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Chair mat

I purchased one of these ES Robbins No Crack Chair Mats from Costco a few months back. Their claim to fame is that they will never crack. And they are backed by a lifetime guarantee. Well, let’s see… My mat now has multiple cracks - big and small - all from normal use (mat is on carpet with a standard office chair with rollers). So I figured I would look into taking advantage of the lifetime warranty. I visit the manufacturer’s site and come to find that they, in fact, do offer a lifetime warranty. However, they require a $20 shipping/handling fee to process the claim. Now wait a minute… if memory serves me, I only paid about $20-$25 for the mat in the first place. What kind of a guarantee is that? Guess I’ll be sure and look into the warranty in the future. What a rip-off!

How do they look?

One of the pieces of live rock I purchased from a local WAMAS participant had some frags of a Devils Hand and a decent chunk of Red Cap Monti on it. Unfortunately, his tank water was going through a rough patch, and it was full of algae. I removed much of the algae from the rocks I purchased and tried to work around the Devils Hand and Monti. However, both look like they are in pretty bad shape. I’m trying to do some research on how to determine if the Devils Hand and Monti are too far gone. If they are, I’d rather scrape them off. If anyone has input, it would be great. Here are some photos.

And I still want to know what this mollusk is.

The bigger versions can be seen here.

BioCube setup

As mentioned yesterday, I went ahead and purchased a BioCube to replace the little 10 gallon tank. It’s a 29 gallon Oceanic BioCube. The 14 gallon was nice, but I knew I would outgrow it too quickly.

I plan to upgrade the lighting via NanoTuners soon, and I plan to get the BioCube Skimmer as well. I’ve noticed that the stock fans are rather annoying, so I’m glad the lighting upgrade includes some new fans. Hopefully they will be silent. If not, I’ll hit a computer store for some decent fans. It’s almost as if the stock fans are too loose in the casing.

I removed the bioballs that are included in chamber 2 of the tank and replaced them with cheato algae and some live rock rubble. I need to get a submersible halogen, so the cheato can sustain itself. I knocked the false bottom out of chamber 1 and added a heater and some ChemiPure. Chamber 3 only contains the return pump at this time. I’m not sure if I want to replace the stock pump with something stronger or just use the MaxiJet 1200 in the tank as I currently have it.

I setup the tank on May 18 and have been tinkering with it since. I moved everything from the 10 gallon over to this tank, so it was already cycled for the most part. I know it will require a bit more time to get settled and ready for livestock. In addition to what was already in the 10 gallon, I added another 20 pounds of the same kind of live sand. I also picked up about 12 pounds of live rock from a local WAMAS participant. I plan to get a bit more live rock and some rubble.

So here come the pictures. And you can certainly see more at the site I posted previously - here.

This first picture is from the day after I bought the tank. I had just added everything from the 10 gallon tank, the extra sand and some freshly mixed water. Of course, the sand is fogging up the water, but the moon lights make it pretty anyway. Taken on May 18.

This picture shows the filter chambers in the back of the BioCube. I added a slice of filter floss to chamber 2 to help filter out some of the floating sand.

So everything decided to settle, and I picked up the additional live rock. After a few arrangements, I found one I liked. Taken on May 24.

Another shot of the new live rock and the arrangement.

More later…

Logging my reef aquarium build

I’ve been keeping freshwater tanks for a few years now. After quite a bit of research, I’ve decided to give saltwater a try. My preference is to build a nano reef tank and go from there. I figured I would keep a log of sorts on this blog. So here goes…

I started things out by taking advantage of an old 10 gallon tank I had sitting around collecting dust. Here is what I threw into the tank to get started:

• Culligan RO water from Walmart mixed with CoraLife Salt
• 20 pounds of CaribSea Ocean Direct Caribbean Live Sand
• Almost 12 pounds of Fiji Live Rock - not a lot of life witnessed so far; nice coralline buildup and a few feather dusters; found a mollusk of some sort that came along for the ride (not sure what it is yet)
• 24 inch Coralife 65W 50/50 lighting
• 50 watt heater (not sure the brand at the moment)
• Small tank hang-on back filter (not sure the brand at the moment)
• MaxiJet 1200 for flow

Water was set up for a day or two. Picture below is after adding the sand bed and live rock. Taken on May 8.

After a few days of settling and rearranging things. Taken on May 12.

After more filtering of the water. Taken on May 15.

I decided to pick up a Biocube, so there will be more to come.

More pics will be added here.

Can my mom help her?

Seven year old goes on a “hoodrat” ride in his grandmother’s SUV.

Linkage

Photo tagging

I just wrapped up about a month’s worth of effort tagging and uploading my photo library to SmugMug. I used Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Windows Live Photo Gallery to tag and sort my photos. Then I used the Lightroom Export Plugin for SmugMug to upload about 6,000 of the photos to my SmugMug account.

Tagging the photos was pure torture. And many of my photos had missing timestamps for the date taken, so sorting was a joy. But I finally wrapped it all up. And now I have a process for future photos.

That will teach her

I’ve never even thought of power washing my kid when he gets out of line. I’ve been doing it all wrong!

People are crazy!

Loaded 4 year old

What in the world is a 4-year old doing with booze?

TSA owns you

Could this be any more spot on?

Giants win! Giants win!

Peyton’s brother just won the Super Bowl.