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Salt water blues

Better living through chemistry, originally uploaded by Gavatron.

I’ve lived with a saltwater aquarium for the past two-ish years now, ever since Heather moved into the apartment. To this point, I’ve been pretty hands off the whole endeavour, not because I wasn’t interested, but because of the steep learning curve associated with keeping a salt water tank. Heather’s picasso triggerfish (Rhinecanthus aculeatus), Trigger, shed his mortal coil on the day that I returned from the Yukon. You can read into that act what you wish.

We had talked about changing the kind of tank, from a fish (one fish, really) to a reef tank. It’s proving to be challenging. Mysteriously, the three shrimp purchased for the tank have all died. They were all delicious (just kidding!). When two expired sometime on Friday night / Saturday morning, it was time to figure out what was going on.

A battery of tests later, we now know that the Nitrate levels in the tank were waay too high for the shrimp (curiously, we have blue-legged hermit crabs in the tank and they seem to be doing fine). What all of this means exactly, I don’t know. This is where the learning curve comes in. So the plan has been to aggressively cycle the water (we did a 20% replacement on Saturday and a 20% replacement on Sunday). I tested Nitrates today and frustratingly, the level doesn’t seem to have come down. Our ammonia levels are down (to undetectable) but our phosphate appears to be up.

Ollie & Muffet race at the BTCO Fun Day



Ollie & Muffet race at the BTCO Fun Day, originally uploaded by Gavatron.

Today was the 2007 running of the Border Terriers at the BTCO’s annual fun day. What a blast. Ollie had a great time going after terrified rats, racing with other BTs down the track and bobbing for hotdogs.

Ollie is in full-stride on the right. Muffet is racing beside him. Muffet and Ollie are both Foxrun Border Terriers (meaning they’re from the same breeder).

Extending Flickr – the Greasemonkey Scripts

So, I’m a big fan and enthusiastic user of Flickr. Its helped me get about 15.3x the enjoyment out of taking photographs then I had prior to becoming a member. And while the site is pretty intuitive and easy to use, I’ve found some extra tools that help make Flickring easier, and that are easy for anyone to install and use.

For my first battery of tools require that you have Mozilla’s Firefox browser and the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox installed. Once Greasemonkey is installed, simply follow the links below to the Userscript website and click the install button in the upper right-hand corner (with the exception of the Buddy Icon Reply).

Greasemonkey Userscripts

Flickr Refer Comment

Refer Comment
This script will automatically add the appropriate HTML in the bottom of a comment you’re making so that other reader will know how you found / where you saw their photo. Link

Buddy Icon Reply

buddy icon reply

Add the personalized touch of replying to a photo commenter by name or by icon. By clicking on either name or icon reply, the script adds the appropriate HTML into your comment box so. Link

Flickr EXIF Decorator

EXIF Data

A favourite script of mine. When you hover over a photograph, a translucent box appears with some of the more pertinent technical data about the photograph you’re looking at. A great way to learn what others have done to get a particular look. Link

Multi-group sender

multi-group sender

Again, a very useful script. It was a repetitive & huge waste of time to add photos to groups. With this script, its a matter of selecting all the groups at once (with the assistance of the CTRL key) and sending the photo on its way. Link

How interesting?

How interesting?

In a pretty straight-forward manner, this script will let you know how, relative to your other photographs, interesting a particular photo is. Link

Reset Flickr comments

Reset Comments

This script solves a particular peeve of mine: the persistence of the “new” icon beside comments when, in fact, there are no new comments. In the past, I would have to close the browser to “reset” the new icon. Now, with this script installed, when you hover over the “new” button, a “reset” icon appears. Click on it and your comments are re-set. No need to close and open the browser. Link