Oh, how good it feels to have a few days off. In addition to the long Labor Day weekend, I took two additional days off, today and tomorrow. So, if you count Friday night, that's five and one quarter days to relax and enjoy myself. In such situations, someone might watch a movie (at home or in the theater, I don't judge), get lost in a good book, touch base with friends, or just get out into the quiet bliss of nature by hiking or fishing. I think most people want something that derails their mind and calms it; makes it so they don't have to think of things they might normally consider responsibilities. Me? Nope. I come up with another project and hyper-focus on it "while I have the free time to get it done." Of course it's around the subject of organizing things. Or rather, re-organizing things. Over...
Category: Aquarium
Aquarium Update
All's right so far in aqua-land.
Making and Catching Up
Yesterday I spent three hours cleaning up and organizing in the garage. A lot of the worked centered around putting away all of the spare aquarium supplies and equipment back into their proper places on the shelves. Then, I took the time to finally break down a ton of cardboard boxes and put them into the recycling bin in preparation for next Monday. Because of COVID challenges, Hillsborough county has moved our recycling pickup to every other week for now. That means all cans and plastic containers need to be smashed down flat and all cardboard needs to be cut up to smaller pieces so we get efficient, compact usage of the bin. Anyway, I also put away and re-organized several tools and finally did a big cleanup of the workbench area. One of the little organization things I've been wanting to do is to get my drill bits into...
Weekend Loose Ends, Scheduling
I added Marriage Story to the library today and fixed the cover art to Jojo Rabbit. We completed assembling and populating the new fish tank and I was able to put the surrogate 10 gallon tank and all the supporting tools back into the garage to dry out over the next few days until I can properly put them back on the shelves. I went through the hard drives of my old PC and cleared off all of the data I might need and put it on my new machine. I have a lot of projects I want to complete and have decided to start properly planning them out and putting them on a schedule. This basically means that I'm going to take all of my non-day-job time and divide it up and organize it so I can start to get things completed. Once I figure this out, I may...
New PC
I've finally had time to build out my new PC, and I'm writing this from it. It's really nice to have such a fast machine. I think I'll end up being a lot more productive in the long run. Most of my day-to-day software has been installed. Dev tools, 3D printing software, and games are still pending (well, I did install Minecraft and tested it - wow!). A nice side-effect of building the new computer is that I've been able to clean up the office a lot. All of the boxes are now gone and my desk is no longer an assembly area anymore. We're on day 3 of the Monte Carlo seeds in the aquarium. Still no visible germination. I ordered some Dewalt folding workbenches to augment the workspace in the garage. I think these will help m a lot with some upcoming projects. Speaking of garage, I'm going...
Balancing Projects
The replacement motherboard for my new computer arrived yesterday. I haven't unboxed it yet as I need to perform some initial setup tasks on the aquarium. I plan to begin growing a bed of Micranthemum Tweediei (more commonly known as Monte Carlo) in the tank, which requires no standing water and a greenhouse effect to be in place for about a week. Once that takes root (pardon the pun), then I'll add water and relocate the fish from the 10 gallon tank. While the Monte Carlo grows, I can focus on building the new computer.
Bucket o’ Updates
I really need to get back on board with blogging. It's been so long... I've re-enabled my subscription to HakerBoxes. So far, I've received boxes 54 (Smart Home), 55 (High Roller), and 56 (Demon Seed). I've created some project pages on my internal wiki, but have made no progress toward assembling the kits. I have a large box of unpainted D&D minis sitting here next to me that were originally intended for a campaign I created for a bunch of friends. Of course, this was all before the COVID-19 craziness. We haven't played yet, but I do want to start chipping away at painting all of these. Eventually we will use them. About a month ago my main PC crapped out. I decided to do something I've never done before; spec out a high-end machine and order all new parts. I did such, and got all of the components from...
Multi-Tank
I recently lost all the fish in my 37 gallon tank and it lay dormant for a couple of months. Then, after being tired of seeing all that equipment sit unused, I spent some money and rebuilt the aquascape entirely, using sand instead of small gravel. And by adding a large piece of real driftwood, smooth stones, and large sandstone pieces as structures instead of a fake coral "hotel" for the fish, there has been a new sense of quality. Lastly, I added new plants to keep everything fresh and add some color. For about a month I only had a black and a white snail keeping everything clean while I tried to figure out my strategy of buying fish. After a little toil, I decided to buy a brand new 10 gallon tank as a "staging" area for all new fish. Here's the logic: Five to seven fish at...
Life, Work, and Fun
So, a lot has been going on lately. I've been working a decent amount (yeah, big surprise there), but I've also been getting organized in a lot of ways on the personal front too. We went through a new logo redesign for Suncoast Studios a few months ago and recently we've printed up new business cards as a result. The next step is to do a website redesign, which is (kinda) underway right now. Actually, I'm building a development server, which is a first for SCS. Normally I make changes to the live server, but since this is going to be an entire redesign, I didn't want to potentially mess up the live box. The dev environment should be complete this week, and the goal is to have the new site live by November 1. I've also been making headway on app development. I've recently signed up to be an...
Casualty
Well, I lost the red-tailed shark last night. Two nights ago he decided to find his way into the inside of the fake white rock. I thought he might just be exploring or hiding for some reason, but I think he got stuck in there. I finally got concerned last night and got him out, but he was looking rough. His tail fin was really shabby - about half the length it used to be, his color was washed out, and there was a large white rash on his side. I tried to feel him, and noticed he had trouble swimming, and would rest on the gravel a lot which he never did before. Around midnight, I noticed he wasn't moving any more, so he got the Royal Flush treatment. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Guess I need to find a way to plug up that big...
