upgrade my current fish tank. Here is a picture of during the cycling stage of the setup.
After about 2 months all my tests stayed consistant which meant the tank has
completed it's cycling phase. I added my clown fish this past weekend and their flower pot they call home.
They appear to really like their new home. It's over twice as big and has 3 times the water volume. My nitrates are still a bit high so after a few water changes I'll add the corals from my previous tank.

I noticed today when I came home from work that my fish felt at home and were in their flower pot. For those who don't know clownfish behavior, they will find an Anemone in the wild and "host" to it. That means they call it home. They spend a lot of time by their host and rarely venture off except for getting food. That being said, I have a reef tank and an anemone could spend a lot of time walking around stinging other corals till it finds a spot it likes to settle in. So I put a clay flower pot in it and mounted a Green Star Polyp to the pot to grow. I'm pretty happy how the new tank turned out. It was a huge learning experience for me. There are still a few things I need to do to the tank. I want to hard plumb the return pump, or at the very least put a union right out of the pump so I can get the darn thing out of the sump when I need to clean it. I'd probably also setup an overflow box inside the tank but with the placement of the whole in the back glass it would have been a really big hole so I didn't want it to distract from the rest of the tank.

That's about it for now, tune in next time for more updates....