Ouch

I never learn. It's always when I'm most distracted that I ignore my little voice, and it never turns out well. In the past I've cut myself, broken an ankle, smashed crockery, shattered glassware, tripped and fallen, and each time I've had a prior warning via the little voice, ignored it, and come to grief. Over the years I've grown better at heeding it, but then there's some days, like today...

I was heading out to the dentist, intending to drop in at the charity shop afterwards and then grab a coffee and finish off this month's book club book while waiting for a later appointment at the doctor's (nothing major, don't worry). The book is on my Kindle app, so I was taking the iPad with me. Little Voice suggests it's probably not a good idea to balance it on top of a box of charity shop fodder, as it could slip off. In a hurry and not wanting to turn loading the car into a marathon, I ignored it. The iPad slipped off and took a nosedive onto the front path. A backward glance suggested it was OK so I dropped the box on the back seat and returned to pick it up. Then I noticed the shards of glass on the path.

Yeah. Apparently even Gorilla Glass™ isn't strong enough to survive a header onto a stone path from five feet up. Especially when it lands on one corner.

Never mind, I thought. Instead of nursing a coffee and reading in between appointments, I'll head off to the Apple Store and see if they can fix it. Can they fix it? Yes they can. That'll be £199 please sir.

Hmm. Well. Coincidentally that's only £1 less than our home contents insurance excess >sigh< so I'll be forking out one way or another, dammit. Apparently there are cheaper places to have your glass replaced than Apple, so I might suss one of those out, but right now I'm feeling very tempted by the Nexus 7. A whole new tablet that *isn't Apple*, and comes in at or below the cost of a new screen. All my apps are available on Android too. Seriously tempted.

The February of technology

Which is a whole lot different to the march of technology.

Because our February (and our January come to that) has seen the wheels start to come off of our tech-filled home. Or at least, that's how it looked at one stage, with the freezer developing a problem where it wouldn't, um, freeze, and the pile of expensive TV equipment refusing to display any of the HD channels.

You know how it is when things go wrong. You reach for Google to find out what they're saying on the forums. Or at least, we do. On the subject of our freezer a small number of people had been very vocal about what a pile of shit it was. Well to be honest that's not been our experience. We've had it over 6 years and apart from a problem with the auto-defrost element shortly after it went out of warranty ( O_O ) which was soon fixed, we haven't had a moment's bother with it. That's the thing about review forums. If you've had a bad experience you're more likely to gripe about it than you are to go and give a glowing review if you've owned something that's given years of trouble-free service. A bit more digging uncovered a slightly larger number of folk who HAD gone into print about how happy they were with our freezer, so we decided in the end it was worth repairing.

Which was a good decision because the fault was a simple evaporator fan, replaced in less than 15 minutes and all's well again. No more spongy "frozen" bread or slightly soggy fish food. And better to pay £80 for a year's service cover than £700 for a new model!

The TV thing was slightly more frustrating and hard to track down. Since installing it (at the beginning of December) we've had an intermittent problem where the screen would go blank, flash "No Signal" and then recover in 1-2 seconds. Only ever happened when watching HD programmes or, if recording them, the recording would freeze for 1-2 seconds while the PVR tried to cope with the loss of signal. I replaced the coax aerial leads. I replaced the HDMI cables. I bought an aerial signal booster. Nothing made any difference. Then a couple of weeks ago I retuned the PVR and it lost the HD channels altogether. And then it lost ALL the channels.

Aha! I thought. That intermittent fault was on the PVR's tuners, and now it's gone hard. Plugging the TV directly into the aerial, bypassing the PVR, allowed us to view HD again thus proving (I thought) my theory.

We took the PVR up to Warrington (the closest service centre) where they plugged it in, tuned it up, and it worked perfectly.

Their tech guy listened to our tale of woe, and opined that we had an aerial fault. I've always been a bit suspicious about folk who work on roofs. Roofers and aerial installers. You never can be quite sure what they're up to up there, can you? And you can't check it out very easily. AND we've had bad experiences in the past, with both. *AND* I was well ready to blame that new aerial. We'd paid for the top quality HD high bandwidth jobby and probably had a coat hanger up there. Tech guy recommended a local firm of aerial riggers (local to us, not him) that handle all their installations and they paid us a visit last Friday.

This is already a long story, so I'll cut to the chase - our problem lay not with the aerial, which was delivering a signal "five by five" (or strength 10 as it's actually called on the TV and the PVR) - but with how we were conveying that signal to the equipment. All those brand new cables I'd bought were... well... shite.

New aerial guys whipped us up some new cables in double-quick time and within minutes all our signal strength bars were fully green and everything was tickety-boo.

Anyone want to buy a signal booster?

In a life I more nice

I'm a lucky man. There can't be many men as sought after by hordes of Russian beauties as I. They write to me all the time.

Some of them, of course, take themselves out of the game with their first line. I could never be attracted to anyone stupid enough to ask, in their opening sentence, "What is your name?" when they've sent their email to my primary address, embodying as it does both my first and last names.

In her latest email, Olga assured me: "In a life I more nice." I could only wonder which life she was talking about. Still, I was reassured that she will be more nice when she eventually reaches it.

Recently, Svetlana was also moved to write to me, declaring: "I am 25 years, growth 178." Is this some arcane tumour denomination they use in your country, Svetlana? If so you can hardly expect me to hop the next plane with your life span already so badly compromised.

She went on earnestly: "I hope, our dreams will come true also we probably we shall embody them in the validity."

I'm sure I could aspire to hope for the same thing dear, if only I understood what it meant.

Ocellations

Took the plunge last Friday and transferred our five ocellated barbs to the new tank. I wanted them to have 48 hours in there, producing their ammonia, so that when I borrowed some of the BiUbe's bacterial culture it would have something to eat.

Look away now if you're squeamish, cos things are about to get messy. When I did the BiUbe's filter change on Sunday I scooped out a few handfuls of the ceramic substrate and scattered it among the new ceramic "noodles" that the AquaStyle uses, figuring there'd be some cross-pollination in the filtration pods. I also added the water from the water change (yes, there'd be some nitrate in it, but not enough to be harmful, and there'd be a small amount of bacteria floating around in it too, I thought) and then - the messy part - squeezed out the filter sponge into the new tank. Finally I had a couple of spare sachets of StressZyme bacteria culture left over from previous filter changes, so I squirted this into the new tank for good measure.

Well it's been another 48 hours since I did that, so today was time for some testing. Sure enough there was a small amount of ammonia detected in the AquaStyle (normally bad, but at this stage good) AND a small amount of nitrite too. This proves the bacteria are working. I'll leave it another couple of days and test again, and include a nitrate test this time to see how far it's built up. I'm not expecting to have to do a water change in the new tank for at least another week, but I'll keep monitoring to make sure the ammonia & nitrite levels don't get too high.

The barbs seem quite happy, although they're definitely the shyest fish we have, and spend most of their time behind the plants if they can detect any movement in the room. Once we've all sat down they will eventually venture out, only to disappear again at the next sign of movement. Once the cherries have moved in, we'll be after some new species. Preferably something not so easily spooked!

New Review

I've been soliciting.

Not like that! No... a few months ago I happened across a post by a well-known blogger of "all aspects of writing, publishing and book promotion" suggesting how one might go about persuading one or more of the Amazon top x00 reviewers to review one's work.

Sounded good to me. Sounded worth a go. So I did. I trawled through the top 500 reviewers (this list changes regularly - we're talking those who were the top 500 last October) and found a couple of dozen who (a) accepted requests and (b) had biogs or existing reviews which suggested they might be interested in my book. I fired off the emails.

Surprisingly quickly, I had some replies. Positive ones. And in the fullness of time (it does, after all, take SOME time to read 90,000 words) a review appeared.

There was one request I sent out back in October that didn't result in a reply. But that was entirely expected, since those are his rules. It's Big Al, over at the Kindle Indie Author's review site "Big Al's Books & Pals".

The deal there is, you pick the reviewer who you think is most likely to be interested, fire off a request, and wait. They either pick up the request or they don't, but if they do a review will eventually turn up on that site. And for good measure they will also syndicate the review to the Amazon product page AND Goodreads. Cool!

And sure enough, just last week, Al's review of War of Nutrition was posted, giving it 4 stars. I particularly liked the bit where he says "[War of Nutrition] surpasses the typical thriller in characterization. Not only the protagonist, but many of the minor characters are fleshed out well beyond the norm, which gives rise to many sub-threads or stories". I was well chuffed with that.

You can read the full review here.

Fun with ammonia

You may have heard the comedic feminist epigram: "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

Well... fish may not need a bicycle, but they do need a cycle. The period, in the life of a new aquarium, during which the biological filter is established, growing enough nitrifying bacteria to convert the waste products from the fish (ammonia) into still-toxic nitrite, and then much safer nitrate. While this is happening, the tank is said to be cycling, a process that is complete when ammonia and nitrite levels fall to zero (or as close as makes no difference) because you have enough bacteria to eat it all, and nitrate levels gradually rise until the next partial water change.

You can cycle a tank with a small number of fish, which is how we started off the biological filter in the BiUbe, but this is stressful for those fish as they're subjected to higher levels of ammonia and nitrite than is best for them, so this time round I was hoping to do a "fishless cycle."

A fairly easy concept to grasp but more complicated in its execution, the fishless cycle basically involves introducing chemical ammonia into a tank for the bacteria to feed on (and starting the colony off with some bacteria from an existing tank if possible) and waiting until you've grown a colony large enough to handle the waste from your fish, at which point the fish can be introduced. In practice this is a bit of a juggling act because (a) you don't know how much ammonia your colony of fish is generating and (b) you have to guess that amount and then add it daily to keep the bacteria fed until the fish arrive. It's also important to do regular testing to monitor the colony's progress. Too much ammonia can kill off the bacteria and put you back to square one.

The first challenge was finding a source of pure ammonia. Or ammonium hydroxide I should more properly say. Most of the bleach available from supermarkets is contaminated with perfumes and surfactants to make it more acceptable as a cleaning agent. Any of that is not good for the inside of an aquarium. After a short search we eventually found a local shop (of the kind we usually refer to as "plastic man" because they sell a huge array of plastic tubs, buckets and bowls) with a stock of Kleen Off - pure ammonium hydroxide. Result!

It's never as easy as that though is it? The bottle had no indication of concentration, so to arrive at the required ammonia levels (4 or 5 ppm) in our 130-litre tank I had to do some experimenting. I'd found a handy guide to fishless cycling that talked about adding "a few drops at a time", testing, and repeating until the numbers came up, so armed with a jug containing 2 litres of treated water, my bottle of ammonia and my testing kit, I made a start. First with 3 drops, then 7, then another 10, 20, 50. Pretty soon I was up to 200 drops in my 2 litres and the test phial had barely shifted from the weakest colour (0.05 ppm) to the next blob (0.1ppm). Pretty soon the water was looking pretty syrupy with ammonia and I was approaching the point where I'd be adding the equivalent of half a bottle to the tank every day. That can't be right! (I thought). Slowly the reality dawned on me - the ammonia was bleaching the dye in the test kit.

I think we'll be cycling this new tank with some fish from the BiUbe!

FuruTankee

Hot on the heels of yesterday's post, where I claimed "KaraTankee" might mean empty tank, we have FuruTankee. Because Google translate is my friend, and tells me that the Japanese for full is "furu".

The only thing it's not full of, is fish. We have plants, we have rocks (the black pebbles that have recently seen service in the BiUbe, the spare piece of ocean rock that I bought to address the acidity problem, but didn't have room for, and a nifty little moulded pile of rubble from those nice people at Fluval), we have a heater, and we have an assembled filter with its input strainer in place.

It all hums along very nicely. Armed with her 'A' Level physics - far more recent than mine - Nat calculates it will take about 15 hours to heat the water up to 24°C. That'll be tomorrow then.

That's when the process of "cycling" the tank will start in earnest, with the addition of a tasty mix of ammonia, old filter squeezings and a bit of rock from the old tank. Yum!