Rue Plumet

Another reef update: I ordered the calcium reactor for the new tank. I chose the MTC Procal, which is a made by a guy in New Jersey. My reactor is now on his build schedule, and I should get it in a couple of weeks once he finishes making it.

A calcium reactor is a device that is used to maintain appropriately high levels of calcium and proper alkalinity in an aquarium. The basic idea is that you fill the acrylic tubes with some kind of crushed coral or aragonite substrate, then inject CO2 into the system, creating a locally low pH inside the calcium reactor. The low pH allows the substrate to gradually dissolve over time, creating output water with very high alkalinity and calcium. You slowly drip the output back into the water for the main tank, which then maintains the proper calcium and alkalinity levels in the tank without having to constantly use additives and buffers. And yes, it does kind of look like a mad scientist contraption. :-)

I think that pretty much any day now I’m going to come home from work in the evening and Charis will be walking around the house. She can totally stand up on her own and she walks all day long while she’s holding on to something. She also has no trouble walking on her own when she is brave enough to let go. I think she just needs to decide to do it.

She was kind of like that when she first started standing up. She stood up on her own one day, and then it was almost a week until she did it again. Then one day she decided that standing up was the cool thing to do, and now she stands up all the time. She really likes to stand up while you read books to her, which is kind of weird, but what can you do.

So based on the standing up thing, I think she’ll start walking pretty much any day now.

And the talking. I have to ask, is there anything cuter than your kid just babbling on and on about who knows what? I love listening to Charis talk, even if I never have any idea what she’s talking about. She always seems to have something to say!

OK, those of you not into reef aquariums might not think this is all that exciting, but I’ve selected a skimmer for the new tank. A skimmer is the primary piece of equipment used to pull waste from the water, so it’s essential for the aquarium and it’s basically the heart of the filtration system. So I decided on a skimmer from H&S, which is a company over in Germany. The skimmers are kind of hard to get here in the US since the company is not super-well-known, so I’ll have to wait for the next shipment to come over on a boat, which should be sometime in late July or early August. Good things come to those who wait. :-)

Click “more” to see a list of all of the interesting web sites I found this week. I keep track of my favorite sites using del.icio.us, a free web site where you can access your favorite links from any computer and share them with friends. You can also see all of my favorite links (not just the ones from this week).

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We decided to use the bulk of the extra cash we got from selling off the audio stuff to pay down some long term debt, which is great. But Joy saw that it was hard for me to sell everything off, even though I thought it was the right thing to do. And she was right, it actually was amazingly hard, which I guess goes to show how much a “thing” can get a hold on you if you let it. Anyway, in light of that, she wanted me to do something “fun” with part of the money. So we set aside a portion of the money to start a new reef aquarium.

Joy and I had a 72 gallon tank when we were first married and living in an apartment, but we took it down when we moved into our house (and had to start paying for water and electricity ourselves - all the stuff to run a tank really adds up!). When we took down the tank, I knew that I wanted to start up another one someday. I’m pretty excited about it, and since reef stuff can get pretty expensive just like audio stuff, I’m planning for a relatively small tank (58 gallons). So you may see some posts around here about reef stuff in the coming days and months. It will be a long haul getting everything going, but I also think the whole process is a lot of fun.

This next bit of info might come as kind of a shock to some of you. I sold off all of my high-end audio and home theater equipment. Let me explain.

As much as I enjoy movies and music and all of the high-end stuff, it takes a lot to always keep up with the latest of everything. I would read the reviews and a new whatever would come out and I’d want to try that, or maybe some other new thing coming out the next month. And I found myself feeling kind of a little dissatisfied with things over time, always thinking about trading for something else, even though I already had all this really nice equipment. And I really don’t want to feel dissatisfied because of some “thing” or “stuff” that I don’t have. I’m really incredibly blessed with my wife and my daughter and I really felt that something was wrong if “things” were making me dissatisfied, so I took the big step. I basically sold off everything and I’ve moved back to a simple set of Paradigm speakers and a basic receiver. I thought about just keeping the higher-end stuff that I already had and leaving it be for the long haul, but I know myself well enough to know that I’d always still be looking for the next thing or the next tweak. I figured that if I stepped way back down far enough to more entry level stuff, that would make it easier for me to “walk away” and just leave things alone. So that’s what I’ve done. I’m still in the stage where sometimes I think what I’ve done is crazy, but I think I know that in the long run, it’s better for me as a person not to spend so much time thinking about and pursuing the next AV thing. I needed to sell it off and get back to something basic - I can still enjoy my movies and music as much as I always have, but hopefully I’m back to the point where I own the stuff instead of it owning me in a strange and perverse sort of way. So I’ve set an upper dollar limit for myself for any future audio purchases, and hopefully that will help keep me in line since I know my tendency is always to go for something “better”.

All of that process took a huge amount of time. Just creating the ads for the equipment and managing all of the potential buyers, not to mention packing and shipping everything off. By the end of it all, the FedEx people knew me when I walked in the door. But now everything has been sold, and all of it was delivered safely to the buyers, which was a great blessing since you never know what will happen when you ship stuff that’s potentially fragile.

After Joy and I returned from our mini-vacation to Atlanta and Chattanooga, I was off the very next week to Nashville for our annual user conference at work. I drove to Nashville very early in the morning on Wednesday of that week, then worked all day long setting up two computer labs for the conference (2 servers, 40+ workstations, 2 printers, 4 switches, plus a wireless network). Then I drove back home that night. Needless to say that was a very long day.

I took the next day off, and then drove back to Nashville early Friday morning for the actual conference itself. Except this time I picked up Randy from work to give him a ride, so I had good company for that drive. The conference ran Friday through Sunday, and overall I think it was probably our most “positive” conference yet. Everyone seemed pretty excited about using our product and about learning how they could use it more effeciently. It just had a pretty good vibe.

And we carried on our user conference tradition for the third year in a row. The company gives us a per diem for the conference each year, and there are a couple of us that eat at the cheapest places possible for most of the conference, then blow the rest on a very nice dinner one night. This year we chose Ruth’s Chris for our dinner (our first choice had closed since we were last in Nashville two years ago). So that was a very good meal, and a great time to spend some time together outside of work. Plus we got to meet Carrie’s boyfriend, Dan, who was really a great guy (he came down to the conference for a day to see her).

And then after we packed up the computer labs on Sunday (which thankfully always goes much faster than setting them up), I drove back with Randy and JP, so I had double the good company for the trip back. So that was the user conference. I was super tired for quite a few days after that and didn’t do too much of anything once I got home from work except crash. :-) But it was really nice to be back home with Joy and Charis!

Man, I have really been neglecting this blog lately! That’s actually for a couple of different reasons, which I’ll get to shortly, but I do hope to get things back in shape around here starting this week. So what have I been up to lately? I’m glad you asked, because the next few posts should catch you up with my life lately!

Click “more” to see a list of all of the interesting web sites I found this week. I keep track of my favorite sites using del.icio.us, a free web site where you can access your favorite links from any computer and share them with friends. You can also see all of my favorite links (not just the ones from this week).

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Click “more” to see a list of all of the interesting web sites I found this week. I keep track of my favorite sites using del.icio.us, a free web site where you can access your favorite links from any computer and share them with friends. You can also see all of my favorite links (not just the ones from this week).

(more…)