When my friend showed me the Christmas lights people were decorating their houses with in some areas in Centurion, I was amazed since I never realised we have some of the spirit one can find in Europe...
Here are a couple of pics.
December 2006 Archives
I take many, many photos of my daughter. Many of them are very nice, however the other day I took one that stood out from the crowd. It is a photo that captured the essence of who she is, and that is really something special to achieve.
Let the picture talk for itself.
Everyone that knows me know that my biggest passion in life (apart from the obvious things such as my wife and daughter) is computers. Therefore it should come as no surprise that I like to equip myself with only the best. Here is the latest addition to my main workstation - my Mac Pro 2 x 3.0GHz Xeon Dual Core, 3GiB RAM, 512MB ATI X1900, 1TB monster - Apple's 30" Cinema Display:
As was mentioned in the previous post, I recently upgraded my lighting. I currently have 8 x 54W T5 lights. To illustrate the difference it would make, I took a couple of photos.
First some background. The tank has glass top covers to prevent splashing of water, reduce evaporation and help keep the fish in the water. Obviously with time these glass covers get lots of salt residue on them. This reduces the amount of light reaching the water column. I never cleaned mine since I never thought about its effect on the lighting.
The 4 x 54W T5 I originally had in there consisted of 2 fittings of 2 T5’s with individual reflectors. Due to space restrictions I had to add a 4 x 54W T5 fitting - with one common reflector.
Here is a picture before I did anything:
Then I cleaned out the top glass panes:
Then I moved the two fittings to the front and back to make room for the quad:
Then I added the quad fitting, but turned off the original two fittings - so only the quad is on:
Then all 8 tubes on:
It is obvious the lighting has been increased dramatically. Oh by the way - the camera was on manual exposure so as to measure the relative effect of the lighting increase.
It is 1 month now since the move and a couple of things had happened. Firstly, I lost a couple of live stock during the immediate days following the move, as well as a couple of weeks later (I doubt it was due to the move).
I lost my Frogfish, my Leaffish and one Chromis. The Leaffish was in bad shape before the move - I think it got some kind of bacterial infection since it looked like it was molting but looking like that for 3 weeks - and refusing to eat the whole time.
The Frogfish - yeah well, I think the stress was maybe a bit too much.
And the Chromis just disappeared without a trace...
A couple of weeks later I had my Ocellaris Clownfish disappear, followed by my Purple Firefish. I think something must have either caught them or scared them to death, since they were in perfect health the day before. I caught my Purple Tang becoming belligerent towards all my other fish, so I decided it was time to move the aggressor to it’s own clan - the Aggressive FOWLR tank.
To help combat the flatworm outbreak I encountered in my FOWLR tank, I added a couple of wrasses - a Yellow Wrasse, a Coris and a Dragon Wrasse. It seems like they are keeping the population down but they do not eat the brown flatworms - only the yellow ones.
I also got a snowflake eel for the aggressive tank. I added lots of macro algae (seaweed) to that tank to make it look more colourful.
I tried my hand at a Pulsing Xenia - it looked fine for two days then melted away overnight. I have no idea why it would have died but I know I will not try another one soon.
Since I am battling high nitrates in the FOWLR tank (probably due to the lack of LR - I only have 15kg in a 400l tank), I took a ball of cheato from my main tank and placed it in the sump of the FOWLR tank, and added 2 x 24W T5 lights. Hopefully this will also help seed the pod population.
The CO2 bottle I used to have got deprecated in favour of a new Tunze CO2 system with solenoid. At least now I am automated again.
I have fixed all the wiring in the fish room so everything is easily accessible. It took some time but it is done. Oh yeah - I also upgraded my lighting in my main tank - I added a 4 x 54W Quad T5 fitting, so I now have 8 x 54W T5 lights in there. This is to help the clams out as well as the Acropora I purchased.
