A few years ago my brother picked up drumming. He is pretty good, as a result of him getting into the ‘music scene’ I have inadvertently started to pay more attention to music. One of the bands I really learned to love in the past few years is Led Zepplin - especially the drums. This weekend I was goofing around on the computer and came across the following 12 minute (!) Moby Dick drum solo by John Bonham at a live concert. It simply amazes me how this guy just ‘rolls with it’ for so long. Rhythm ran through this guy’s veins.

I hired some new people a few weeks ago, and I am pretty excited to have a great new crew on board. Samy is also actively recruiting this perl developer from Flint, MI and had him in town for the weekend to see if he was interested in moving to LA. Samy, Giselle, Matt, David and this dude Noah from MI all hung out last night and geeked out while playing guitar hero. We talked mostly about security. I debated that rainbow tables were uninteresting to work on, and Samy explained how he found an undocumented heap-overflow in the authentication code in MySQL 4.1.12. After I got a bit tipsy I went onto silc - nologin and started bantering at old friends.

We talked about projects that we had been working on, and I realized that there is some really interesting non-work (and some work) code that I have developed over the past bit that is quite interesting. Considering that I teach a 3-day course on integrating IP PBX’s I figured I might make some of it release-worthy and begin posting it, better that than put it to waste.

Huzzah!

After having my halides in for a few months, all of the corals I have had have been doing very well. The LPS’s have been doing great with the exception of the Candy-Cane that kept getting buried by the gobies, I relocated him up onto the rocks but he lost a few heads.

We had a bit of a  hot day, and the tank got up to about 88F(!). Now I noticed that both my Orange Plating Monti and this other unnamed purple SPS bleached in small spots. It seems like the Moniti may be filling in that area with fresh (brown?) polyps but it is hard to say, there was definitely some damage.

I am looking on craigslist for a chiller - I have found a few JBJ models that will fit under my stand. I am hoping to get something in the 1/5th HP range to keep everything super-cool. My tank runs about constantly at 82F and I would like to take that down to 75 ideally. When I end up picking up a chiller I will also pick up a new return pump to drive it.

In other news - an acquaintance of mine was done with reef tanks and offered me her 12 Gallon stocked JBJ nano-cube. I was delighted to take everything, but I wasn’t sure about another reef tank. I ended up putting all of the livestock into my reef tank. The inventory included:

• Hawkfish
• Red-spotted Goby
• 1x Mexican Turbo Snail
• 8x Hermits
• Live sand (I put this into an old orange juice carton and put it into the sump)
• Live rock (also in sump)

I then ordered picked up some substrate and cleaned everything up. I still need to pick up some 8k bulbs and possibly a new return pump and then I can start seeding it with some plants and get it going. Thinking about bringing it to the office, we will see.

With the above stuff I also got 3 new 5-gallon buckets, bringing my count to 5. I decided to use 2 of them for RO and start topping off with RO water. I have already seen the positive benefits of this due to the total lack of cyano that use to be rampant.

So I found some cool dudes on craigslist that wanted to do some trades. I traded some nice pink pulsing Xenia for a huge two-head purple-tipped green frogspawn, and a 4-headed green candy-cane and a few mushroom frags. The guy I met had a 20k 250w DE halide that he wasn’t going to ever use. I went ahead and installed it today. I am not sure that I like the look, with the actinic supplementation the tank is VERY VERY blue! I am going to leave it in for a few days and see how the color looks then.

A few weeks ago I came across a problem with MySQL and Mediawiki that nobody on the internet seemed to be able to solve. I was able to figure it out and posted a little article on what I did. I have a number of other unique tricks up my sleeve i’ll post when I can.

http://obstinate.org/computing/making-mediawiki-urls-non-case-sensitive/

Over time, my little 3 gallon pico tank became overgrown. The Ritola Green was seriously taking up ALL of the space in the tank. I trimmed back about half of the growth in the tank and filled up 2 dixie cups worth of clippings. Revealing the substrate revealed an interesting suprise, there was film of detrius all over the bottom of the tank.

I wanted to get rid of this, so I took a little air-powered filter and stirred up the tank, after a few hours the tank was cleared of the detrius and had a good dosing of fresh carbon. Not having a filter in the tank for 6 months I can’t say that I am surprised at all of the detrius settling. I am going to leave the little filter on for a day, and stir everything up a few more times to get as much detritus out of the tank as possible.

So, for the first time ever with my reef tank, I have measured some of the chemical parameters. I was at a local LFS and they had a Reef testing kits by Aquarium Pharmaceuticals that tests the following:

• Calcium
• Phosphates
• Nitrite
• KH

So I tested each of them and ended up with the following paramaters:

• Calcium: 400ppm
• dKH: 9
• Phosphates: 0
• Nitrites: 0

I wanted to raise the Calcium a little so I dosed some Kalkwasser top off and ended up with 460ppm calcium without effecting the dKH (still at 9).

These are very healthy parameters. I am quite pleased, I should really check the PH, though.

So today I arrived in South Beach Miami. I am here for a trade show for work. I have never been to Florida before, but so far it is very neat. Our hotel is RIGHT on south-beach, like literally the back of the hotel borders sand. We arrived around 4pm local time and posed around south beach, because it is Monday night there isn’t much to do. However, even on Monday night there is something neat going on - we went to a bar called ‘Mangos’ which is like this latin club / bar. It had live Reggae music and dancing performances.

As we walked around south beach I saw about 5 places with ‘reef tanks’. They were actually FOWLR with tons of aptasia sp. :(.

This week should prove to be tons of fun, although I miss Giselle like crazy already :(.

So I wanted to post some quick shots of the progress on my Planted tanks over the past 2 months:

3 Gallon Pico

From a few months ago

January 19th 2008

12 Gallon Nano

A few months ago

January 19th 2008

Today I went with my Wife and a coworker to Disneyland. I am no stranger to Disneyland, about a year and a half ago my Wife and I got yearly passes, and we renewed them again this year. Today we went, and we largely just walked around, looking at the people, and some of the things none of us had seen before. We went and saw some of the first Mickey cartoons, and looked around at the miniatures. Our coworker brought a book that had all of these secrets about things.

One of the things the cast members at Disneyland did while building all of the attractions was put “Hidden Mickeys” into the rides. We found a bunch of them, in the Snow White ride on the turtle on the stairs, in the Pirates ride on a piece of armor at the end, and a few more.

I took a bunch of pictures, we showed up at about 4pm, the lighting was gorgeous and I took a bunch of pictures of reflections in the water, I am really impressed with how they came out. They are really much better than most pictures I am used to taking. I am going to start trying to take more pictures, hopefully they will come out half as good as these.

Castle Upsidedown	Castle in the Water	Castle in the Water
Castle	Castle	Trees in the Water
Trees in the Water	Trees in the Water	Tower in the Water
Bridge in the Water	Bridge in the Water	Statue