Life is a State of Mind

After a major setback last night (the first sump tank leaked), we have a new sump tank in place and the plumbing is working perfectly in the new 120 gallon tank. I set up the Tek T5 lights and got them on a timer too. It is starting to look nice.

The new sump was my old hospital tank, so I had to migrate all the corals, fish, and shrimp from the old hospital tank to the 30 gallon breeder. Feels good to be done with this phase.

I am very annoyed that for some weeks now, every time I sign into Yahoo’s instant messenger service I get two spam messages from random Yahoo accounts that change every time. I only get the unsolicited offers for illegal goods or services when I first sign into the service for a session (never in the middle of a session), and I always get exactly two such offers. The consistency makes me wonder what is going on… since I don’t get them randomly throughout a login session it is only mildly annoying, but I know others who’ve had Yahoo messenger accounts much longer than I have who do not get this junk.

Anyone know how to stop the nonsense?

Update: Turns out there is no good way to stop it, but you can elect to only accept new messages from people already in your contact list. That means people who would like to contact you will first need to contact you out of band (perhaps via email first) and have you add them to your Yahoo IM client. Sigh. Once again the evil creeps ruin a good thing for everyone else.

Well, after talking it over and examining our options, Erci and I stopped by Marine Scene and bought a 120 gallon All-Glass (brand) aquarium, cherry stand, Tek T-5 lights, versa-top, sump, pumps, and plumbing to make it all work. The new big system will go into the dining room and it will house the fish and coral and shrimp from four smaller aquariums we’ve had on the kitchen counter and in the family room since they came home from work.

I am using a 30 gallon breeder with CPR backback overflow skimming to filter sand and water before it goes into the new system. For a while it will be a lot of work, but once set up it should be easier to maintain than all the little tanks. Now I am impatient to start plumbing tests and thrilled the old backpack works so well at skimming the surface water (I should have use it much earlier, great device).

With all the holiday party action, new jobs, and planning/prepping for Yuletide Ball Championships; I am afraid I have been lax in updating. Here is a batch mode update…

This morning I had an unexpected adventure, just as I was finishing breakfast and feeding the fish, I discovered that my 30 gallon marine aquarium was leaking on the kitchen counter and from there down onto the floor! I wiped the water with a towel, waited a moment and it was definitely an ongoing leak and not just a spill.

So I grabbed an old 29 gallon tank from the basement, transferred the water, fish, shrimp, corals and heaters/pumps/lights to the temporary replacement, and made sure the leaky tank stopped leaking (about an inch of live sand and water are still in the tank waiting for more time)… then I headed into work. At work I think we can shrink from 5 active marine tanks to 3 if we need to, but we must keep the big fish separate from the little fish and the little predator away from our shrimp… so 3 tanks is the minimum. Must work this out with Sutragirl.

I have been hitting a learning spurt in my dancing, picking up several new groupings and refining technique at both studios. I hope to dance with Cassandra, Ann, Anne-Marie, and Sutragirl at the Yuletide Ball Championships. It should be great fun.

I am replacing my dual 500MHz G4 Mac desktop and 500MHz G4 Mac cube server at home (both running 10.3.9) with a 20″ iMac and a Mac Mini (both running 10.5.1). That is taking a while to get everything set up properly (jump from 10.3 to 10.5 is non-trivial, but fun), and I am discovering that I do not have enough firewire cables, extra drives for backups, and time…

New job has been a huge learning experience (exactly what I asked for… though perhaps a bit much of it) and I have been learning all about openSuSE 10.3, HP Blade c7000s, i-LO server management, PXEboot/tftp/dhcp install servers, YaST, and relearning Solaris, BEA WebLogic, and NFS… Plate is full… and after the holiday break it will be time for MySQL replication servers, MediaWiki, Oracle, and Progress. Folks at the new job are awesome, and everyone tries to do everything… Damned Astaro VPN is not letting me in, but that’s because we cannot save a new configuration with my userid in the PPTP allow file… sigh. It’s fun working on a team of five with three Prius owners on the team!

Children of Hurin is helping me stay in touch with Fantasy/SciFi at night… and the writer’s strike has given me a chance to catch up to almost current on the few remaining decent TV shows…

Apple delivered my shiny new 20″ iMac 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of Ram today. It has been fun to get it set up and running. Since I just helped a friend set up her MacBook a couple days ago, I thought I’d share some of the stuff I routinely add to a Mac.

Both the MacBook and the iMac come with iLife ‘08 and Leopard (10.5) now. That solves my need for iPhoto (to import pictures from the camera) and iTunes (to play music, download podcasts, and put content on my iPod and my AppleTV).

Other things built into the machine are: Safari (excellent web browser), Mail (best mail reader since ZMail), AddressBook (excellent contacts database), Terminal (pretty good shell/terminal emulator), and TextEdit (for reading those pesky, proprietary, and annoying MS Word doc files people insist on sending me).

Nearly everything else I use is available for free download, and comes as Disk Image (.dmg file) which makes it trivial to install. Sadly the Palm Desktop Software I use to control my Tungsten C (PDA) from my Mac is only available as a Stuffit Archive (.sit file), so I had to find Suffit Expander (free, but a pain to find now) and install that as well.

Stuffit Expander (for extracting the last few Stuffit Archives in the world)
Adium (best AIM/Jabber/MSN Messenger/Yahoo Messenger)
VideoLan (Video playback for many formats not supported in QuickTime)
Flip4Mac (Quicktime and Web extension allowing Windows Media files to play)

Camino (Excellent Web Browser, very fast text display)
Firefox (Excellent all-around web browser)
OmniWeb (Excellent web browser, very fast, excellent bookmark management)

Carbon Copy Cloner (Backups to external drive)
Chicken of the VNC (useful for remote control of other machines)
QuickSilver (Application launcher and search program)

OmniDictionary (Dictionary spelling and thesaurus)
OmniFocus (Getting Things Done tool, organizer)

Palm Desktop (Desktop organizer for Palm PDA devices)
Plucker Desktop (ebook/cached web page reader for Palm PDA devices)

OmniGrafflePro (Visual Diagram Software, the Visio-killer!)
Graphic Converter (Very good and affordable photo image editor)

Also, I typically set up the first account on a Mac as “Administrator” with the short name admin, then I set myself up as a second account without administrative priviledges so it is harder for hostile software to grab my machine.

The new iMac comes with the “Mighty Mouse” and the new aluminum keyboard… I was skeptical, but initial impression is very good on the keyboard, and my previous dislike of the Mighty Mouse may be fixed by turning off horizontal scrolling (I found it made vertical scrolling harder to control). Most of all, I love being able to simply turn off the annoying Caps-Lock key (hurrah for Preferences/Keyboard&Mouse Control in 10.4 and 10.5).

Oh, I am trying out a .Mac account to sync things between machines (might help with migrating off the dual 500MHz G4 running 10.3 I’ve been using) and I will be trying out iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) on the new machine.

For those of you who know about us through La Belle Compagnie, the book we worked on for a long time is finally getting published and is expected sometime in 2008 (February is tentative). The Peel Affinity has it’s own website, thanks to our amazing publisher, Shumacher Publishing, LLC.

Dance-O-Rama with the Tysons/Vienna Arthur Murray school was terrific fun. Erci and I went with a group of 22 from our studio and danced until our feet were sore and danced a whole lot more. Blue Martini in Bally’s continues to serve excellent martinis, and it was probably a good thing (if mildly disappointing) that they closed at 2:30 Sunday morning (we might have stayed and drank even more, ouch).

I am mostly very happy with my dances, though I need to work on my groupings and presentation a whole lot more, and focus intensely on mambo as a dance (I totally blew that dance). Bolero and Viennese went particularly well for me (due to recent focusing and lots of practice), and I wish I had entered more heats. I have bruises from a slip and fall in the bath tub in our room, and Erci is bruised and sore from a bad tumble down some steps at the hotel. We both have sore feet from lots of dancing, but we are wimps compared to Mr Bond, who did over 100 heats, well over. Our studio was remarkable in that we had over 2/3 of our group were male dance students. Rumba/Cha formation, a slight variation on the one we did earlier in the year at Freestyles went very well though with seven couples instead of the original fourteen. The bus ride up and back with the Silver Spring and Gaithersburg studios was nearly as much fun as the dance event itself!

Big thank you to aenloo for taking care of Bailey while we were away, he was well fed and affectionate when we got home.