ToasterWaffles

Fish like laser pointers as much as cats! Since my phone can’t take video you’ll have to try it yourself.

Astounding.

1. I can blog from my BlackBerry via Opera. Cool!

2. I’m at the local fish store (aquatic warehouse) and saw this awesome 600 gallon aquarium they’re setting up. Apparently the file uploader doesn’t work in Opera. The pic will wait until I get home.

(She’s in my old 29 gallon aquarium)

While I was in Europe, Jess bought some more lights for the aquarium. These are high output (HO) T5’s, a type of fluorescent bulb. Basically they’re standard compact flourescent bulbs that have been straightened out and shrunk to about 5/8’s of an inch diameter. They’re small, bright, efficient, and run cool. They make great fill lighting, as you can see!

At this point our tank robot (an AquaController III) is really becoming a life saver. Between the main tank (4 lights), frag tank (2 lights), dosing pump (dose for 7 minutes every hour between 5am and 7pm), and the probes (temperature, pH, and ORP) we’re getting a lot of bang for the buck.

To put it another way, all the automated stuff fits in 46 lines of “code”. That controls turning on and off the lights 5 minutes apart from each other, the dosing pump, and keeps a graph of the water temperature, pH, and ORP (“cleanliness”).

For the first time in nearly forever, our aquarium is back inside the house! It’s been at least three years since we’ve had an aquarium inside the house — that being the 29 gallon we had in our bedroom. For the record, don’t put aquariums in bedrooms; it doesn’t work out.

Once the water clears up a bit I’ll post more photos. Of note in this move is that we added about 88 pounds of new rock. That 88 pounds was about 3 pieces worth; they’re ginormous!

It took seven of us to make an incredibly long walk with the tank to get it in the house. We couldn’t just back the U Haul up to the garage and take it a few feet, we had to go a freaking Marathon around the house so that we could get it through doorways and such that were straight enough. There honestly were a few seconds near the end when I thought we wouldn’t make it.

Mad thanks to: Charles, Mitch, Mitch’s Girlfriend (missed your name!), Nick, and Vinit. Without you it wouldn’t have been possible!

There is still one little hitch. If you look closely at the bottom left of that photo you’ll notice a cable coming out of the wall. That’s the cable for the TV. We haven’t routed that where it needs to go just yet. Hopefully we can get some help for that soon.

If there’s some part of the tank you’d like me to focus on when I take photos, leave a comment. I’ll accommodate everybody!

Yesterday I took Jess up to LA to see Pan’s Labyrinth. On the way up we stopped at Tong’s which is renowned for it’s display tanks. Since we had the camera I snapped a few photos. I’d like to take all the credit for these, but Tong’s makes it reeeeally easy to take pretty pictures. The tanks are just astounding in person and taking photos is pretty easy.

Jess decided to get uppity with me and bash me over the head until I went into the garage and took photos. Below are the results. We tried to get a photo of each fish but that’s really hard. Once we’ve accumulated a complete collection I’ll put up a composite.

… and finally, Jess wouldn’t let me out of the cold until she had a few full-tank shots to show off with.

High resolution

High resolution

So long Bongo, you were an awesome fish. Why you decided to go exploring on the floor behind the tank I’ll never understand. I hope you found what you were looking for.

To know Bongo, was to like Bongo. Everybody commented on him. Everybody. He had more personality in his little fishy eyebrows than some people have in their whole bodies.

When we first got him he knew how to eat algae off of rocks. We thought “Cool, he’s vegetarian like us!” Eventually he learned to pick the food pellets we fed off the ground and rocks. He wasn’t coordinated enough to catch them out of the water column just yet. Not too long later he learned how to do that too.

I think that’s part of what people liked about him. Watching him eat. He looked just like Homer Simpson eating potato chips in space.

He also learned to dance. There was a point where he would come up to the glass and wiggle back and forth really fast if somebody was watching him. It was awesome. I think people also liked his eye brows. There was a tang that liked them a lot. A little too much — he kept trying to eat them!

He was a good fish, and he’ll be missed.

Friday I loaded up Brahm’s truck, Jess and I packed up her car, and we headed up to Mammoth. On the way we picked up Charles so he could join in the fun. Somewhere north of Corona we got a great phone call — they guy with the 180g for sale still has it and will sell it to us! w00t! That tank will cost us $500 and includes a nice return pump. To order a similar tank (with nicer glass on the front) would have cost us about $1,600. Awesome. The drive up was pretty uneventful until we passed Bishop. Up to that point the truck had been doing very well on gas, but Bishop marks the start of the climb up to Mammoth and the gas needle plummeted as the truck ran out of air to suck in. I made it to the gas station in Mammoth but only barely.


Setting up the tank was your standard crazy affair. Here’s 12 hours compressed into 24 seconds:

Our lovely new 180g has a crack.

A big crack spanning the entire height of the tank, near the middle.

It makes a lovely arc of despair and destruction.

We just finished getting it set up.

I didn’t get to take even one decent picture of Brahm’s aquascaping. In 30 minutes we had it gutted and the water down to the minimum.

I’m so grateful that rkd2 was still around. We put most of the rock/coral in there and left the fish in the tank for fear of them jumping out of the bin.

I duct taped the hell out of the crack to 1) stop as much leaking as possible, and 2) keep it from fully falling apart.

I doubt we’ll get much sleep tonight.

It was a damn lovely tank.

UPDATED:
History:

1. I saw two strange bubbles between the glass and the black backing on the tank
2. I also noticed the back of the stand had a little bit of water on it
3. There was a small puddle on the floor, nothing big.
4. Popped bubbles and had salt water come up
5. Tear off backing to find a crack going from the bottom of the tank to the right brace
6. Quickly siphon 80% of water into RK2 bin to relieve pressure
7. Move rock & most corals into RK2 bin
8. Duct tape the hell out of the crack to prevent further leaking/cracking
9. Leave fish in tank with pumps & heaters (they could jump out of the RK2)
10. Start looking for a new tank