GeekBrit's Aquarium

Dr Seuss Kids Clothes

2011-04-26T12:46:00.000-07:00

Division by God

2010-08-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

Imagine if you will, that the Universe is the creation of an all-seeing, all-powerful God. Imagine further that this Creator is aware of every single entity that has ever lived on every single world that he/she/it has caused to come into existence. Suppose also that of those teeming billions upon billions of life forms, the Creator has decided to favor one species - humans - above all others with knowledge of the Creator's existence, and has done so by interceding directly in the lives of people living on Earth, causing them to record words uttered directly to them by the Creator of the Universe.

Let's take all the above as being true - after all, this much is common belief among most religions. The question I would have to ask is, given the omnipresence and omniscience of the Creator, why wouldn't this God make the same message known to all people, at the same time? Why would there be any ambiguity in the message, and why would some claim to have completely antithetical instructions from their deity?

The disagreements over God's message to Humanity have caused more pain and suffering than almost any other factor in human behavior, throughout recorded history and it seems not unreasonable to assume, for a great deal longer.

Some would say that the reasons for the confusion and conflict is the fault of the imperfect vessels (humans) for God's perfect message. I would suggest in response that this indicates the plausibility of one of three possible conclusions about the nature of God that can be deduced through consideration of claims of God's message to his Faithful. The first conclusion has to be that God is incompetent. If this were not so, God would have put in place safeguards to ensure that in case of doubt, it would be possible to refer to the original message - inscribed with plentiful illustrations and examples in titanium supernaturally infused into clearest diamond perhaps, or when questions arise we would be able to have a quick word with a heavenly Customer Service representative - anything except a body of morally-suspect old men with a vested interest in manipulating interpretation of the 'message' to their own ends.

That seems a little harsh in retrospect. Let's assume that a Creator who made this magnificent enormous Universe to live in isn't ham-fisted or incompetent. What does that leave? Well, God could be... whisper it softly... dead. I guess that could explain why the message became corrupted and misused to justify suppression, torture, killing of all non-believers by many who cleave to one faith or another - God just wasn't there to fix things when these silly humans went off-course.

There is another possibility what if the entity or entities that formulated all these varied and conflicting versions of the "One True Faith" were actually just a teeny bit evil? This option doesn't actually require the Creator to get involved at all - doesn't it strike you as just a little egotistical to believe that the lord of all Creation has a personal interest in your species, let alone whether you get a better job or avoid a mugging on the way home?

So there you have it. The Creator from your holy book is incompetent or negligent, doesn't exist, or is actively malevolent, delighting in causing all the struggles big and small between extremists of all persuasions. I leave you to determine how a Loving, Caring God fails to fall into any of these categories given the evidence of the last week (any week), and whether this deity is truly worthy or even aware of your saccharine praises. May your God go with you.

Quotable quotes

2007-06-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
- Steven Weinberg

This entry doesn't have a title

2007-05-10T14:30:00.001-07:00

I am:

Robert A. Heinlein

Beginning with technological action stories and progressing to epics with religious overtones, this take-no-prisoners writer racked up some huge sales numbers.

Which science fiction writer are you?

In The Mob

2006-12-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

Well, I can't tell you about the outcome of the show, and I'm not even sure I can tell you how I did as a contestant in "The Mob" - I'll just say I didn't disgrace myself. Apart from the legal aspects, I wouldn't want to spoil the fun ;)

So I'll just say that the taping of the 1 vs 100 show last Friday was a hell of a lot of fun, and even the waiting around wasn't too bad - with a hundred or so other hopefuls sitting around with you, there's always someone to talk to.

The casting directors are very proficient, and surprisingly polite - I would imagine that it can be very frustrating working with large numbers of people, none of whom know what's going on, while trying to coordinate the taping of three shows in a day. The analogy to "herding cats" is most apt.

After queuing outside Security Gate 3 at Culver Studios, the day starts off (at 8am for my group) when everyone is escorted into a huge empty sound studio where you collect your name badge before presenting ID & Social Security Number card at the 'accounting' table. Coffee and breakfast items are available, and the first hour of waiting begins at a set of bare wooden tables. When you sit down, you'll find the Official Rules of the game and the legal contract on the table, along with a pen - don't start filling it in, at 9am, one of the directors stood up and explained what you need to write in each section. It's worth reading through the legal contract though - the clauses and legal retribution that you sign up for are intentionally scary. My favorite clause was that I grant the right for the program that I appear in to be broadcast throughout the Universe without any compensation. Personally, I'm ok with everything up to the edge of the Solar System, but I'd really like to hold out for a cut of all royalties earned from Alpha Centauri & beyond.

On your name badge, you'll find a three-character code; the final character is a number between 1 and 4. We all speculated that this is related to the score you achieved in the trivia test at the audition, since the directors are careful not to get too many of any one 'grade' when they're assembling The Mob for the next show - I nearly got into the first taping of the day, but they had enough of my grade already. I was a 4, and I'm still undecided as to whether that means I'm a really bright spark, or thick as sh!t.

We were called through to a curtained-off section by name-tag 'grades' and seated in grade-groups on comfy grey sofas. There are also one hundred folding chairs that are used when assembling the next Mob, and some of these were occupied by people who hadn't managed to get onto the show the previous day, or who were returning players.

At this point, an independent observer went through the legal obligations and other rules again, with dire threats in case of contravention of the rules. No one decided to back out. I however, was increasingly uncomfortable with one of the requirements - you have to be a legal resident of the United States. Now, I'm here legally, with a work visa, and I'm a resident for tax purposes, but my permanent residency application is still pending. (Heck, I can't even claim more than one allowance, so I'm paying MORE tax than permanent residents and citizens). I decided to go and ask the independent adjudicator guy if this was a problem, because if it was, I was going to step down and walk away. They took down some details (British & Canadian citizenship etc) then they spent the next half hour looking into it, before deciding it was ok. The nice thing about that was, every time one of the casting directors spoke to me after that, they called me by name, rather than saying "oy - you in the blue shirt - yes, you - you're going to be number 54" etc.

Sooo... at 2pm (remember, I got up at 5:20am to drive to Culver City), my group shuffled to the stage next door where the taping was being carried out. I was number 83 - and let me tell you, the second row from the top is STILL pretty high. The stage manager told us to be rowdy, and man, we were ROWDY. The studio lights were intense, but at least it was warm (the waiting area is more than a little chilly - well, what can you expect? The ceiling is about 50ft high, and they keep the door open all day). The show that I'm on has a famous gymnast and her husband, stars from a soap opera and eleven "men in black" - you'll get it when you see it - as the 'special groups'. It should be aired on either the third or fourth Friday in January 2007.

The taping took a little over two hours - and during that time the Mob has to stand at all times except for the odd two-minute break. There's a little butt-perch at the back of the 'pod'. The Contestant and Bob Saget however seem to be on their feet the whole time.

Bob Saget is fun, and he has to think very fast to ad lib questions and comments. He does however have a little difficulty pronouncing foreign names - one question took at least five takes, and they ended up recording audio only so they could dub in a voiceover! I'm going to leave further details of the taping till another posting - I can't afford to give anything away!

Andrea Godin

2006-12-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

My daughter Emmy sent me this youtube clip of one of her friends perfroming live at the St George Applefest in Canada - I think this young lady will go far. Remember, you saw her here first!

P.S. - I have been invited to be part of the Mob on 1vs100 - taping at 8am next Friday! Wish me luck!

P.P.S - We have our first second generation baby seahorse! I dunno if there's only one because the litluns born in August are still not fully grown, or because I disturbed the 'happy couple' by starting to clean the tank while they were exchanging eggs, but I think this is a good sign :) A few more and I'll start sending breeding groups out to other people - spreading tank-bred seahorses conserves wild stocks.

Competition... find the craziest stuff on eBay

2006-11-24T13:22:00.000-08:00

Ok, this caught my attention when I was smurfing through ebay today:
Pound for pound, possibly the most expensive dirt on ebay.

Is this guy for real? Who would pay $200 for a few grams of dirt that have been on the International Space Station? Well, good luck to him!

There's a bunch of crazy things on ebay - someone must be able to find something that beats my crud from the ISS, post your findings in a comment!

Update: I'll be darned... he got a buyer!!!

ChicNeanderthal

2006-11-18T19:52:00.000-08:00

I just found a couple of letters that I wrote for my friend's online magazine "ChicNeanderthal" a few years ago, and thought I'd share them with you...

Sir,

As the duly elected representative of the people, vis-a-vis the Council of Elders, Shamans and Tribal-chiefs, I am writing to inform you that the Council has today initiated legal procedings to have this den of iniquity, this hotbed of dangerous new ways of thinking, this so-called "ChicNeanderthal" wound up.

We have consulted the highest legal baboons, and they concur with our contention that incitement to evolution is a grave contravention of natural law. Remember what happened to our good friends the Australiopilithicans? Evolved specialised mouthparts to drink happy-juice from the shub-shub plant just as the shub-shub plant evolved into Stinking Milkwort. One generation and they were gone. That's what evolution does for you, young man.

Honestly, you've got it coming to you, what with your fancy lah-di-dah friends with their fancy names like "Alf", "Bert" and "Elsie". Zog was good enough for me, your grandfather and so on for as many generations as we can count. Er.. that's about three I think, I'll have to consult the lemurs on that one.

Be warned, you young fops, I'm not saying that I have any control over the more militant Neanderthals, but there's those who say that the editors of ChicNeanderthal have gone too far, and that this HERESY AND POISON OF THE MIND WILL BE WIPED FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH WITH THE FIRE THAT BURNS AND MAKES DAMP THINGS DRY. Damn. I think I might have given away a guild secret there.

On a more personal note, could you bring a few copies of your newspaper round when you come home? We're almost completely out in the privy. Oh, and Mum says to look in on your Aunt Auguthta when you get time, because the mammoths are eating her washing again.

Zog Wogan-Golightly, Elected Elder of Little Dumpling, Wimpstonshire

Editor's reply

Sir, this is a weighty matter indeed. Your thinly-veiled threats of violence are of no consequence to us. Evolution is a one-way superhighway to the myriad campfires in the sky, and ChicNeanderthal is determined to lead the way. I feel an editorial coming on. And the baboons are liars.

Tell Mum I've got an idea for keeping the mammoths away from Auntie's washing. Can she get me lots of pointy sticks and some string from the shops?

Dear Sir,

My good friend Wilkins and I were recently engaged in idle chatter down at the communal privy, when Wilkins' attention was captured by a scrap from one of the issues of your disreputable journal. I was concerned when Wilkins put the article to one side rather than use it for its intended purpose, but made no comment on the matter at the time. Wilkins gave me a cheery wave and said that he'd see me later, as he "had to see a man about a Norse".

Somewhat perturbed, I made all haste to return home and rapidly thumbed through the enormous pile of unsold back issues of your journal. [Mum says can you let her know when you're going to find somewhere to put these, as she's sick to the back teeth of vacuuming around them. I'd have thought that since her vacuum cleaner consists of a short pipe, her own lung-power and a spittoon, she'd be grateful for anything that took up some floorspace - but I digress.]

At last, I found the article that had so caught Wilkins' imagination - the misspelling of the word "Flagellate" in one of the headlines on that particular page is I think, unique. With a growing sense of alarm, I read how ChicNeanderthal is recommending that certain breeds of Scandinavian are suitable for ploughing, pulling carts and even riding and jumping. No wonder Wilkins had been sitting there with a bemused smile on his face and steam gently escaping from his open-toe plimsolls. Without delay, I set off to find the poor wretch - immediately after enjoying a nice round of club sandwiches (although some of the clubs still had bits of hair stuck to them), and helping to dislodge a small mammal of some kind from the back of your Mum's throat.

I knew exactly where Wilkins would be. There he was on the beach amongst a crowd of proto-Vikings excitedly waving his scrap of paper around and trying to explain the concepts of saddlery as he understood them from your article. One of the strangely-garbed members of Wilkin's audience took off the knotted rope contraption that Wilkins had been trying to put over his head, rubbed his jaw and called out something to one of his companions on their boat. Immediately a fearsome four-legged creature, of great size and snorting like a man in desperate need of a pint of warm beer was brought ashore, led by someone holding something very like Wilkins' rope contraption. The Viking pointed to the creature, then to your article, and kept saying something like "Orse! It is Orse!".

Well, of course Wilkins was incensed that this stupid Johnny Foreigner could think that he wanted anything to do with such a loathsome creature, all nose teeth and very hard feet. He politely explained that if the gentleman would kindly hand over one or two of those rather charming young Norse girls, he could be on his way. For some reason the Viking took exception to this, and with a bellow first bloodied Wilkin's nose, then placed his ceremonial horned helmet somewhere from which it has taken simply ages to extract. Well, if he wants it back, he's going to have to clean it himself, that's all I can say.

I of course acquitted myself admirably in the "lives to fight another day" stakes. I have recommended an excellent lawyer to Wilkins, and he'll be in touch with you shortly, unless you'd like to offer an out-of-court settlement for the reckless and dangerous advice you gave in the article? And you got a typographical error in every single instance of the word "Norse". It really makes me wonder what the education system is coming to. Honestly, I really think its time to go back the old ways. The Grannys looking after the kids until they're old enough to understand the concept of "Kill something and eat it". Never did me any harm.

By the way, Aunt Auguthta says thank you for the "fence", but should it be inside or outside the house, cause the only reason the mammoths have stopped eating her washing is because she can't get out to hang it up on the line any more.

Yours,

Zog Wogan-Golightly

Editor's reply

Thank you, Mr Wogan-Golightly, for your letter.

I am naturally very concerned that errata published by this journal might cause "misunderstandings" but I am rather more concerned that you would blame ChicNeanderthal for your friends foolishness. Before you take umbrage let me explain. I have recovered the article to which you refer from our database and can tell you that I see no way to misinterpret the text as anything other than what it is - a tutorial on Macrame. There is no mention of carts; there is nothing at all about Scandinavian females and I would suggest that your friend's misreading of "plaiting" as the allusive "ploughing" is significant of his state of mind.

I do sympathise with you, Mr Wogan-Golightly but I really don't think your friend Wilkins needs a lawyer (yet.)

Please don't let me discourage your correspondence - feel free to sue as often as you like from March of next year because the publicity can only help the sale of genuine "adult rated" material in our newest, nudest publication - ChickNeanderthal. (Ed.)

Thank you, Dr John, & and update

2006-11-12T18:53:00.000-08:00

My thanks to Dr John for choosing my humble blog as today's selected site, and thank you also to those of you who stopped by - I don't think I've ever seen so many comments on one of my postings. I hope some of you wandered down to other postings.

[To understand what the heck I'm talking about, I suggest that you read last Sunday's blog entry first.]

An interesting theme through the comments was the fact that few people think they would have stayed for the whole 5 hours waiting for those scant 7 minutes total for the interview and trivia test - and viewed dispassionately, if I had known it was going to take so long, would I have gone? Actually, I think I would, not for my sake, but because Mrs Geekbrit has for a long time envisioned herself on that stage, and I wanted to go to the audition to support her - and from that perspective, who wouldn't give up a mere half a day for the sake of a loved one? Of what worth is your love if it pales at the thought of a little discomfort?

Ok, that's the high-minded gas & noise out of the way - you also have to consider the competitive atmosphere when you're waiting in line, everyone who drops out brings you that much closer to achieving the goal you set yourself when you made the decision to attend the auditions - and even when a small pragmatic voice whispered that the rational course would be to withdraw, stubborn pride wouldn't let us quit, to someone else's benefit. As time went by, our investment in the whole process grew, such that it would have been harder and harder to walk away - you know the principle, the gambler's compulsion to throw good money after bad, or "we'll just spend another $100Billion and we'll achieve Peace in the Middle East".

I decided to close today with my own "embarrassing moment" that I wrote on the Deal or No Deal questionnaire (although expanded somewhat as I had little space to write on the form), and boy, ain't it a doozy...

When I was a lad of 17, going to Harlow Technical College in England I used to catch the bus to Bishops Stortford from the Harlow Town Centre bus terminus - now this is quite a respectably sized terminus, with two rows of covered waiting area and able to handle perhaps forty buses at any one time. One day, I saw my bus about to leave as I ran down the length of the terminus to catch it. I knew a trick that always made the bus stop, and had used it many times to get the driver to open the door and let me on - if you grab hold of the arm for the rear-view mirror next to the door, the driver has no choice but to stop.

Well - not this time. The driver just glared at me and made "Go forth and multiply" gestures. I yelled through the closed door "WHY WON'T YOU LET ME ON???" He jabbed his finger back over his shoulder at the aisle-full of standing passengers - the bus was full - and then he pointed again at the thirty people he had left standing at the bus stop, all of whom were glaring at me.

I decided to eschew the dubious comforts of the bus shelter and instead walked the mile and a bit to Harlow Town Railway Station - definitely a day to take the train!

Deal, or One Versus One Hundred?

2006-11-05T09:57:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was absolutely gruelling. For some time now, Mrs Geekbrit has wanted to be a contestant on Deal or No Deal (a TV game show where you select random cases numbered one to 26 containing a cash value of 1 penny to $1,000,000, while a 'banker' tries to tempt you to leave the game early by offering sums of money based on the odds that you're going to be left with a high value case).

So when open auditions were announced just thirty miles away we had to go along. The same auditions were selecting people to appear on One Vs One Hundred - much more my kind of show, where the contestant wins increasing amounts of money each round multiplied by the number of members of the 'Mob' who answer each question incorrectly - so long as the contestant walks away with the money - if he gets a question wrong, the remaining members of the mob share the contestants winnings between them.

The auditions are nominally open from 10am to 1pm. We arrived at 11am and stood in line out on the corner of the street about 400 yards from the doors. An hour and a half later, we were inside the doors, and saw that the line of people in front of us snaked from front to back of the hall seven times before disappearing up some stairs to where the 'auditions' were actually being held.

At this point, we were given some forms, with questions like:

What was the luckiest moment of your life?

What is the most interesting thing about you that people can't tell just by looking at you?

Tell us about an embarrassing thing that happened to you?

What is the most outrageous thing you've ever done?

Apart from your spouse, who would be your main supporters, and why?

What would you do with a million dollars?

There were a couple of other questions I can't remember - sorry :( These actually took quite some time to answer, and we'd progressed around a couple of lengths of the hall by the time I finished answering them. [BIG HINT... take a pen!]. Then everything came to a grinding halt for at least 20 minutes - I think the casting crew stopped for lunch.

The good thing about all this is that you get to know the people in line with you - you'll probably be talking to them more in the time that you're in line than many people talk to their next door neighbours all year! Anyway - after more than four hours standing in line, we made it to the top of the stairs and were formed into lines of ten people. [ANOTHER BIG HINT... the casting crew are really fed up with the Screamers - they say that since people get only thirty seconds to make their pitch, it's not good if some other prat is yelling and distracting the interviewees/interviewers].

A short time later you're in a group of ten people standing around a table facing an interviewer. For the past two hours, you've been working out what you'll say. Now's your chance, don't fluff it! Can you imagine the pressure? You have to sound interesting, they don't care how much you enjoy the show. I don't know what it takes to get selected as a contestant, because I didn't get selected! A few people were told that they could leave now, the rest of us were sent to YET ANOTHER LINE, where we were photographed, and then waited in line to take a trivia quiz. I guess Mrs Geekbrit and I are in the shortlist for the Mob - I suspect most people end up in this category, since the One Vs One Hundred show could easily get through 100 people an episode.

The test itself is pretty easy, apart from some obscure questions that I just had to guess at - it seems that to get a perfect score, you have to remember what some CD covers from the last few years looked like (Aerosmith, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, some others).

Anyway, after five hours standing in line (my back was killing me), I came away with a deep sense of... how cheap I felt - I was only mildly interested in the audition process myself, why did I rack my brains to come up with a good spiel for the 'interview'? And I really went for it. Damn, am I really so materialistic? I like to think its because I feel that if I do something, I do it with all my heart, but I wonder...

P.S. Feel free to add a comment with answers to some of those questions!

British believe Bush is more dangerous than Kim Jong-il

2006-11-03T13:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1938434,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

If you're still proudly sporting a "Bush-Cheney 04" bumper sticker, this may be news to you...

"America is now seen as a threat to world peace by its closest neighbours and allies, according to an international survey of public opinion published today that reveals just how far the country's reputation has fallen among former supporters since the invasion of Iraq.

Carried out as US voters prepare to go to the polls next week in an election dominated by the war, the research also shows that British voters see George Bush as a greater danger to world peace than either the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, or the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both countries were once cited by the US president as part of an "axis of evil", but it is Mr Bush who now alarms voters in countries with traditionally strong links to the US."

Ringtone Rip-off!!!

2006-10-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

Oh my good grief... what a SCHMUCK I have been to fork out $2.49 every few months for the privilege of downloading a ropy old ringtone from the limited selection offered by my phone network!

You wouldn't believe how easy it is to create your own ringtones and download them to your phone - without spending any money at all. I was playing around with Mrs Geekbrit's new phone, when I wondered what would happen if I used it to smurf the internet to an mp3 file. Sure enough, the phone saves the file, and in the 'My Stuff:Music' menu you can choose to use the downloaded file as your Ringtone... easy!

Since the phone network charges you for the download of the ringtones you buy from them, on top of the fee for the tone, downloading an mp3 is essentially free.

Sooo... I started rummaging through the music collection and used a couple of free software packages to create my own ringtones.

The first one is Acoustica MP3 to Wave Converter Plus, which is a really nice application that installs into your right-click menu and allows you to convert from mp3 to the more easily edited WAV format. I set up the options so that when converting the edited file back to an mp3, it used mono encoding and the minimum sound quality - trust me, you don't need anything more sophisticated when you're listening to the music being played out of a cellphone speaker.

The second software package is WavePad from www.nch.com.au/wavepad This is a really nice (i.e SIMPLE and USABLE) little audio file editor. It will open and save MP3 format files, but I like the control that Acoustica gives me over the quality settings when it comes to saving the file. I used WavePad to extract a 30-second clip from the song.

After converting back to mp3 (and giving the resulting file a short, simple filename), I uploaded the file to one of my websites (http://all-antiques.com , but it could as easily have been http://coralsealife.com in my case [sorry for the shameless plug of my websites!]). You could upload yours to a free website to keep the whole process zero-cost.

Now you'll see why I suggested keeping the filename short and sweet - it's still a pain in the digits trying to type in the url on a cellphone. But that's it - download the mp3 files, exit the browser and go to your downloaded music, and make that ringtone yours!

Hmmph! Looks like the new version of WavePad doesn't even let you use a subset of the features after the trial period times out - oh well, it is very good - $38 doesn't seem too bad... its less than 16 ringtone downloads anyroadup.

The Rapture Has Happened!!!!

2006-10-17T17:12:00.000-07:00

Looks like you weren't Holy enough. And guess what? your Mother-in-Law is STILL coming over for Thanksgiving/Christmas/Chhhhanukkkahhh/Kwanzaa or whatever.

And what's worse, Sky have snapped up the TV rights to the Apocalypse, and its going to be pay-per-view. So I'm looking round to see who has gone, turns out it wasn't even that obnoxious kid from down the street with the permanently just-scrubbed look and fifty-thousand "Warrior for the Lord" best bible student stickers from Sunday School.

As far as I can tell, the only person missing from around here was that old bag lady you see shuffling her way to or from the disposal skips at the back of Walmart. I'll miss her, she has always been there somewhere in the background, no matter which country I'm living in. Funny that- perhaps she's actually part of a grand Sisterhood, pushing shopping carts around the cities of the world, and it only seems like its the same person from Bishops Stortford to Toronto to Los Angeles.

Anyway, apart from missing Mad Meg (or whatever her name was) and the times we spent sharing her curiously-flavoured and slightly stale pastries (furiously suppressing the memory of Meg peeking into the garbage disposal skip, here), not a lot has changed. Looks like heaven won't be too crowded after all. There's a whole bunch of Christians expressing an amusing admixture of disbelief, chagrin and indignation, I can't WAIT to see John Stewart interviewing a flock of them on The Daily Show. Assuming he's still here of course, I bet they broadcast a bunch of prerecorded shows as usual, but if we don't see a new one by say... Wednesday next week then it's going to start looking mighty fishy to me.

Dubya looked piqued for a while, in that charming constipated lemur way of his. Then that nice Ms Rice suggested that he was probably still on Earth to command God's army against the Hellish hordes. He brightened up immediately and said "Why hell, Ah bin doing that for years already! This is is going to be EASY! Now, watch how I make this long putt..."

Save A Life Today

2006-10-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

This suicide note was found in the apartment of someone who leapt to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge:

"I'm going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump."

It would have been so easy for someone to save that man's life - you may say that it's a wasted effort, a suicide will find a reason to die eventually no matter what. It is interesting however to note what a survivor said:

"I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

About twenty years ago, I had a notion that everyone in the world had an internal clock counting down to the moment that they would commit suicide. A kind word or gesture, a moment of unselfconscious happiness wound back the clock, perhaps by years. Bitterness, anger, despair push the clock forward. For most people, the moment that the clock expires and they step past that decision point never comes - for far too many, there seems no alternative.

I read somewhere that Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it. That's a powerful notion - it ratifies the idea that you have a choice. It's something that seems to be difficult for many to grasp - how often have you seen someone descending in ever-decreasing circles of despair? Don't you just wish you could shake them out of it, somehow get them to see all the opportunities and options that they have around them?

The big gesture, the attempted intervention into another's life just doesn't work - at worst, it makes them dependent on you, who are part of the "10%" of their lives, diminishing their will to take control of the "90%" that defines them.

What does work, is the small gesture of friendship or support - or just plain acknowledgement of them as fellow travellers along the path of life. Take a moment to say "Hi" and smile if you pass someone while out walking - I hope you'll feel a moment of connection as you both put back for a while that sinister clock I imagined that all of us have ticking away inside.

Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est La Même Chose...

2006-10-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

It did my heart good to read this quote in Newsweek... it just goes to show how much progress has been made, a real tribute to the wise investment of thousands of lives and billions of dollars:

"It is the right of the Iraqi government, as it combats terrorism, to silence any voice that tries to harm the national unity". Habib al-Sadr, of the government-financed Iraqi Media Network, on new laws that criminalize speech that "publicly insults" the government or its officials. Some of the laws are verbatim copies of those that existed under Saddam Hussein's penal code

Which kind of backs up my assertion (counter-intuitive though it is to my American friends), that Democracy is not the natural state or aspiration in many cultures around the world, and trying to install it by force is the most counterproductive and wasteful exercise imaginable - let other countries make their own decisions, and take time to perfect their societies as a natural evolutionary process.

Favorite Quotes

2006-09-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

I need to dig around a bit to find some good'uns I've mislaid over the years, but here's a few to be getting on with:

"I'm agnostic about the existence of god in much the same way that I'm agnostic about the existence of fairies". Richard Dawkins

"Man is a marvelous curiosity . . . he thinks he is the Creator's pet . . . he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea." Mark Twain

"There is enough for everyone's need; there is not enough for everyone's greed" Mahatma Ghandi

"A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain - then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?" Robert A. Heinlein

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives." Robert A. Heinlein

"We Have Not Forgotten, Mr. President"

2006-09-13T13:52:00.000-07:00

I can't add to this, I'll just put some snippets here in the hope that it will encourage you to read the whole transcript for yourself: "We Have Not Forgotten, Mr. President".

"All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers."

"And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President."

"Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning."

"They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did."

"History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage."

"When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... "We Have Not Forgotten, Mr. President".

Venn Diagrams

2006-09-13T08:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes all this intersection and union business gets too darn confusing. I was helping Mrs Geekbrit work out how to teach children about venn diagrams recently, and decided to see if I could write a program that draws the diagram corresponding to an arbitrary expression. Two evenings later, I have a very basic system...

To do inverses (where you would have a bar over a letter or an expression), put an '!' before the letter, or '!(..)' around an expression. so "bar A intersection B" becomes !(AnB).

I hope anyone struggling with venn diagrams finds this useful for practice.

All Antiques Update

2006-08-30T08:56:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post something about changes to my http://all-antiques.com website (if you search around a bit on there you'll find a photo of the geekbrit and Mrs geekbrit), but first an update on the Seahorses - A couple of weeks ago I transferred them into their new home - a tiny 1.8 gallon hexagonal tank, with an airstone uplift tube powering an undergravel filter. I did consider a tank with a powered filter, but the airstone system seems to be safer for the horses - the currents are gentler, and they can swim around with no danger of being sucked into the filter.

I put in some sand from my main tank as a biological filter bed first, then covered the sand with some charcoal pellets (it sinks eventually!) and some dark epoxy-coated gravel. THEN I realized I'd introduced a few bristle worms into the new tank - D'OH! Ok, got those out. After putting in a few plastic plants for the ponies to hitch up to, I moved them into their new tank.

There were actually nine babies - not seven as I'd thought, they really are tiny. All are doing well in their new tank, and they're at least twice the length they were when they were first born. One of the original adults is looking very chubby, so I'm expecting a new brood any day now. I'm thinking that as long as I have plenty of baby brine shrimp to last them over a weekend, and if I bring in fresh saltwater regularly, it should be possible to run a dwarf seahorse aquarium in my cube at work - I think I'll give it a go with four of the babies when they reach adult size in a couple of months.

Ok - www.all-antiques.com - it's a site that uses the automated ebay item showcase that I wrote for www.coralsealife.com, but aimed at antiques instead of aquarium equipment (hence the name). For ages it bugged me that the front page for all-antiques consisted of a plain list of about 380 categories of antiques, from stained glass to manuscripts, dining tables to antique medical equipment (yes, honestly!).

So, at long last I got round to writing a program that searches for the most interesting items in about forty categories and creates a front page using photographs of each item it finds. The program runs automatically every hour, creating new front pages 24 times a day - which does mean that if you see something you like, you'd better click through and bookmark it, because it may be gone next time you come back to the front page!

You can still get to the 300+ subcategories by clicking on the top-level category names, but I think the new look for the front page is more attractive - feel free to leave me a comment about the layout, this is still a work in progress - I'd welcome ideas for improvements (I'm going to tidy up the pages you get to by clicking through the category titles, next).

Seahorses

2006-08-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

Having moved to my new home (I got married a month ago today!), I finally took the plunge and bought some more fish for my 24g nanocube aquarium. The tank had been looking a little sparse, with just a lawnmower blenny and percula clown swimming around the rocks, so I started looking around for something to fill out the population a little.

A weekend perusing the local stores didn't yield anything suitable - isn't it shocking how many dead fish there are in the average fish stockist's tanks? And if I see one fish with parasites or rot I just walk out of the store. Which makes it all the more unlikely that I would end up bidding on some seahorses that I found through www.coralsealife.com.

1) I have no idea of the conditions under which the fish have been kept.

2) Seahorses are best kept in a species tank - what the blue photon was I thinking I was doing, buying them to add to a tank that already had tenants?

Anyway - a few days later four dwarf seahorses turned up after an overnight journey from Florida courtesy of the USPS. I put the bags (unopened) into the aquarium so that the temperatures would equalize, and immediately realised that Benny Blenny thought that I had brought him some tasty snacks. The seahorses are tiny - much smaller than I had been imagining, and wouldn't have survived long with Benny pecking at them to see if they're edible yet.

A quick visit to PetSmart later, and I had some essential supplies (I already had some decapsulated brineshrimp eggs and hatching kits from brineshrimpdirect.com). I think the best choice I made was to buy a clear plastic floating breeding trap as a temporary home for the seahorses. For now at least, they can enjoy the cooled water in the main tank while I work out how to get the waterchiller to also cool a new tank (probably 2.5 gallon - seriously, you can keep a lot of dwarf seahorses in there, and it's much easier to keep the concentration of live food high in a smaller tank than a large one).

I noticed that the baby brine shrimp I was feeding the seahorses were escaping through the slots on the breeding trap, so I hotmelt-glued meshing from a cut-up filter bag across them. Just in time - sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, one of the seahorses gave birth to seven tiny white babies, each about a quarter of an inch long!

All eleven seahorses are doing well, eating enriched brine shrimp. The babies are changing colour from white to grey, green and brown. I'll let you know how they get on. The Blenny and the Clown are also enjoying the escapee baby brine shrimp - yum.

All-Antiques.com

2006-05-15T07:56:00.000-07:00

I have to admit I've hit the web-developer's equivalent of writer's block.

I'm reasonably happy with the 'category' pages of my www.all-antiques.com site - they link to similar categories and are always up to date with relevant antique items for sale (except some winker in China keeps spamming all the categories with 'genuine ancient swords').

The problem is the front page - it's just a list of 338 categories and sub-categories. BORING!

I need to have that page in there somewhere - it's like finding the aisle that you want in a big antiques supermarket - but it really shouldn't be the front page!

So I'm looking for ideas. I want the front page to be fresh and relevant, but I don't want to be editing it every day - fortunately all my other pages are generated automatically from databases. Ideas I've had so far include...

Opening the page up to guest writers who can promote their products
Creating an online treasure hunt using a collage of pictures cunningly interwoven
Biting the bullet and writing editorial about selected featured auction items.

Anyway - if you wander along and take a look, feel free to drop a comment here, I think I can take the criticism ;)

Useful Perl CGI Trick

2006-02-15T08:37:00.000-08:00

This will be sheer geekspeak for most people - to whom I apologise - but it's a really useful thing I stumbled on when working on CGI scripts for websites.

I wanted to keep several versions of a complex perl script in different directories, so users could fall back to an earlier version if they needed to (defensive programming - assume the worst will happen). The problem was, I didn't want to keep fiddling with CGI executable directory permissions in the webserver.

I came up with a simple solution, which had an unexpected and very useful benefit. I decided to pass the folder name into a wrapper script that lives in the cgi-bin folder, read in the real script and execute it in an eval function. The unexpected benefit was that instead of getting mysterious "Error 500" reports from the webserver when there's a mistake in the target script, I now get a full syntax error message, complete with line number information!

Without more ado, here is the code:


use CGI;
$query = CGI::new();
print $query->header;

my $danadir  = $query->param("DVersion");
my $danacode = "";

#
# Read specified danalyze script and execute it
#

open IN,"<../htdocs/danalyze/$danadir/GetSubTree.pl" 
     or die "Can't open requested GetSubTree version $!";

#
# slurp in whole file
#
$danacode = do { local $/; <IN> };
close IN;

eval($danacode);
print $@ if($@);    #print an error message if there is one

Totally Taken In

2006-01-09T21:44:00.000-08:00

To quote Holly the Red Dwarf computer, "We are talking wheeze of the century, we are talking April, May, June, July and August Fools..."

For months I've been reading Dr Life's blog (see below) with a kind of horrified fascination - I've even pointed my workmates at his page to marvel at the religious intolerance of his postings. Most of them told me they thought it was a scam, trying to get people enraged (which indeed it did), but I totally believed Dr Life was borderline psychotic.

Today Dr Life revealed that he's been making up all those inspirational rants for over three months just to see what kind of reaction he'd get. Well, kudos to the man.

In a sick kind of way I guess I really wanted to believe Dr Life existed - he confirmed all my worst prejudices about religious fundamentalists, and it's kind of rare to find someone so singlemindedly and entertainingly fixated. I think I'm going to miss my weekly Dr Life word from the Dark Side!

Busy week again

2005-12-08T23:10:00.000-08:00

Well, this is appalling... I must be averaging about a post a week at the moment, something's going to have to be done about it!

I have been a little busy with www.coralsealife.com lately - it's going well :) Yesterday I finally got round to putting a gallery of Morf's photographs on there, feel free to wander over and check them out - the direct link is www.coralsealife.com/gallery if you want to sidestep the front page. Morf took the photos that brighten up the otherwise drab header for this blog.

Some sad news on Dr Life's blog - http://abort-this.blogspot.com. I think the guy is the most misguided irrational zealot I've ever read - I have to keep going back just to see what he'll come out with next - but it was sad to hear of the loss this week of his wife. I'm certain there was a lot of love between them.

On the Geek side, we had an inspiring speaker for an all-day seminar this week - Jack Ganssle of http://www.ganssle.com/. What a character, he made the job of improving the software development process sound fun - just as well, as of today that's my main job at work. I'll be in a small team working to find ways to eliminate software mistakes before they ever happen (I think calling them 'bugs' makes them sound too cute!). Apparently Jack will be coming back to help us set up the code review processes and stuff - I look forward to working with him. He has to be a cool dude - he has his own blog!

Ok, it's now half an hour later than I was intending to go to bed - I'll try to be a bit livelier next time I write! In the meantime, have fun peoples.

Chitika, no more

2005-12-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

Well, I decided to eliminate all non-bloggy advertising from this blog's header and side bar (except advertising for my own CoralSeaLife.com website of course!).

I mean... this is a blog, not a shopping site. I'm guessing you're like me - reading blogs to read about things you can strongly agree with or that make your blood boil (either one is good!). If you wanted to see advertising you'd have searched for it.

I have to say I wasn't over-impressed with the performance of Chitika - I tried it both on here and on my commercial site. The Chitika ad had a much lower click-through than google adsense, and though the commission per click was about 3 times the lowest clickthrough payment I get from google, it was less than a quarter of the highest google Cpc. Overall, I'm better off using the space for google ads. I guess I could have given Chitika a longer run, and perhaps I would if they had more products that fit in to my site's subject matter, but I'm going to let them keep the $0.36 and just move on :)

Designing websites for colour-blind visitors

2005-11-30T14:01:00.000-08:00

Ok, this is really cool - Vischeck can simulate what your website would look like to people with three different types of colour-blindness, so you can be sure that nothing blends into the background. Just go to vischeck and point them at your webpage. In a couple of minutes you'll be able to click on a link and see your webpage as someone with colour-blindness would see it... it's a bit of an eye-opener (har har har).

So I joined chitika

2005-11-22T20:43:00.000-08:00

I've been taking a good look round for affiliate programs that work well with my CoralSeaLife website, and happened upon this program from Chitika. It's kind of like Google Adsense, in that it delivers targeted ads to your website, but it's MUCH more adaptable.

One thing I really liked is that you have lots of choices for customizing the Chitika block - size, layout, colours - you can even specify what products are shown on your website. I've gone for a general gadgety selection on this blog (Geeks of the world, unite!), but chose products that appeal to aquarists on my CoralSeaLife site.

The support seems good - they even have a blog with all the latest news and tips, and they've bent over backwards to ensure you can use their advert blocks on the same page as Google ads. I'll let you know how it goes :) See how Chikita can help you earn money from your blog.

The more things change, the more they stay the same!

2005-11-22T10:46:00.000-08:00

I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new
situation by reorganizing: and a wonderful method it can be
for creating the illusion of progress, while producing
confusion, inefficiency and demoralization

-- Petronius Arbiter, ~60 A.D

Awww... what a shame - seems the quote isn't really by Petronius, but rather seems to originate amongst disgruntled British soldiers in post-war Germany... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petronius_Arbiter. Bloomin' Brits! Still, by the sound of it the old boy would have been proud of that quote.

Thanks to Roger for finding the wikipedia reference :)

FireFox bugs

2005-11-21T08:46:00.000-08:00

Ok, much as I like FireFox, it's really beginning to get on my nerves.

Everyone who writes webpages from the ground up (with a text editor rather than a WYSIWYG html editor) has always had to deal with behaviour that is designed to be different in various browsers - very annoying, but we live with it.

As standardisation improves, we're seeing a convergence towards being able to write a web page once and have it work in every browser. This is great! And being a lazy Son of a Bunny Rabbit I'm jumping on the css/XHTML bandwagon and I'm as happy as a pig in the sticky stuff.

So it is most vexing when browsers fail to perform as advertised - you write standards-complant code and it renders correctly on all but one of the major browsers - despite that browser claiming to support the features you're using. I had an issue with Opera a couple of years ago; I wrote a javascript spinning-ufo text display widget (with size and hue depth-cueing, it was the dog's bollocks). Opera completely failed to position the dynamically-generated divs that contained each of the letters in the text. I'll give those Opera guys their due though - once I told them about it, they tested several revisions of their browser on my site until they got it working. The funny thing is, on that particular page you could enter your own text message - they put "Opera is clearly the superior browser"!

The errors that are bugging me at the moment are evident in Firefox.

1) Internal padding in divs is ADDED to the width specified for the div.
If you say a div is going to be 400 pixels wide, with (internal) padding of 20 pixels each side, the div is rendered 440 pixels wide. Internet Explorer renders the same div 400 pixels wide - so your page looks right in either IE or FF - never both.

I did find an ugly workround for this - place ANOTHER div inside the 400 pixel div, and give the new div a margin (external padding) of 20 pixels. It's a shame to add all that guff to your webpage but it works.

2) This one is more obscure and I haven't been able to pin it down yet. Adding too many dynamically-generated objects in the page confuses FF. As an example, on this page I used to have a gadget that showed the visitor's ip address and country of origin up there ^^^ next to the Zardozz web-ring widget. When I added the google adsense block over there <<<, FF got confused and swapped the IP gadget and google ad - which didn't work at all well. IE quietly and competently got the page right.

I hate to say this, but over the years whenever I've seen IE behaving differently to Opera, Netscape, or FireFox, generally the behaviour shown by IE made more sense to me as a webpage designer. This is a huge generalisation, but IMHO I'd say it's true about.... 90% of the time.

Anyone else have any incompatibility or bugs stories (preferably with workrounds)?

Well, don't I feel like a right plonker?

2005-11-14T08:50:00.000-08:00

I just loaded up this page while at work to check out the flash button I made for CoralSeaLife.com. Whoops... should have done more testing - it lost the click-through to the website when I tweaked it last night - D'OH!

It'll have to wait till I get home tonight before I can fix the link, I'll leave it up there (top right corner) for now so readers know what I'm blathering about.

[Update]
Button fixed, just remembered to do it at 11:20pm. I've spent all evening writing a script that detects what people were looking for when they click on my yahoo adverts and asks them if they want to go to the latest lists for that item... Well, ok, I did also find time to binge on 3 different Sci Fi programs my Tivo decided to record for me. *Sigh* - even my Tivo knows I'm a geek.
[/update]

I'm way overdue for increasing the population of my aquarium - the lawnmower blenny and fan worm are both thriving. I guess some people would still say I have an algae problem, but I think the tank looks fantastic - about a dozen different types of plant of all sorts, as well as numerous sessile creatures. I do have to pull out the odd hand-full of hair algae from time to time - Benny Blenny loses his appetite for it when it gets over a certain length, but generally he's an excellent gardener, eating the 'weeds' and leaving the interesting stuff.

I'm heading over to Florida for a week just before Christmas with G and her daughter, and my two kids are flying down from Canada - so I may postpone buying anything that needs daily feeding till after the holiday.

Anyone have any suggestions for colourful and compatible tank-mates for a hyperactive blenny with attention deficit disorder?

Grieving Palestinian parents' brave gesture for peace

2005-11-10T05:38:00.000-08:00

For many people, the persistent images of Palestinians are those of suicide bombers, running street battles with Israeli soldiers or ghoulishly ululating in the streets after the deaths of thousands of people from all over the world in the events of 9/11.

It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing that since all the news about a people is negative, then by inference all members of that people are evil. That's as good a reason as any to report outstanding examples of good from that war-torn region of the Middle East, but this story from the BBC has a real emotional impact on a number of levels: Palestinian's organs go to Israel.

Now that's a typical understated headline from the dear old beeb. The gist of the story is that twelve year old Ahmed was shot by Israeli soldiers because he was carrying what they believed was a gun while throwing stones at them. In their time of grief, Ahmed's parents made the decision to make their son's organs available for transplant - for Israeli children. Five children and a woman, comprising of Jews, Arabs and a Druze girl received Ahmed's kidneys, liver, heart and lungs in life-saving operations.

His father, Ismail, said saving lives was more important than religion, and added: "I feel that my son has entered the heart of every Israeli."

To quote the Israeli parliamentary speaker, after decades of war, this is a remarkable gesture.

I'd venture to suggest that this is an appropriate time for all of us to examine our preconceptions of people who are demonized across the world. Yes, we can point to the fanatical 'leaders' who advocate insane policies such as the extermination of their enemies, but never forget that there are ordinary people who are capable of extraordinary gestures of love - would we be as strong, as human as Ahmed's parents?

Zaphod's Killo-zap blog

2005-11-04T00:55:00.000-08:00

Very pleased to be able to host Zaphod's blog as this week's "rent my blog" featured site. I've been enjoying seeing his amusing and rational comments on a number of other blogs, including the breathtakingly rabid Dr Life's rantmill (see "Liberals: Innately Evil or Simply Misguided?" below).

Scroll down past the handpainted miniature figures on Zaphod's blog, and you'll find a couple of classic posts about political culpability, and religious extremism.

Sorry for not posting more this week, I'm simultaneously sick as a pig and sitting through an exhaustive 2.5 day training course on the intricacies of Serial ATA at work (geek alert). Quite what I'm doing here at 1am I HAVE NO IDEA! What a wombat.

Anyway - please do click on the thumbnail of Zaphod's blog at the top of the page, and come back and tell me what you think :)

P.S. Let's play 'spot the only blog comment GeekBrit has made this week' on Z's blog ;)

Growing Pains and how to inflict them

2005-10-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

I fully intend to grow old disgracefully - like Richard Harris I shall change overnight from juvenile delinquent to wise old sage, probably on the stroke of midnight before my 75th birthday.

I shall revel in wearing plaid with stripes, pulling my trousers up over my stomach, tuck my shirt into my underpants (which will come up to somewhere near my chin), and wear my tie on the outside of my v-neck sweater.

I WILL wear the pink tartan golf hat with the pom-pom given to me by my equally crazed spouse at all times - especially to funerals of any bustard I’ve managed to outlive.

I shall try not to be swayed by the fact that my children will choose my nursing home, while embarrassing them outrageously.

Delay that moment as long as possible… but then… GO FOR IT!!!!

The War on Terror

2005-10-25T17:58:00.000-07:00

In my own small way, I - along with thousands like me - are victims of the War on Terror.

I'm a UK (and since September 22nd a Canadian) citizen, and until recently I've had a UK stockbroker account with a modest but to me significant number of shares.

A couple of months ago, I received a letter from my stockbroker stating that due to new regulations imposed by the US government, they are no longer in a position to provide accounts to people who are residents of the US. This applies even to people like me, who the IRS consider residents for tax purposes even if we don't have any immigration rights.

On further enquiry, I found speculation that the new regulations are designed to 'control terrorist funds'.

The upshot of this was that I had to find another UK broker to whom I could transfer my account - no dice. There is exactly ONE stockbroker still willing to take on new US clients, but they need you to have a UK bank account...

So, with (of course) a falling market I had no choice but to get rid of the shares I had been keeping as a longterm investment, before the stockbroker had to impose a freeze on the account, as required by the US government.

Now, I don't believe for a moment that this really has anything to do with clamping down on potential terrorist funds. Let's face it, it's just a way for the US government to stop US citizens investing outside the US. I already had a W9 lodged with the stockbroker under existing regulations, but the US government wants to make really, really sure that it doesn't lose a tuppence-worth of tax revenue, and they don't give a damn who they inconvenience.

Considering what they do to countries who upset the President's Pappy, I think I got off lightly.

P.S. Did it ever strike you as warped that US citizens have to pay tax if they win a straw donkey in a competition, but in other countries you can win millions (payable in full in one lump sum) on the lottery absolutely tax free? I hate to break it to you guys, your government really doesn't like you!

Liberals: Innately Evil or Simply Misguided?

2005-10-20T07:14:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think my best posts are left as comments on other people's blogs :( There is a particularly fervent anti-abortion blog at http://abort-this.blogspot.com run by someone calling himself Dr Life. Dr Life posted an entry condemning the ACLU for promoting terrorism through their campaigns and goals. Now personally, I don't give a tinker's fart about the ACLU, but I just had to respond to what I saw as short-range thinking in the original post. Sections marked in red in Dr Life's post were also highlighted in his original text.

To put the first paragraph of my reply into context, the previous commentator had posted a comment composed almost entirely of the word 'Fornicate' repeated a couple of hundred times... only with fewer letters.

Dr Life

GeekBrit

The monsters of the underworld climb from their brimstone caves and terrorize the earth with their molten fear. Crimson sparks spew forth and paint the sky a peutrid color; the battered heathens perish.

I recently went to the website of the ALCU and read up on their mission statement. I will break it down here:

They "defend"

-Your First Amendment rights-freedom of speech, association and assembly. Freedom of the press, and freedom of religion supported by the strict separation of church and state. (basically these people want to trick the majority into hating God).

-Your right to equal protection under the law - equal treatment regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin. (allowing sinners the same rights as the righteous? Strange.)

-Your right to due process - fair treatment by the government whenever the loss of your liberty or property is at stake. (soft on terror. What a nobel ideology...)

-Your right to privacy - freedom from unwarranted government intrusion into your personal and private affairs.(you need privacy to be able to build bombs in your basement - as far as I'm concerned, if you aren't doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about!)

Am I accusing the ALCU of terrorism? Of course not. I do, however, believe that they are part of a process that enables the very foundations of our freedom to be compromised by terrorists. They are part of the Liberal conspiracy that denies God and any religious access to the government. I suggest that you all email these bandits and let them know what you think. Liberty of the individual is important, but not when it harms the majority - which is what the ACLU is encouraging.

Are Liberals evil? I don't believe so. But they are doing evil. There is a thin line...

Ugh - please remove that ignorant "anonymous" moron's comment as soon as possible. Freedom ALWAYS comes with responsibility, and in this case, he has failed in his responsibility to contribute in a meaningful way - dissension is one thing, personal abuse quite another.

Now then - I think that you're not considering what government can do with the power you're willing to give them. The most repressive regimes in the world are theocracies - take the Taliban for example. They closed down a UN bakery that gave widows an opportunity to work and be paid in Afghanistan since that was against their beliefs. They'd rather see the widows starve honorably. You can say "well, they're not Christian" - but what happens when someone you know is persecuted because he doesn't want to live by strict biblical law? Rummage through the bible - there's a few choice rules in there that an unscrupulous politician could use against you.

I don't hate God - god never did me good nor ill - but religion is the root of many of the most evil times in history, look at the Inquisition, the Crusades, the witch-killings in medieval Europe and 19th-century America, the persecution of the Jews (the Nazis accused them of 'killing God'). Now, I'm not accusing church-goers of being evil, I'm just pointing out how religion is abused when it is used as the basis of government.

I'd rather have a crooked president than a religious one - the crook will always look out for his own best interest, which will include keeping the country running in order to keep himself fed. The religious one will follow whatever mad scheme pops into his head no matter what the pain "for the good of the people".

Regarding "allowing sinners the same rights as the righteous" - who is to judge sin? "Judge not, lest ye be judged". Sure, if the sin is actually something embodied in law, such as murder, then that can and should be judged in a court of law - but remember, people are innocent until proven guilty, and should be accorded fair trial. Isn't that exactly what you'd expect for yourself? Or would you rather be jailed without trial, since you must be guilty because 'a Just God wouldn't let you be accused if you weren't guilty?'. I'm failing to see how a fair trial equates to 'being soft on terror'.

Regarding privacy, I'm more ambivalent - as an analogy, I find waiting in line at airport security for over an hour extremely tedious, but I'm grateful to them for doing their job (even when I'm the one being singled out for searching) because it makes me feel a little bit safer. I think the 'nothing to hide' cliche is a little weak however, McCarthy showed that anything can be used against you, just by demonizing formerly legitimate activity.

Possible Good Taste Bypass

2005-10-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

Blogging has had to take a back seat for a few days as I spent lots of hours over the weekend working on www.coralsealife.com - including a stint from 3am to 6am Saturday morning putting together a 'pixels' advertising panel.

Tonight I sat looking at the result, and something was nagging at me. I'd decided to go with a very formal white background, muted greys/greens look, which is very conservative and businesslike, but you know - it just wasn't me

So in a mad moment I threw together a multi-coloured background (you can see it best on the Auction Watch page), and you know what? I like it - but I'm still wondering if those of a nervous disposition or who are endowed with an excess of good taste will get a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies.

I think my next task on that site will be to put a little slideshow of some of Morf's photographs up in the top-left corner, where his octopus photo is now. I'm way overdue posting a link to Morf's website - it is www.IamSharkBait.com.

I need to write a blog entry about how in my own small way I am a minor casualty of the War on Terror - I'll do that in a day or two, don't let me forget :)

Should have left it....

2005-10-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

Yep, should have left it alone. I was wandering through blogexplosion last week, when I happened across an article by a roving campus pastor exhorting people to read the bible. This got me thinking about something that I've been kicking around for at least half a dozen years:

If you set aside the issues that ultimately come down to an issue of faith, and consider that the bible was written by people who inevitably reflect the social, economic and political world around them, then the bible is an archaeological record that documents the evolution of the human mind. The changing portrayal of god's character throughout the period of time covered by the bible is a key indicator of social development.

Unfortunately, the comment I left inevitably lead to the respondant falling back on assertions based on blind faith, at which point there was no value in continuing the discussion, although earlier comments were promising. I hope you wander over there and take a look - if you do, feel free to tell me how wrongheaded I am, I particularly like comments backed up with research, reasoned arguments and that don't rely on "I'm right because I know I'm right" clauses ;)

Stuff and nonsense!

2005-10-12T10:51:00.000-07:00

Lots of disparate (not desperate) and random thoughts in this posting.

First - I can recommend the "Interview with Belinda" on the Bring It On blog - a good read, very reasonable, Belinda seems like a "whole person", someone who thinks rather than exhibiting a collection of ankle-biting reflex reactions. Even though I don't share all her religious beliefs, I don't have any problem with them - oh, and yes - I've heard Rick Warren speak (my wonderful girlfriend G goes to Rick's church, and I go with her on occasion), and I agree with Belinda, he has a message that's worth hearing.

As a side-note, I also like to believe in a Creator, even if I can't bring myself to believe that the Creator gives a wet slap with a haddock whether one bunch of freaks or another wins an Immunity Challenge in Survivor(tm), no matter how fervently they all hold hands and pray - that to me seems like the ultimate egotism, GET OVER YOURSELVES, PEOPLE. I tend to agree that Creation and Evolution are not mutually exclusive.

What else has happened? Oh yes - I published the fourth incarnation of www.coralsealife.com yesterday - I'm looking forward to posting Morf's fantastic reef photographs on the site soon. I went for the more staid layout because it loads faster and has room for me to add more content. The big ol' turtle picture will be back, but he'll have his own page rather than being relegated to the background.

In my own little aquarium, I've been keeping my mitts out for a few days to allow the blenny and feather-duster fanworm time to get comfortable in there. As a consequence, the algae on the sides of the tank was rife! I was amazed to see a little hermit crab happily munching at algae on the side of the tank... over a foot up the glass! That's like you or me climbing the side of a ten-storey building with an 80 pound backpack and stopping for lunch while holding onto the brickwork with our fingernails!

The blenny is doing sterling work, he's really hacking away at the algae on the back of the aquarium, and even on the rocks now. It's incredible to think that apart from waterchanges and lighting, at the moment the tank is entirely self-supporting with all the critters feeding off of the algae or organic matter suspended in the water.

The water quality is still good - I'm considering what to add next. Almost certainly a colourful shrimp, and possibly a colourful fish or two. The blenny is a real character, but his defining characteristic is how he changes colour to blend in with the rockwork!

On the Geek side, I think I may have started a religious war of sorts here at work - regarding software coding styles. Believe me, software engineers can get more worked up over how to code programs than any religious or political pundit. There are already cries of code fascism and programming jihads. What did I do? I wrote a program that goes through the 800-odd source files in the complete project, and finds potentially catastrophic errors that the compiler misses. It turns out that there's a fairly simple coding convention that avoids most of the errors my program uncovered, but it contradicts one group's article of the coding faith "Thou shalt not include files within included files" - to which I can say "well, that way you can make mistakes, and oh look, you have!".

I'm just going to pour the petrol on that particular fire and sit back to enjoy the glow (wicked evil grin!).

My new website

2005-10-10T06:55:00.000-07:00

I wonder how many geeks you have to put in one place before they reach critical mass and you get an explosion?

Probably not that many - a couple of weeks ago, some of my fellow geeks and I were discussing our interest in marine life. R is an avid scuba diver, M is a geek but a bit of a softy when it comes to pets of all kinds, E has a horror story about an anenome that went from apparently healthy to a tankful of rancid anenome soup overnight.

As we were talking, and also bemoaning how many irrelevant sites search engines throw up whenever you're hunting for stuff on the internet, I got that old itch again (no, not that one) to pull together my own website. Drawing together ideas and recommendations from my fellow geeks, I made www.coralsealife.com.

R gave me about fifty fantastic photographs from his collection taken while scuba diving, and I'll be putting many of those into the website. If you look at the button up there in the header ^^^, that's taken from one of his photos of a pipefish, the turtle on the CoralSeaLife website was also photographed by R, though unfortunately I had to severely downsample it so that it would load quickly.

The idea for the website is to give people a starting point when they fancy doing some comparison shopping for anything related to keeping marine reef aquariums. I have lots of stuff to add in there, so expect to see the site grow!

If you could link to the site, it would really help me get it established - it's hard work getting a good listing in the search engines! Drop me a line or add a comment here, and I'll be happy to crosslink from this blog to yours (so long as you aren't Sleazy Sid selling "Naughty Nuns from Neasden" or anything like that). Thank you!

Aquarium Decision Time

2005-10-09T10:10:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking long and hard about how I am going to stock my aquarium. As you may know, I have been considering keeping this aquarium as a species aquarium for seahorses.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of hair algae on the live rock means that I have to put in some creatures to keep it under control; it seems that whatever creatures I put in to control the algae would cause problems for seahorses - either by competing for food, or by nipping at or bullying these gloriously bad swimmers. The young fry would also be vulnerable to being eaten!

I can't really remove the live rock - the bacteria colonising the rock are the major biofiltering component in this miniature ecosystem, removing deadly ammonia and toxic nitrites from the water.

So (with promises to myself to eventually turn this into a seahorse aquarium when I'm living somewhere I can set up a larger tank), yesterday I dragged G & E out lawnmower blenny hunting in "Coral Islands", Orange, California (714) 939 8797.

Coral Islands is a reasonably large store, with plenty of freshwater tanks and one long row of marine. These people specialize in fish - the marine section isn't an afterthought squished in a corner between the kittens and puppies. Apparently I should have gone today (Sunday), since that's when al the new stock comes in. Personally, I'd rather wait till later in the week, many fish stockists don't sell fish until they've gone through quarantine.

We were fortunate, and picked out a lawnmower blenny, and - since we were there - I picked out a 'feather duster' fanworm. After about ninety minute's acclimation, both were safely installed in the nanocube. This morning the blenny seems a little shy, but he has plenty of places to hide in the cave system I built with the rocks, and when I look overfrom this side of the room, he is perching on top of one of the rocks :) I hope he gets to work consuming that algae soon!

Iraqi opinions on the constitution

2005-10-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is fascinating reading (well, it was for me) - a conversation between two ordinary people in Iraq. Check out the Monday October 3rd post on Baghdad Burning blog.

Hermies 5, Snails 1

2005-10-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a very rare event occurred - I could see all five hermit crabs at the same time. I kind of suspected they were all there, even though I'd seen only one, two, or three at a time for the past couple of weeks. G had been worried that she'd squished one when she knocked a rock over while cleaning the algae off the sides of the tank, but even if a crab had been in the landing zone, those shells they're carrying around are pretty tough.

That reminds me - I must secure that top rock with some of the putty I saw over at Aquarium Guys - next time the rock could scratch the acrylic!

Tonight G & I are going to wander over to Petco to see if they have a lawnmower blenny in stock - I seriously have to get this hair algae under control. It no longer looks like Einstein from Mars, but it's tenacious stuff!

What a RIP-OFF!!!

2005-10-02T19:28:00.000-07:00

If you click the Nano Cubes link over there at the top left, you'll go to an ebay search for these excellent all-in-one aquariums, but BE CAREFUL!

Someone is doing a roaring trade selling PICTURES of his nano cube aquarium for upwards of $100 PLUS $30.12 UPS shipping! He's being very cunning, he's not making any representations that he's selling anything other than the picture, but he's relying on the shipping cost plus "Buy Now" cost of the item (about half the normal cost of a 24g Nano Cube) to cause potential buyers to think they're getting a bargain.

Take a look at the feedback he has been getting - several people have said they mis-read his descriptions. This is very dodgy behaviour as far as I'm concerned - I suspect he's doing very well pocketing the money paid by people who feel too foolish to complain, and in truth he's fireproof - he has sold exactly what he said he would sell to the buyer.

Before I finish on this posting, one more thing to look out for on eBay is the shipping and insurance costs. I've seen a ten dollar item with an associated FIFTY SEVEN dollar shipping charge and FIFTEEN dollar insurance. Once you've made that ten dollar bid, you're legally liable for the full $82 cost of the item.

Read the small print!

Well, that's a mystery then...

2005-10-02T19:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took a sample of water to my LFS (Local fish Stockist) and asked if he could give it a general check, and also test for copper in the water. To my surprise, he said it was fine - no detectable copper or ammonia, and very low levels of nitrites and nitrates.

On the plus side, this means the biofiltering system (live rock & sand) is working perfectly - I can start looking for some critters for my tank, I'll almost certainly start with a scooter blenny (known as a lawnmower blenny here in the good ol' US of A), just to keep on top of that darn hair algae.

On the other hand, it's a complete mystery why four out of five snails are now ex-inhabitants of their shells... oh yes, this is going to sound ghoulish, but I, G and even G's daughter (E) have all been evicting the poor shrivelled dead blobs from their shells and putting the shells back into the aquarium. It sounds harsh, but the hermit crabs are thriving, and one day they're going to need bigger shells!

I don't like mysteries - if anyone out there has any suggestions why snails will stop eating and just fade away over a week or two, please let me know!

How to avoid a student loan...

2005-09-30T08:32:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is ingenious. A UK student saw how his elder brother left university owing UKP 30,000, and wanted to do something to avoid getting into that situation himself. He came up with the idea of selling PIXELS on a webpage to advertisers... the dear old Beeb covered the story here.

Alex' page is already a colourful mosaic of graphics linking to an incredible variety of web pages - I can see the next craze being "site hunting" on www.milliondollarhomepage.com

I emailed Alex a suggestion to put a gadget on the page that will tell you which 10x10 block your mouse is hovering over - apparently they'll be working on it over the weekend. Then we can say "hey, check out the crazy site at MDHP(8,7)!"

It's water, Jim - but not as we know it

2005-09-29T07:57:00.000-07:00

I'm becoming very perplexed about these snails in my aquarium. Its as if they decided to just give up eating and slowly fade away. over the past few of days I've had to rescue two of the remaining three from being stranded on their backs in the sand, and brought them to the front (where the healthiest of the three was sitting in his own little algae garden).

Yesterday and this morning I picked out one that looked like he had turned up his little gastropod toes and was pushing up the daisies, but when tickled he retreated into his shell - so, still alive... just.

I did begin to wonder about the last water change I carried out (ten days ago) - I used five gallons of Stater Bros 'Pure Mountain Water' and mixed in Instant Ocean salt. I did a little research online, and found that far from being pure, shop-bought water may contain significant amounts of phosphates (I have been seeing rampant hair-algae growth) and even copper - a deadly poison to invertebrates. Hmmm.

Just a shame that the water testing kit I have doesn't show anything wrong with the tank water! I'll have to look for a copper and phosphate test kit online.

So last night I was more careful in my water selection. Reading all the labels, I found Sparkletts "Crystal-Fresh" purified label was the only one that processed with reverse osmosis and/or dionization, filtered and ozonated. They do add some minerals "for taste" - sodium bicarbonate, sodium sulphate, but I decided they were probably innocuous in the reef tank.

This morning I'm happy to say there is some sign of recovery - at least one of the snails has been moving around munching the algae overnight :) Think I better do another water change this weekend to further dilute any nasties from the old water.

Shiny Brand New Canadian

2005-09-24T05:35:00.000-07:00

Well, the citizenship test went well on Thursday morning, and an hour later I was in the ceremony getting sworn in as a new Canadian, with 49 other people from about a dozen different countries.

The test was very easy (though I probably wouldn't have found it so if I hadn't read "A Look At Canada" - the official test preparation text - about half a dozen times). I think the only question that needed any kind of 'research' outside the text was "What is the name of the Prime Minister?". And there I was making up daft nmemonics like "Ontario Lieutenant Governor's name is Bartleman, rhymes with Bartman, ok, think of Bart Simpson as the Lieutenant Governor...".

I hadn't expected the ceremony itself to be quite so moving, this old cynic actually did feel emotional about the final step in the long process of becoming a Canadian. The court officer did a great job of making everyone feel at ease, and it was good to finally meet her - she made all the arrangements for me to take the test and ceremony on the same day, and persuaded me to stay the course six months ago when I thought "to hell with it, I'm having to work in the US because of Ontario's laws against skilled immigrants working as engineers without going through a 2 or 3 year 'apprenticeship' (which of course the immigration people never mention to you during the process of applying to come to Canada).

When I went up to get my certificate pack from the Judge, he asked me where I had originally come from. When I told him England, he asked which city, and I said "Cambridge" - since I didn't feel like explaining why I was now living in California, I just mumbled something about moving from Cambridge to Cambridge (Ontario). In stentorian tones he bellowed "REALLY? MAY I TELL THEM THAT?" 'sure...' "HE CAME FROM CAMBRIDGE IN ENGLAND.... TO CAMBRIDGE IN ONTARIO!!!" Ground, open up and swallow me right now. Well... it was kind of true - a year ago.

I feel bad about leaving G to look after the nascent aquarium - two snails out of the five have died - one the night before I left, one yesterday. Both had been stranded on the sand for a day, but whether they fell there because they were weak, or if they starved because they were stranded on the sand, I have no idea. I think I was far too hasty when putting them in the aquarium - should have spent far longer acclimatising them to the new environment. Oh well, I'll do a huge water change and clear out when I get back tomorrow, and try to find out what could be the problem. I'm even wondering if my tank is just a little too salty (it was 1.025 last time I checked, and although I put some fresh water in, evaporation may have pushed it higher).

Don't you just hate...

2005-09-20T12:17:00.000-07:00

...people who leave adverts under your windscreen wipers?

Honestly, what a nerve! It's the environmentally-unfriendly version of spam emails. I'm seriously considering collecting as many as I can next time they do that at the office car park and delivering them back to the company that sent them out.

But I'll probably get sued for 'restricting the shop owner's freedom of speech'.

So I'll probably do what every other schmuck does... take it off my windscreen and put it under the wiper of the car next to mine. I mean, put it in the nearest recycling bin, of course!

Algae-munchers

2005-09-18T20:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday G & I drove up to Tustin to visit Fish2000 - we got there just after six (the official closing time) so didn't get much time to look around. To be brutally honest, the shop could do with a good tidy up, but it does seem to have a good range of stock and accessories.

There's an awesome 4ft shark in a large display tank, but the display is kind of strange - I guess they had to mount it directly on the foundations, so you have to crouch down to see it. The tank is completely bare, and had no lighting (at least when I was there), so it didn't look all that great.

I'm trying to get the rampant algae under control, so I picked up five tiny hermit crabs (red leg and blue leg) and five snails - astrea I think, the sales guy said they stay smaller than turbos. Cost me $15.73 including tax. Sure I could have got them cheaper on the internet, but I'd have to arrange for someone to be here when they arrive!

A pair of the snails were indulging in some serious hanky-panky when I looked in on the aquarium this morning... I wonder how long before we're hearing the pitter-patter of tiny... umm... gastropods? Actually, I'm wondering about those snails - they REALLY don't seem to like crossing the sand, so much so that they fall over on their shells and get stranded when trying to get from the tank walls to the rock!

Oh... forgot another thing - bought a 16.5lb pack of Instant Ocean from Petco and did a 4 gallon water change yesterday. The refractometer really came into its own, made it very easy to check the specific gravity of the new water - none of this messing around checking temperatures or waiting for the water to stop swirling before testing that you have to do with floating hydrometers.

I've got a bloomin' garden in my tank

2005-09-14T20:06:00.000-07:00

Well, the knowledgeable people at www.thereeftank.com (what a great bunch of people) were absolutely 100% right - the diatom blooms have dissipated as the tank matures. I've swapped out only about 2 gallons of water from the tank after one week - I want to get those denitrifying bacteria working! At the end of the week, I think I shall do a 20% water change.

Looking forward to getting the refractometer I bought from ebay - had a nice email from the seller yesterday saying that he had shipped it, I'm hoping it's going to take the guesswork out of keeping the salt water at the right concentration!

The algae is positively blooming! There's some chunky-looking stuff that was dying off, but is now established on several rocks and is adding a 5mm flattened blob on each stem every day, and there is a raft of new delicate fronds all over a large flattened coral skeleton fan, which is in the full force of the overhead lighting. Some of the fronds look like miniature christmas trees, less than an inch high - very pretty.

I *thought* I saw a worm on one of the rocks earlier tonight - I do hope it wasn't a bristleworm (or fireworm) - I have nasty memories of accidentally squishing one between my fingers when cleaning out my old aquarium in England. Believe me... those spines leave a painful rash!

G followed a link from here to vividaquariums today, and decided that her favorite critters were Red Coco Worm, Blue Starfish, Fire Shrimp, Colored Dwarf Feather Duster - I have to agree with her, they are pretty :) Not sure about the Fire Shrimp with seahorses, it'll be snatching food away from them before they can grab it! And heaven alone knows how many seahorse fry it would manage to grab before I found them in the morning...

A kind word for Bush

2005-09-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

Ok, I can't stands it anymore...

I've bitten my blogging tongue while reading posting after posting about Hurricane Katrina, and the subsequent blame-game blown up to category 5 proportions. Now, I need to throw my tuppance-worth into the broth.

Let me first state that my good friend MC labelled me an 'ultra-liberal' (I'd have preferred uber-liberal) after asking me my reasons for not wanting to apply for American citizenship - perhaps a subject for another blog entry after I've posted at least a couple vaguely related to the site's primary subject.

I have repeatedly stood gobsmacked at yet another example of Bush incompetency and just plain refusal to understand that other countries are not America, and have their own value systems. He has Bushed the dollar. His insistance on "educating for abstinence" and stipulating that donations towards HIV programs in other countries should not be spent treating prostitutes has undermined Zambia's AIDS effort and lead to Brazil refusing to accept a $30million donation. If I were to say that his reasons for invading Iraq were 'questionable' I'd be more than charitable.

And yet... aside from a tendency to 'let the world go hang' when he's on vacation, I can't bring myself to join in the blame game too much as far as the disaster relief effort is concerned. At most, he's reaping the rewards for his inspired appointments, and reminding us that he's not the quickest at making decisions after a disaster (but we all knew that, right?). If we're going to take issue with the people he appoints to positions of power, forget the recently departed Mr Brown, let's start with Condoleeza Rice, whose idea of diplomacy is to fly around the world awarding countries marks out of ten for democracy! As Cartman would say.. "You will respect muh democracuh!".

Now that The Big Dubblya has admitted responsibility for some of the shortcomings of federal response to the Katrina disaster, and is looking to improve things in the future, I for one will say "You're doing a heck of a job, Bushie!".

Pop Quiz... if a foreign power invades your country, removes the current leader allowing chaos to ensue in the inevitable power vacuum, and you see many of your friends and family die at their hands or those of insurgents, would you be: A) less likely to take up terrorism to get back at that power, or B) more likely?

I don't blame the soldiers btw - I support them in carrying out a very difficult job, and if I prayed, I'd pray for a way to bring them home safely while not abandoning the people of Iraq to a bloodbath.

There... controversial enough for you?

Diatoms, Seahorses

2005-09-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

I found an AWESOME website for anyone interested in keeping seahorses this morning - I would STRONGLY recommend anyone interested in these creatures to visit it: http://www.seahorse.org - I'm going to be spending a lot of time there over the next few weeks!

Reading up on the 'brown algae', I found that it is almost certainly diatom bloom, and a natural part of the cycling process that should disappear as the diatoms use up the silicates in the aquarium. The bloom sparsely covers a fair proportion of the sand now, though it seems to me that the coverage is shifting - sand affected earlier is now becoming clear. Some of the rocks have a thin covering over much of their surface, and there are patches on the aquarium itself, down by the sand.

The macroalgae had been looking as if it was going to die away completely - the greenery that had been shrivelled when I bought the rocks turned white and started falling apart. Yesterday however, strong bright green buds started appearing on all the clumps :)

Please ignore... notes for Canadian Citizenship test

2005-09-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

I need to jot a few things down to help me remember them... and this seemed so much more difficult to lose than a scrap of paper! I'll remove it before the end of September ;)

Prime Minister : Paul Martin Liberal Party - Lib party site won't let you in without name, postcode & email address... they're going to be spamming ForGoodnessSake@IJustNeedSomeInfo.com har har har

Governor General : Michaelle Jean (after Sept 27th 2005), currently ADRIENNE CLARKSON

Lieutenant-govenor of Ontario : James K. Bartleman

Ontario Premier : Dalton McGuinty Ontario Liberal Party

Leader of the Opposition & ProgConservative Ontario Leader : John Tory (with a name like that, how could he not be?)

Green Party Leader : Jim Harris
Green Party Ontario Leader : Frank De Jong

New Democratic Party Leader : Jack Layton
NDP Ontario Leader : Howard Hampton

Progressive Conservative Leader : (master of the oxymorons) Stephen Harper

Bloc Quebecois website won't open!
Partis Quebecois - Alors! c'est seulement en Francais! Merde!

MPP for Brant (where I used to live) LLoyd St. Amand, Liberal.

Useful Websites
http://www.v-soul.com/vsoul/testinfo.html - names of political party leaders
http://www.v-soul.com/vsoul/freesw.html?citizenship - self-test software
http://www.yourlibrary.ca/citizenship/index.asp - practice tests for Richmond BC, but most Q's useful

First signs of algae...

2005-09-07T17:47:00.000-07:00

Ok, we're four days into the cycling process for the nano-cube, and I'm seeing the first signs of brown algae bloom on the sand, a few dozen quarter-inch diameter dots in the areas that get most light. The addition of a little fresh water at intervals over the last couple of days has brought the specific gravity (SG) down to 1.024 - most satisfactory :)

Water conditions are still very stable -
Ammonia 0, Nitrite 0.3, Nitrate 20, pH 8.0, SG 1.024

Seems like the live sand and live rock are doing their stuff already! It's tempting to order a cleanup crew to hit the algae straight away, but I'll let the macroalgae on the live rocks get well-established first - wouldn't want my cleanup crew to starve :)

Now then, I think I'm going to make this a species tank for seahorses - the main reason is that it is possible to tank-breed seahorses, and though the survival rate for the young'uns is very low (about 1 in 20 to 1 in 10), that's far better odds than they get in the wild, where it is estimated that only one in 1000 survives to adulthood. That way, I avoid my guilt-trip about plundering the wild stocks, and provide a new source of fish into the reef community :)

...wanders off looking bravely to the horizon and feeling extremely noble.

Ooh... sea monkeys

2005-09-06T07:50:00.000-07:00

Yup, the brine shrimp hatched after about an hour yesterday, and there's still a myriad of them swimming around this morning. I'm hoping they're going to find some good grazing on the rocks/floating around the tank - would be good to see some full-sized brine shrimp in the aquarium... before I put something in that will dine on them.

Water test results:
Ammonia 0, Nitrite 0.4, Nitrate 20, pH 8.0, SG 1.025

The pH may be higher, the target 8.2 is between the 7.8 and 8.4 pads on the test kit bottle. The pH adjuster has certainly made a difference, though. SG is a little high - I put a little fresh water (from my supermarket bottled drinking water) in there, and will check the salinity again tonight once it has all mixed in.

Disgruntled at live rock

2005-09-05T16:19:00.000-07:00

It's Monday, I'll do another water test in the morning - I'm expecting to see a rise in ammonia etc. Not too sure about these live rocks - they seem pretty lifeless! Nice shapes though, and I've been able to make an intricate cave system, and have plenty of ledges for future critters.

I did buy some "Proper pH8.2" from Petco today - $3.99, since the pH I've been seeing is a little low at 7.8. Apparently this stuff 'automatically sets aquarium pH at 8.2' - so presumably it works over a period of time rather than blatting the pH level all at once. Clever people, these chemists.

I also decided to conduct a little experiment. I bought a 6 gram pack of brine shrimp eggs at Petsmart - also for $3.99, and put a pinch of them into the aquarium. I figure they're pretty hardy, will give me something to look at for the next few weeks, graze the scummy bits off the rocks and become food for whatever I end up putting in the aquarium .

Ok, back on the subject of livestock again... in addition to (or maybe instead of) the goby and pistol shrimp [probably from http://www.marinedepotlive.com/index.html - they're very near here, so although the creatures will still have to be shipped, the journey should be short], I'm considering a breeding pair of seahorses. I saw a recommendation that there should be a maximum of one breeding pair to eight gallons of water, so the 24g tank should accommodate them nicely.

Seahorses are not easy to raise, and I'd certainly want to try to raise the young to go back into the aquarist community, so it may be that I'd have to forego other livestock, or I'll find the new fry becoming breakfast in the tank rather than replenishing the community :(

Starting to look like a real aquarium...

2005-09-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

$89.25 lighter and 27 pounds of live rock later, the aquarium looks like it is starting to take shape! I promise I'll post a photo or two when I upload them off of G's camera :)

*I asked about the cichlid food - seems like the shopkeeper *did* intend to put it in the pack. Oh well, I'll give it a try if I get livestock that may eat it in about four week's time.

Talking of livestock... I'm very taken with the idea of a pistol shrimp and goby symbiotic pair - I was reading about them here: http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/showthread.php?t=56905. Since I'm not going to have an awful lot of livestock in the tank, the idea of a double-act like that is very appealing. Definitely high on my list :)

Getting Live Rock this morning!

2005-09-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, moving the heater into the main tank rather than the filter section was probably a good move (for now) - I could see that the heater was on when tank temperature was at 80F. Turned the heater down another couple of degrees, I want to see a nice, stable 78F in there!

Checked the water again, everything unchanged at:
Ammonia 0, Nitrite 0.3, Nitrate 10, pH 7.8

That's all going to change when I install the live rock in a few hours! I'm guessing that's when the aquarium will *really* start cycling. I'm overwhelmingly sceptical of the "already cycled - just add fish!" claim on the bags of sand!

Random tip #1: Aggressive Damsels

2005-09-03T08:16:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is going to sound far-fetched, but it worked for me.

I had a problem with two saffron-tailed blue damsels - they were small, but really aggressive, chasing practically everything else in the tank that came anywhere near 'their' end of the aquarium.

One day I put a regal tang into the aquarium (Finding Nemo's 'Dory'). Well, apart from being MUCH bigger, the colours of the tang were similar to those of the saffron-tailed damsels. All of a sudden, the damsels stopped being aggressive to all the other fish! It was as if they decided that the tang was the tank boss, and that was just fine with them.

A couple of months after the tang was introduced, the damsels started spawning on a regular basis, so they must have been totally relaxed with the whole situation :)

Wossitallabout

2005-09-02T07:06:00.000-07:00

Just a journal for me to keep track of setting up and maintaining a small marine aquarium. The story so far:

Saturday 2005-08-27
After much soul-searching and internet trawling, bought a 24 gallon nano-cube and stand from the local fish stockist "The Sand Bar Pet Shop" Mission Viejo CA. Why the soul-searching? Well, I did have a couple of tanks about 5 years ago in England, and gradually built up a huge guilt-complex about the impact of the hobby on wild reef populations.

So why the change of heart? Well, on investigation, it seems that the hobby has progressed enormously over the past few years (we may have been behind the times a little in England). The lighting and biological filtering requirements seem far better understood, and people are maintaining healthy systems in tanks far smaller than would have been considered ten years ago. Still - I decided to go with a 24 gallon nano-cube rather than the more popular 12 gallon, I just like to stack the odds in my favour.

Why the small tank? Why not one of those sexy 60 gallon cubes, or larger? I'm living for now in a rented apartment in California, and I know I'm going to be moving in the not too distant future. It seems to me that moving a 24 gallon system is eminently more feasible than transporting something that weighs in the order of 1000lb when fully-stocked!

Thursday 2005-09-01
Ok, first stumbling-block - the nano-cube when I unwrapped it had a huge crack on the side. The store ordered me a replacement, and Thursday night I went over and picked up the stand, replacement cube, 23 gallons of pre-mixed salt water, 30lb of Live Sand, a heater (100W "All Glass Aquarium" - ironic, it's in an acrylic tank ;) ), thermometer, testing kits for Ammonia, Nitrite-Nitrate, and pH. Also in the bag was a pack of Cichlid Gold food pellets - bizarre! I'll check the receipt, it may have been put in there accidentally.

Set up the tank on the stand (this tank had more pieces of polystyrene around it than the first, so I assume the first one has been bought, broken, sent back to the distributors and shipped out to another pet store - it may have been doing this for years *smile*.

I've been doing some research on sites like http://TheReefTank.com, and the general advice is to put the live rocks on the glass, or on stands and put the sand around the rocks. Well, the guys in the store said to put the sand in, then build the rocks on top of it, because you'll get die-off on the parts of rocks that are under the sand. I dunno, it does sound like a recipe for disaster - I can imagine a burrowing animal undermining the whole stack, causing damage to livestock and tank as it tumbles! I'll be getting the rocks tomorrow, and I'll try to make a foundation directly on the bottom of the tank, or perhaps on suitable stand-offs to get flow underneath the rocks.

Testing of the water last night showed:
Ammonia 0 Nitrite 0.3 Nitrate 10 pH 7.8

This morning, the temperature in the tank was high - about 84F! That's with the light off, in a cool room with the ceiling fan going above the tank all night. I checked the heater and found that it was coming on, even though it was set for 79F. I adjusted it down to 77F and put it into the main body of the aquarium for now so I can keep an eye on when it is coming on.

* First irritation with the nano-cube, the silly little cut-out in the hood for pump cable barely accommodates the heater cable too, and because there's nothing on the lip of the tank to stop the cables moving, one of the cables generally misses the cut-out and causes the hood to be misaligned with the top of the aquarium. Something will have to be done!

Costs so far
24g Nano cube	$269.99
Stand	$124.99
Sundries listed above	$179 inc. tax