Weather and pH
May. 24th, 2011 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoOne glance at the horror that is the radar composite of North America this evening and I can't but wonder whether Texas and Oklahoma are suffering a repeat of the super-tornado that ripped through Joplin, Missouri a few days ago. One hopes not, but it looks nasty.
Here we have light rain with occasional thunder. We need some rain, so I don't object.
One of Gary's new fish died today, and he took a water sample to the aquarium shop where they told him he had "high nitrates". My testing of the water shows nothing of the sort, but rather a low pH once again so we added some more buffering solution. The other tank, which has been devoid of fish for a year but had lush plant growth until last week when I removed most of it, has a high pH and does have a high nitrate level. That one has been topped up with treated well water that had been through our softener over the past year, and seems to validate my theory that the sodium carbonate residue of catalytic water softening provides a substantial buffering effect. I suspect we need to use a mix of unsoftened and softened water by drawing some off in the barn (untreated) and the rest in the house (treated.)
Penetrated the maze of missing documentation to get TCP/IP based printing working on my two VAX emulator installations. The discovery over the weekend that DHV11 terminal interface emulation resolves communication issue for pseudo-sessions using telnet now makes the emulated VAX quite workable. The powerful multitasking in VMS places no apparent load on the host system processor, which I take to be a sign that VMS has a much better underlying time sharing design than does either Windows or Linux. That does jibe with my VMS experiences, where a machine with only 32MB of RAM and a relatively slow processor by today's standards was able to provide subsecond response times to a couple dozen VT220 terminals, keep two tape drives and several disk drives busy, run multiple batch jobs (not all I/O limited either, as some were mostly mathematical or statistical) and still registered as much as 45% "idle" processor time. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: OpenVMS is a really amazing software design.
Here we have light rain with occasional thunder. We need some rain, so I don't object.
One of Gary's new fish died today, and he took a water sample to the aquarium shop where they told him he had "high nitrates". My testing of the water shows nothing of the sort, but rather a low pH once again so we added some more buffering solution. The other tank, which has been devoid of fish for a year but had lush plant growth until last week when I removed most of it, has a high pH and does have a high nitrate level. That one has been topped up with treated well water that had been through our softener over the past year, and seems to validate my theory that the sodium carbonate residue of catalytic water softening provides a substantial buffering effect. I suspect we need to use a mix of unsoftened and softened water by drawing some off in the barn (untreated) and the rest in the house (treated.)
Penetrated the maze of missing documentation to get TCP/IP based printing working on my two VAX emulator installations. The discovery over the weekend that DHV11 terminal interface emulation resolves communication issue for pseudo-sessions using telnet now makes the emulated VAX quite workable. The powerful multitasking in VMS places no apparent load on the host system processor, which I take to be a sign that VMS has a much better underlying time sharing design than does either Windows or Linux. That does jibe with my VMS experiences, where a machine with only 32MB of RAM and a relatively slow processor by today's standards was able to provide subsecond response times to a couple dozen VT220 terminals, keep two tape drives and several disk drives busy, run multiple batch jobs (not all I/O limited either, as some were mostly mathematical or statistical) and still registered as much as 45% "idle" processor time. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: OpenVMS is a really amazing software design.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-25 07:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-25 06:24 pm (UTC)I made the mistake a few years ago of thinking that "goldfish are just fancy carp, they should stand anything." Boy was I wrong. They turned out to be even more difficult than the tropicals.