Jeremy York

We’ve got two planted aquariums. I’ve decided upon the more natural approach to aquaria than what the pet stores will tell you – lots of live plants, real dirt as the substrate. This has its benefits – more natural environment for the fish, no worries about water quality. I only add water to replace evaporation, don’t worry about the filters much, and do water changes maybe every 4-5 months.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0967377307 This book by Diana Walstad was my inspiration. It’s a mix of relevent science, not so relevent science, and her own practices. It’s cool to see something more natural be more satisfying and less work.

However, the first aquarium that we set up this way has a serious algae problem. Maybe the plants were contaminated (there’s clearly algae growing on the plants at Denny’s Pet World), maybe it gets a lot more direct sunlight, I’m not sure why. It’s not pretty, and I worry about the angelfish in there not being able to swim freely for all the thread algae.

My goal is to move the fish out into a holding tank for a week or two, break down and clean the bejeezus out of the tank, move it into a location where it won’t get direct sunlight, buy some plants over the web from a reputable vendor, replant, and then move the fish back. Once I get started, I figure this is about a 3 week project.

to make empty chit chat is to ask people to tell you about whatever it says on their t-shirt. Even when they don’t actually know anything about what’s on their shirt, there’ll usually be a story for how they came to have it.

It’s so obvious to anyone with a clue, however, that I find it very annyoing when people use it on me.

In a past life as a door to door political fundraiser, I learned that bumperstickers are very handy for this sort of thing. They will give away the leanings of the people in the house, give you ideas for angles to work on them, etc. Makes me feel dirty just thinking about it.

Not really a bug, but confusing interface things are in my opinion worse than bugs.

The interface towards the bottom of most pages, that leads off “I want to” and has a button that says to add it to your list, looks a lot like a search interface. Yeah, so it’s clearly labelled, but people don’t actually read everything they click on. I entered some stupid thing there, let’s say “suck less” and all of a sudden I have a goal that’s entitled “suck less”, without going through any confirmation interface or anything. Meanwhile, when dropping that goal to “suck less”, I’m given the 5th degree – an extra screen devoted to scaring me with how I’ll never ever get to “suck less” again, any entries I’ve ever written about “suck less” will be gone, etc.