Humped out

[altivo]

Meaning we're past the hump day.

Saw the first indigo bunting in our yard this morning. It was gloomy out there and spitting cold rain, but the little bird made the rounds of all the feeders sampling each one before flying off. Now we've seen all the usual culprits for the summer.

I've been rebuilding my VAXServer emulation at work, and today just for the heck of it I installed the Compaq Basic compiler on it. Since I don't normally use Basic and I thought this was just a compiler I had never bothered with it before. It is, however, included in the hobbyist installation CD and it's best to have all the language compilers installed before you put on DECSET and the Language Sensitive Editor so this time I added it. The installation took a long time, but succeeded. Then I typed "basic" and pressed enter, expecting to get some sort of UNIX-like listing of the parameters for the compiler. But no. This is Basic. Invoked without any parameters, it starts in interpreter mode. I didn't even realize it could do that, but it can.

Rehabilitated my home office aquarium before heading in to work this morning. It had been running for more than a year with only plants in it, and was quite overgrown. We replaced half the water and removed a lot of overgrown strangly greenery. It was quite murky, but the filter has cleaned it up pretty well. Tomorrow I'll test the water and if it comes up within acceptable levels I can add some tough inexpensive fish like zebra danios or guppies to restart the nitrogen cycle.

Comments

[murakozi.livejournal.com]

While zebras are tough, giant danios would likely handle the tank cycling better.

Personally, I did fishless cycles on my tanks when setting them up, just using pure ammonia. The first one took ages, but I seeded the other two tanks with media from the first. Hopefully, when I set up the oscar tank it'll only take a week or two to cycle and let me move a juvenile into it.

[altivo]

This tank had fish in it prior to the fishless interim and I imagine the gravel and substrate still have enough of the right bacteria. It went sour after a guppy explosion and I had just let it sit with the filter running. All I did for the past year or so was top up the water level using our tap water. That's hard well water that has run through a softener, so it is heavily buffered with sodium carbonate. The pH has risen and the buffering is good, but I need to run another water check before adding any fish.

Our main problem here is water quality. The well water if used untreated is too hard. Softened it is too alkaline. Bottled water seems to have odd things in it unless it's distilled which has none of what you want. I've been struggling for years trying to figure out what mix of water sources will yield a stable result.

[(Anonymous)]

With plants in it for that long, the bacteria are probably already there and just need to increase in population. So, yeah, it'd probably just be a minicycle like you get with any increase in the bioload.

I run most of the water for the aquariums through a deionizer cartridge and add electrolytes and a ph adjustor back in. Having nitrates in the tap water here sucks.