Fish keeping. With live plants. In a 150 gallon aquarium.

I first got into the hobby several years ago, when Cathy brought home a small aquarium and fish she’d been keeping at work. It soon grew from that first 5 gallons to a 10 gallon tank, then a 29 gallon one, then the 10 *and* 29, then finally 2 29 gallon tanks.

Somewhere along the way, fairly early on, I decided that we needed something other than the plastic plants we were using. So we started replacing all the plastic with live plants. At that point, we started replacing the tiny under powered single-tube lighting with more and more fluorescent lights, until the 29s were maxed out at 4 24″ (well, really 20″, if I remember correctly) tubes.

This provided at least a minimum amount of light to allow plants to grow, and some to even flourish. The addition of more fish, aquatic fertilizers, carbon dioxide (both in liquid additive and yeast fermentation forms), etc just made the addiction worse.

When we moved from our apartment to a house, we got. 150 gallon tank, to consolidate both of the 29 gallon ones we’d been keeping. Unfortunately, the lighting levels weren’t the best, and as time went on, aquarium maintenance started to slip from every week to every few, to once a month, and beyond. Compounding the problem, the 150 gallon was in the basement, which still doesn’t qualify as a “living area”, because we were worried that approximately 1500 pounds in a 4 ft by 2 ft area would cause problems on the main level.

Since we’ve had a dog for over a year now, we’ve been passing through the basement on our way to the back yard for “potty time” (dogs, kids, apparently it’s common to use the same euphemisms for things…), and I’d gotten really good at ignoring the tank sitting against the wall.

After regular prompting for a few months, however, we finally found the time one weekend to perform a much-needed water change and filter cleaning. We’d lost some fish and all the plants, but enough fish survived to guilt us into getting back into the maintenance habit again.

At this point, we’ve mostly fought off a blue-green algae infestation (brought on by an overabundance of nutrients and poor lighting), cleaned up an embarrassingly-thick layer of mulm (a nice term for fish food, fish poop, and…dead fish & plants), and mostly have what’s left of the tank under control. We’re planning to restock in the near future, building up schools of fish around the current survivors. I’d also like to take the time to get a sufficient amount of lighting in place to make the place viable for a range of plants.

Why plants? Because most of the “waste” in an aquarium can be used by plants, keeping the water cleaner, which keeps the fish happy. That, and live plants just *look* better, providing homes and hiding places for various aquarium fauna, as well as some supplemental food. I’d also like to introduce Malaysian Trumpet Snails to the tank, which will act as scavengers while leaving the living plants alone, as well as burrow through the gravel, to keep that healthy.

Going forward, some of the challenges I see are;
1. Maintaining the current weekly water changes and other routine maintenance, which has obviously been a problem
2. Slowly increasing the fish population, to avoid overloading the current biological filter (bacteria that convert poisonous ammonia into poisonous nitrite, and other bacteria that convert the nitrite into much less harmful nitrate)
3. Getting enough lighting into the tank to make plant growth possible, without turning the tank into a bubbleless hot tub
4. Finding and arranging plants to soak up nitrates and all the other by-products of keeping live fish that can tolerate the likely low light levels (1 watt/gallon is “low”, 2 wpg is “medium”ish, 3-4 wpg is “high”…that’s 150W, 300W, and 450W-600W, respectively, with a 4 foot fluorescent tube putting out about 40W)

Something tells me this is going to get expensive, especially when you start to factor in items like a carbon dioxide injector (for the plants), heaters & chillers (to maintain a constant water temperature), additional fish food variety, and liquid fertilizer for the plants. Then again, I’ve managed to do this on a smaller scale already, so hopefully I can use that experience.

Anyway, Cathy and I have been in the process of merging our separate lives, from bills for things like the landline & TV, to bank accounts, to now cellphones. After all, we already tend to the same network for coverage, and we’re each the primary person the other calls, SMSes, and IMs from our phones, and so it makes some degree of sense to stop paying for wholly separate plans, and start taking advantage of “family” plans. You know, since we’re now a family…

For me, part of the process involves looking back at what I’ve liked and disliked about my current and past phones, and what I’d like to see in a new one. In the interest of being more positive, I think I’ll mostly enumerate the things I’ve liked, and what I want in addition. With the SK3, I knew a lot of the restrictions going in, and while some of them I hoped would have been fixed in firmware updates, that never turned out to be the case.

So, what I’m looking for, in no real order, is:

• GSM, most of the rest of the world uses it, I’d like to continue using it as well
• Data connectivity such as GPRS or EDGE, because I really have gotten used to web surfing on a phone to look things up or just fill time while waiting somewhere
• QWERTY keyboard, I’ve gotten used to having one, to the point where typing on a numeric pad is painful, in part because I use SMS a lot, and in part because I also want…
• An SSH client, as there are times I’m not near a computer or Wi-Fi connection, and still need/want to access machines directly. Also, broadband where I live sucks and goes out in the rain
• Wi-Fi, because there are times I am covered by a Wi-Fi signal, but have almost no cell reception, but don’t have a laptop with me (or I only have computers I don’t trust, namely ones I don’t have sole control over)
• Bluetooth, because, well, it’s nice to not be tethered to an earpiece for hands-free calling, and my last 2 phones and current PDA have it
• Decent battery life, I shouldn’t have to charge my phone every day if I’m not actively using it, and shouldn’t have to worry that it will completely drain if it’s sitting idle from a full charge in “airplane mode” (all radio transmitters/receivers turned off) in 2 days. My PDA lasts at least a week, if not more, with light usage on a single charge
• PDA capabilities, as I’m getting tired of carrying around multiple devices to do everything I want/need to do to manage my life
• Decent data sync, especially address books, calendars, reminders, etc, since I manage a lot of that through desktop apps (and use WebCal/iCalendar for calendaring, especially sharing with my wife and/or coworkers)
• Expandable/removable storage, since nothing’s worse than running out of space. Carrying a few flash cards in a pocket takes almost no space
• Somewhat open platform, so I’m not spending a small fortune on adding software. Yes, I knew this wasn’t the case with my SK3, and accepted it at the time, thinking I’d get around to qualifying for a developer’s key, allowing me to directly load apps, but I never seemed to find the time to write something ever-so-slightly more complex than a Java “Hello, world”, despite so many plans. It would also be nice to be able to get not-officially-sanctioned apps like the mobile Google apps or Opera Mini
• IM clients, yes I’m addicted to IM, but it also seems to be the way I keep in touch with the majority of people I know. At least AIM and Y!IM, since that’s where the majority of the people I know reside. MSN Messenger would be nice, and a Jabber/XMPP client would be fantastic
• Email, as I do a lot of reading/responding while killing a few minutes here and there. I’d really prefer IMAP4 (with SSL), but will settle for POP3 (with SSL). Non-SSL is likely a non-starter for me.
• IRC, hell, let’s go for broke! This isn’t really a requirement, as I would likely just SSH into my remote server, and reattach to my screen session that’s always running irssi if I really needed to hop on IRC…
• Media player, ideally something supporting WAV, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, though I can deal with MP3. I’m trying to consolidate devices, after all, and both my current phone and my PDA can both play audio
• User-installable ringtones, since most every ringtone out there seems to suck, and the ones I can currently install on the SK3 really suck, since my tastes seem to be decidely outside the demographics they’re targetting. Why can’t I use something like the Imperial March from Star Wars for work-related calls, or some Billy Joel, the Beatles, Styx, or Nine Inch Nails, when I already have the CDs, have them ripped, and plan to listen to them anyway on the device?

Ideally, if Palm could release a GSM PalmOS-based Treo that had Wi-Fi (the Palm TX has been out for how many years now with Wi-Fi?), and wasn’t just another tired rehash of the Treo 650 or Treo 680, that would probably be an ideal phone for me, as my PDA is a Palm Tungsten|T3, so I have almost all the software I’d need/want, and could easily transfer over all my existing data. Alas, Wi-Fi at this point seems like a determining factor. I’ve considered the various Microsoft PocketPC/Windows Mobile/whatever it’s called this month phones, and I’m sort of lukewarm on the whole idea there. Sure, they’ve got the largest market segment right now, and even Palm is releasing Windows-based phones, but what little I’ve seen of the interface (and what lot I’ve read from people that have devices with it), makes me hesitant.

Symbian-based could be nice, I really liked my old Nokia 6600. Unfortunately, what I’ve heard of recent “advances” with the Symbian OS make me think that it’s diverging greatly from where I want to be, what with locking down the installation of 3rd-party software. I’m also wishy-washy on BlackCrackberries. I admittedly don’t have much of any exposure to them, so it could be entirely just my unfamiliarity with them. As for the iPhone, well, talk about locked down…updates that brick phones that people have liberated, software only installable through the just-announced App Store, and the requirement to use iTunes to even activate the thing? Maybe if iTunes were available for Linux, which will not be happening any time soon, or more likely ever…

Ideally, when we’re ready to switch, and both of us are off-contract, the OpenMoko will be in mass-production. It’s Linux-based, seems to have almost all the features I want (except maybe a keyboard), has a community already, and looks to be fairly extensible. Whether it will actually pan out or be available at that point, though, is anybody’s guess.

Looking at phonescoop, it appears that I’ve got a choice of a lot of Windows-based phones, some Symbian ones, a handful of Blackberries, as well as a few undetermined phones. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m likely to choose at this point. Maybe a few more months will produce a clear winner…

One might think, “But the last guy had DSL, so what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that Verizon really doesn’t care about the Frederick area at all. There’s one CO in the area. It happens to be at full DSL capacity. So as soon as the previous owner terminated his service, his DSL circuit was snapped up by someone else. So it wasn’t available to us. I really didn’t want to go with cable, because I’ve had it before and haven’t been overly impressed. For a while, I seriously considered SDSL, but at well over $100 a month, I convinced myself that wasn’t an option.

Then I found a local ISP that claimed to have ISDN. Now, this would be just as slow as SDSL, but for roughly $30-$40 a month, it’s much more reasonable. I was psyched to get the service, and just had a few questions. So I call the ISP to speak to their tech people. They couldn’t really answer any of my technical questions, such as whether I’d need another line, and despite being right down the street they couldn’t say whether Verizon would charge per-minute fees or anything above and beyond what I was paying them. I could have handled that, but the answer to my next question floored me. Their website specifically stated that they would provide the CPE, fully configured. The person I spoke to, when asked “Do you guys provide the CPE?” told me that no, they didn’t, and recommeded a specific model of ISDN CPE and suggested I find it on eBay. Um, yeah… So scratch ISDN.

By this point, you might be wondering what I finally went with, not having DSL, cable, SDSL, or ISDN. I’ll tell you… Satellite. Yes, slow, slightly faster than dialup if it’s a clear day, expensive satellite. We went with Dish Network, which resells WildBlue’s service. If I’d done some homework, I might have gone elsewhere, as the overall opinion seems to be rather negative. But, I didn’t. So we have it. Now. Because we ordered on June 26th, were told an install of August 4th. On the 3rd, we got rescheduled to the 5th for what I consider a valid reason. On the 5th we got rescheduled to the 12th, due to lack of the right length of ladder. On the 12th, we got rescheduled and the feces started to hit the rotating blades.

We were both sick and tired of being rescheduled, and this time we were told the 24th. You know, 2 months after we ordered the service. After several phone calls and being told there was nothing sooner, we called Dish Network to cancel all our service. We lucked out with someone who seemed to actually care, that looked into the ticket and then got pissed on our behalf. And then she got her supervisor, who also got pissed on our behalf. After collecting all our details for her supervisor, to be forwarded to the district managers, we had a promise of “this week, with at least 24 hours’ notice” or they’d completely release us from all their services without penalty.

Monday morning, we get a call, and set up a Tuesday morning install. Tuesday’s install completes with very little trouble, and we’re online by 1pm. Since then, I’ve learned about the Fair Access Policy, and have installed FapZilla to monitor usage. After 2 days and change, we’re at about 23% of our monthly download limit before we get cut to painfully slow speeds. Most of this is due to having 5 computers needing a 45 days’ updates, 4 of them Debian Unstable (2 i386, 2 amd64). We’ll need to see over the next month just how bad things get, but I’m getting the impression that this service is, at best, aimed at just websurfers. Urk.

So, where’s the blog now? I ordered a Linode, since I needed a solution for web, mail, dns, etc. They’re really awesomely responsive, dealing with requests usually within minutes. For root-level access and my choice of distro, with static IPs and an insane amount of bandwidth, the prices are incredibly reasonable as well. I highly recommend them if you need your own host somewhere.

And so, now we’re finally back on the air. Maybe not with the best access speeds for ourselves, but hopefully we’ll have more options once our contract with the satellite is up…

I got a call from my mother a little while ago, in part asking about a friend of mine who teaches at Virginia Tech¹. After assuring her that my friend was OK, she went on to tell me that she got home from work this morning, and the house was flooded. Apparently the tank on the toilet in the powder room cracked sometime between when she left for work last night and when she got home this morning. So there was about an inch and a half of water on the main level, and the basement was a lot worse off. Ruined floors, carpet, tile, etc. Frantic, she couldn’t find her homeowners policy, so called the number on her car insurance². After they managed to calm her down, they got the insurance info squared away, and told her that within an hour and a half or so, someone would call to arrange for a crew to come out and deal with the issues within four hours.

Well, I didn’t get a time that she got home (though I suspect it was in the 8-8:30 or so range), but when she called me just after noon, there was already a crew there cleaning up. Now, I don’t know what the normal turn-around time for the average company is on an issue like that, but that’s still a pretty impressive reaction time.

She’s had Nationwide for probably close to 25 years, and they’ve always been there, especially when my sister and I were pretty stupid teenagers with cars, with all that implies. I’ve had them myself for over 10 years, since I got my first apartment and my car. My fiancée has had them since she got her car. And we’re (my fiancée and I) are using them for our homeowners insurance on our upcoming house.

Now, this blog doesn’t have the production values of of a national television or radio spot, and I certainly receive nothing other than the normal long-term & multiple policy discounts that any other customer gets from them, but Nationwide has been there time and again, and have never given me or mine any hassles in dealing with them. And that, as a completely independent customer who’s genuinely happy with the service, speaks more highly of them than any paid-for advertising. At least, it does to me.

1. If you haven’t been following the news today, there have been shootings on-campus in Blacksburg, VA, with the casualty count mounting
2. There are advantages to getting home/renter’s insurance and car insurance from the same company!

Some of the fun fun things I’ve encountered thus far are:

• The confused server that seems to think that, instead of giving a proper 304 Not Modified response (with no body) when the content I’m requesting hasn’t changed, it should instead give a 200 OK response, with no body. This kept throwing me as I was trying to debug, as I kept believing my logs that there should be new content there…
• The confused server that gives a 406 Not Acceptable response to requests that don’t supply a User-Agent: header with the request. Admittedly, were I less lazy, I’d be specifying one anyway, just to identify the new kid on the block. But as I haven’t even officially settled on a name yet, I was leaving things at their default (and made the assumption that Ruby’s Net::HTTP library had some sort of default value). What really threw me was that wget would work, but telnet wouldn’t, even when I was listing a huge laundry list of formats I was interested in in the Accept: header (including the type that wget said was coming back). After a little while, I decided to just pass a User-Agent: moo, and lo and behold, content!
• The really confused server that would reply to all requests with a Last-Modified: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT, but would then completely bomb out with an application error if it got that value back in a If-Modified-Since: request header.
• The feed that seems to randomly return something that isn’t RSS or Atom at all, but from the exception the content generates, looks like it could be normal HTML. I say randomly, because after the last time it happened (and I finally got around to catching that exception to log it, deal with it, and carry on), it’s happened a grand total of once. And in that time, it’s checked the feed a few more times, though the content hasn’t updated (from before the time stored…), with no issues. I’m hoping something happens during the night, just so I know that I’m not the one going crazy.

Feeds in general have also been interesting. I’ve discovered that there’s such a huge variation in the quality of the actual data that I’ve had to special-case a few things, and delve into the XML (or XML-like) content itself in order to pull out data that I’d hoped would percolate into the normal accessor methods of the classes I’m using. It’s not a big deal, but it’s one of those things that becomes a minor annoyance after a while. Fortunately, of the information I care about, it’s only dates and links to individual entries (or in at least one case, the complete and total lack thereof), and I think I have that in the bag.

Speaking of dates, one thing I’ve been noticing over the months of adding various and sundry feeds to the readers I’ve used in the past is that there are some pretty horrid implementations of Atom out there. I’ve noticed several feeds that various apps/frameworks provide that seem to think that publication, update, etc dates should always reflect the current time when you make the request, and not the time that each item was actually published or underwent a major update. This makes trying to figure out anything temporally useful about feed items a non-starter. Such is life…

Now, lest folks think that all I’m doing is complaining, let me just say that I’m glad that I’ve been running into these problems. I never would have discovered some rather fragile assumptions that I made without real-world data. In order to do that, I whipped up a pretty brain-dead (but functional) OPML import feature, and an add-a-feed feature, so that I could import the OPML file that I’d managed to export from my other reader a short time ago. Importing that, and adding some feeds that I’ve been pasting into a file for a week or two, I’m able to see how everything fares trying to parse 294 highly varied feeds instead of a few minor test cases. So when I’m ready to release the first alpha version to the guinea pigs, it should at least do better than it might otherwise.

So, yeah, I’ve made some decent progress on a lot of the back-end code and infrastructure. There’s just enough of a UI in place so that I can at least verify that things are working. It’s butt-ugly, and almost completely useless, but meets my current needs. Eventually I’ll get around to making it functional for me, maybe even functional for you. There’s logging in place so that I can at least figure out where something goes wrong. Hell, it even saves data (without corruption despite multiple crashes). You just can’t, well, read or navigate or do anything else at the moment.

I think in part it has to do with consumers not demanding more information. While within minutes of a failed delivery the online trackers are updated, there’s this huge black hole from the time a package is loaded onto a truck and when delivery is attempted. Last year I read an article on how UPS uses computerized routing to help increase efficiency. Everything from the truck loading order to the exact route to take to deliver packages is pre-determined. If a package is missed, the driver is notified.

So why can’t this information be provided to people tracking packages? A spokesperson in the article says a residential delivery should take 30 seconds, steering wheel to steering wheel. Combine that (or even a fudge factor) with the number of packages loaded on the truck on scheduled before the specific one being tracked, and you have the “non-driving delay”. Factor in an approximate travel time between stops, which it would surprise me if they didn’t already know down to at least a 5 minute window. Update periodically throughout the day, especially since successful and failed deliveries are already being reported back with a time of (non)delivery. Now, instead of just knowing that your package is “Out for Delivery” as of 6:35 AM, and having it be delivered randomly between 11:30 AM and 8:00 PM, you can now see that your package has an “expected delivery window” of 4:00-6:00 PM.

Am I picking on UPS? No, they just happen to be the one that I remember reading about having the type of infrastructure that could handle this with probably just changes to their web interface. FedEx, DHL, and maybe even the USPS (though it’s more likely they show up at a specific time every single day) could implement the same thing. In fact, I’d be surprised if FedEx and DHL didn’t have similar automated routing and planning systems¹ already in place. As all three major carriers seem to be able to update quickly in the event of a delivery or failure to deliver, it’s not even an issue of adding more equipment to the delivery vehicles.

Online package tracking used to be a differentiator between services, but now everyone does it. Is a finer-grained view of when the packages are expected to be delivered the next step?

1. Though FedEx seems to have completely separate facilities for Ground, Express, Home, etc. Having basically bought other delivery services to get into the various markets, this makes some degree of sense, unless you’re a customer trying to pick up a package, and discover “the” FedEx facility you’ve been to several times isn’t the one that your package has been sitting at for several days… And that the facility it is sitting at is inexplicably not listed at all on the FedEx site. No, I’m not still slightly annoyed about that in the slightest.

I mean, just look:

Who can possibly resist that?!

Ok, if you’ve stayed on this long, I have a confessioin to make: this was just a thinly-veilled excuse to test an email posting plugin, sending from my Sidekick3 to the blog. I hope it worked!