Intellidick.com - Pure Insanity

Here I am, another fun night in a hotel (*yawn*) and i’m flipping through the channels on the TV. I hit Discovery and end up watching a few minutes of “Cash Cab” or whatever it’s called. Wow… this is just nuts. How do people watch this? It’s like a reality TV and game show hybrid… how odd.

Sorry folks, it just doesn’t do anything for me. I don’t understand the point of it at all. It’s not really funny… I can’t say that it’s really educational… and I feel as though I got more out of the commercials than I did out of the last 10 minutes of the show.

Apparently i’m just missing something.

So, we had just put in what we thought was going to be our last fish… the Royal Gramma. Overall, we were happy with our tank. 1 Coral Beauty angel, 1 Royal Gramma, and 2 True Percula clowns. Nice variety and fun to watch.

Last night, we came home to an almost dead clown fish. He was new to the tank so we thought maybe we had a water problem. We’ve been testing regularly and just did a water change a while back, so we just had to assume he was sick when we got him. True Percula Clownfish are notorious for not acclimating well. It just happens sometimes. Needless to say, he didn’t make it.

This morning, I awake to find my other clown in the top right hand corner of my tank… swimming slowly like his friend was the night before. I wondered what was happening but knew that they go through a lot of stress when they lose a friend. Well, it wasn’t stress from his loss that was getting him… it was the fact that the Coral Beauty attacked him! I went to perform the morning water level checks and the clown was under the lid. When I lifted it, he ran away to the top center of the tank. Less than a minute later, that coral beauty emerged from the rocks and went after him… repeatedly attacking him until he went back into that top right hand corner.

So now, Clownfish #2 is not doing well, I doubt he’ll make it through the day. I also saw the CB attack my Royal Gramma, but the Gramma is faster than him and runs away quickly so I think he’ll be okay. The Gramma also hides in the small holes of the live rock that the CB can’t fit in. It’s just a shame though because i’m sure he’s stressed out big time.

So much for the “generally compatible” thing that everyone has told me. I guess sometimes you just get a mean one and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Yes kids… fishtank 2.0 is already gone. Just a heads up for all of you who are thinking of getting into the aquarium world… little fast fish are HARD to catch when you’ve got 30lbs of live rock in a 46-gallon tank. Get ready for an adventure. Needless to say, we had to remove ALL of the live rock out of the tank to catch those 3 damsels and get them out of there. It was not fun at all.

The moral of this story is this, if you want a salt water aquarium, use the live rock to cycle it. It WILL cycle… be patient. Test the water often and watch it. It WILL cycle… be patient. Don’t attempt to use “starter” fish unless you’re okay with redoing all of your aquascaping work.

Anyway, check out the new coral beauty, the pictures of Fishtank 3.0 are here.

Okay… the fishtank has officially had a makeover….

• More live rock to increase surface area, and this time it’s arranged so the fish have some neat little caves to play in.
• 10 Astraea Snails for help with algae control / glass cleaning.
• 3 Nassarius Snails for old food control, and they burrow in the sand and help clean that up.
• 30 Blue Legged Hermit Crabs for algae control on the live rock and sand
• 1 Emerald Crab… just because he’s cool and he eats algae too!
• Hydor Koralia 600 gallon per hour pump to fix some circulation problems
• 20% water change to get the nitrate levels down

I think i’ve officially jilted my fish for a while, but they’re slowly getting over it and the tank looks 10 times better than the first attempt. Check out the photos!

I finally did it.

I gave in and bought a big screen TV.

I was initially interested in DLP sets because of the “bang for the buck factor”. Big DLP screens are cheap compared to LCD/Plasma. They also have the advantage of being able to change the bulb and prolong the life of the set… that’s another plus in my book. When I first started browsing the internet for pricing, DLP seemed to be the TV of choice… and then I saw one.

Most DLPs were very dark and unpleasant when sitting next to their LCD/Plasma competition. LCD sets were usually the brightest sets I saw, almost to the point of being too bright. Then again, that’s sitting in a showroom, what would they look like in my home? I saw a few DLPs and talked to people that owned them. Brightness and glare were their only real complaints. Seeing as I have a giant window on the right side of my living room that causes horrendous amounts of glare, DLP suddenly didn’t look like the best solution.

… And then I saw the Mitsubishi Diamond WD-57831 … it sold me at first glance.

I had to have it. The new Mitsu Diamond DLP BLEW AWAY the others. Sitting next to Samsung, Toshiba, and even the other Mitsus, the Diamond ALWAYS had the brighter picture. To the point where you can identify the Diamond in a group of TVs from across the room. It’s that much of a difference. You’d think it was LCD. I went back to the internet to research and sure enough, the Mitsu web site indicated that they came up with a new DLP lighting engine for this years’ Diamond. And boy did they knock it out of the park with this one!

$2600 + Tax at my local shop (which runs right in line with the cheapest internet price of $2599 + S&H) and i’m there. What a deal! Internet pricing and i’ll have it in my living room later on this evening! Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

Anyway, long story short, this is an amazing unit. Here’s my rundown.

Pros

• Bright, beautiful, clear picture. Even with the settings on normal (not in vibrant mode or anything like that).
• Almost immune to glare. If you look at my photo gallery, you’ll notice that you can clearly make out the picture on the TV in each shot… the irony there is that it was like 1AM with poor overhead lighting so I fired the flash! You can see how much it affects the screen when the TV is off. If the TV is on, you can’t see the glare from the flash. Amazing.
• NetCommand KICKS ASS. Very neat technology that’s easy to program and even easier to use. SUPER NEAT feature if you don’t already have the universal remote setup and such. Even if you do have the universal up and running, you may find NetCommand more to your liking. (Attention Harmony users, stay with the Harmony. It’s still better overall. The IR repeater in the TV comes in handy though!)
• If you’re looking for bang for your buck. This is the TV to beat.

Cons

• Slow startup time (4s+ depending on how warm it is already) can be tricky for some macro based universal remotes w/o a delay feature. (The Logitech Harmony works like a champ on it though.
• Component Input will not do 1080p. 1080p is available only through DVI or HDMI. (Note : This seems to be a standard thing with most TVs I looked at. Only a select few would do 1080p over component)
• You will quickly become an HDTV bigot. 480i/p signals from cable / satellite are blocky b/c of the compression and the fact that you’re blowing them up to 57″. (I can see the compression on my 27″ & 36″ CRTs, so it’s REALLY apparent on the 57″) The Mitsu does a great job with it and all, but you’ll really see where your cable / satellite company is cutting corners and compressing the crap out of the signal! DVDs in 480p look good. HD-DVD in 1080p is significantly better. The Xbox 360 will blow your doors off at 720p or 1080i… Everyone says i’m crazy, but I honestly like 1080i the best for the 360. I really don’t even see the need for the 360 Elite b/c it’s BUAUTIFUL in 1080i.
• Be prepared to spend all of the money you saved by going with DLP on extra components / cables / mounts / entertainment centers to make it all work the way you want it to.

If anyone cares, here’s the photos.
My new TV

Well, we’ve done it. We are now the proud owners of a salt water aquarium! 46-gallons of salt water… sitting in my living room next to all of my expensive electronics. In all seriousness… it’s neat. Expensive and time consuming, but neat. At first I was very skeptical of the whole thing, but it was better than a 150lb Bull Mastiff in my house!

On to the meat of the story. We purchased a 46-gallon bow-front aquarium, hood, and stand. Nothing too fancy, but a decent All-Glass setup.
Here are some pictures of the initial setup. (And my snazzy new entertainment center)

The new tank sat in the living room for about 2 weeks with nothing in it but a funny note I put there. Finally, even I couldn’t stand it anymore so we ventured down to the LFS (Local Fish Store) and bought the setup. Now, i’m all excited, ready to go down and grab some chemicals and a pick out what fish we want… you know… like you do with most small freshwater setups. (Day 1 : Chemicals, A few days later : Fish!) This is when I got the first hard lesson of saltwater. No fish for a month unless you want to sacrifice them to the ecosystem of the tank.

Yes yes, that’s right sports fans… no fish for at least a month! Let’s take a tally.

This was almost a month ago. We just added some fish in there… just some “starter fish”, all Damsels. We’ll probably have to pull then out in a few more weeks but, they’re neat to watch and MUCH better than staring at an empty tank. We ended up with a Blue Devil, a Yellow Tailed Blue Devil, and a “Jailbird”. Here are some pictures….
Yellow Tailed Blue Devil and Blue Devil are here
Jailbird, or Four-striped Damsel

Oh, and just in case anyone is wondering what the tank looks like now, here are a few pictures, i’ll put more up later. You can’t see the fish in this one because it was late and we had already killed the lights in the aquarium. Needless to say, the fish were resting in the rocks.

A word to the wise, if you want to do saltwater… start reading now. It expensive, but the end result is much cooler than anything you can do in freshwater. (At least I think it is) The fish are more exotic and you can do more interesting combinations, but you have to know a lot about it before you start.