Intellidick.com - Pure Insanity

A little humor from my friend Geoff over at 3rdmoon. Halibut inspiration provided by Chris over at WickedTiki.

This image belongs to Geoff, do not re-use without his permission.

So, i’ve finally managed to cram enough inhabitants into my 46g tank that I can officially say that the doors are now closed. Granted, they’re all moving to the 90g tank in a few weeks, but they’re all crammed into the 46g for now. (Well, they’re not crammed, but there are a lot of fish in there) Bio-load is definitely up, but that nice big Euro-Reef skimmer and 45lbs of Live Rock is still keeping water levels acceptable. No spikes of any kind, just more frequent water changes for nitrate buildup.

Current Inhabitants -

• 1 Coral Beauty (Piggy)
• 2 Onyx Clowns (No names as of yet)
• 3 Green Chromis (Curly, Larry, and Moe)
• 1 Watchman Goby (Spot)
• 1 Royal Gramma (EARL!!!!)
• 1 Maxima Clam (Timmy)
• 1 Mexican Turbo Snail (Fiesta!)
• 2 Acro Frags
• 1 Rose Anemone
• 1 ‘Condy’ Anemone
• 10+ Astrea Snails
• 5+ Nassarius Snails
• 20+ Blue Legged Hermit Crabs
• 10+ Red Tip Hermit Crabs
• 1 Black Sea Cucumber

Anyway, here’s the video of everyone in their current home.

Yup. That’s right. A used 90g Clarity Plus Acrylic and a complete Lifereef Filtration System will soon make it’s way to the house. The Lifereef stuff is here, just have to get the tank, stand, and hood now. Then it’s on to water, live rock, lighting, then live stock!
Here is what I have to far.

I’ve definitely lost it.

Based on the recommendation of a friend, I went out and purchased Battlefield : 2142. Yet another work of art… no pun intended.

As usual with EA games, something doesn’t work right out of the box, this time it was the registration utility. Oh sure, I only had to re-enter my serial number, but it was just a sign of the bad programming to come. That registration routine had a glitch in it that caused my serial number to get turned to garbage… it was one of those “hold the delete key for 30 seconds and then type in the right code” errors. No big deal… just a Testament of things to come.

On to the game! First, let’s see if there’s a patch… it’s been out for a while, surely there’s a patch. Ah ha, the 1.25 patch. 300MB?!?!?!?? For a patch? Oh well, I must get tons of new content with the patch. (Or maybe not)

Finally! Patch loaded and i’m in! Ready to game! Okay, pop in the clan tag and the player name and we’re rolling. Wait a second… no spaces in the names? Bummer. Another sign of the horror that awaited me.

Alright, first stop, options. Keymaps - Check. Video - Check. Audo - Wait a sec… the voice command won’t let me select a secondary sound card for voice input / output. Weird… TeamSpeak does, Ventrillo does… BF2142’s voice engine doesn’t. Bummer. True bummer. Well, i’m not reconfiguring my PC for one game, so, voice support off… moving on. Having done some DirectSound programming way back in the day, I don’t remember it being that difficult to enumerate the sound card list and display a choice to the user as opposed to just lighting up the default. I suppose that extra 20 lines of code was too much to ask. I’m sure it falls into the “Nobody will use this” category. Yeah, except all of the people with a Sound Blaster and an onboard sound card. Or a USB headset… which appears as a virtual sound card. Or a bluetooth headset, which also appears as a virtual sound card. But nobody has those, so we’ll just move on.

Okay, finally… let’s play! We’ll start with single player as i’ve never played this game before and a good bot match will get me used to the game engine. That way i’ll have at least played the game before I go out and get my few weeks of spankings as a new player online. Here we go! Single player, select maps, and start the game! Woot! After an excruciating optimization thing, the level loaded and now I can’t get in to the game. It shows the “kit” screen, I pick my kit and hit “Select Spawnpoints”. Nothing. That must just be a tab or something, even though it looks like a button. So, i’ll just click on some spawn points! Nope, nothing happening here either. Oh wait, I need to join a squad… Okay! Click the squad tab, here’s three… I click join. Good. Now i’m in a squad. I click the “continue” button (which looks exactly like the “select waypoints”, which isn’t a button.)

Game up! I’m in… no wait… i’m not. I can’t spawn. A few seconds go by and now the squad screen shows up. Okay, let’s see, let’s click all over the place and see what happens. Nothing. Nothing happens. I get a clicking noise as a conformation that i’ve done something, but no responses on anything except for leave squad, create squad, and join squad. I create a new squad with me in it, hit the manage squad button, and that interface doesn’t seem to work either. I must be crazy… it must be me… right?

I bust out the mighty Google and start running queries. Sure enough, others are having the same problem. Single player is broken in this 1.25 patch. Most people’s response in the help forums is something along the lines of “But why do you care? Single player sucks!”. Gee, that’s helpful. So now I have two options, I upgrade to the new “beta” 1.40 patch, or downgrade via uninstall/reinstall. This is just sick. I’ve also seen reports that the 1.40 beta patch has the same issue. So much for the QA process.

I fiddled around with the multi player and decided I didn’t want to bother. The spawn works in the multi player, but I die so fast it’s not even funny. I can’t get the good weapons b/c they have to be “unlocked”. Which can be difficult for those who have no clue how to play the game.

So, thank you again EA for a “pleasurable” game experience.

I’d also like to take this moment to say thanks to EA for not doing any further updates on SSX Tricky so I could play it on my Xbox 360. Oh sure, SSX 3 works… but SSX 3 SUCKED compared to Tricky. What I wanted was more tracks and some new riders for Tricky, what EA gave me was something less impressive than Tricky… and now it’s the only thing that will play on the Xbox 360. Thanks EA! This is almost as good as the C&C : Red Alert 2 thing… no updates for XP to fix any compatibility problems, but you’re sure as hell repackage it and re-sell it… bugs and all. What a crock!

So now I’m on my way to return BF2142… another disappointment from EA. I think i’ll just pre-order Enemy Territory : Quake Wars instead.

I couldn’t help myself. I made a long video of the aquarium with my latest (and hopefully last) rock design. I also switched to my digital camcorder, it’s a bit older than the camera I was using before, but it’s designed for movies and records in raw DV format. The quality seems a bit better on this one.

This video has almost everything, the snails, all of the fish, etc… the only thing missing was the Condy anemone. I’ll probably do one more once the new skimmer gets settled in and such… hopefully it’ll clear up the water some more.

I have just one word for my fellow aquarium owners who rely on their thermometers and heaters… don’t. Everyone talks about how bad aquarium heaters are, what they don’t tell you is that the thermometers aren’t exactly the most precise pieces of equipment either.

Lemme lay down the time line here of what happened to us the other day. A problem that has been causing me problems since day 1 in my tank and I never knew it due to fault equipment.

04/30/07 - Fishtank 1.0
We started the tank setup. Added water, dropped in the thermometer. Put in the heater and started running it. Over the next few days, we managed to stabilize tank temperature at 76 degrees by setting the heater to 83. Kinda odd that it is that much off, but hey, even the guy who sold us the thing said they weren’t that accurate. And the heater was down in the sump, not in the tank. So whatever. At this point in time, I don’t know any better but the thermometer readout is good so we decide to just go with it!

06/30/07 - Panic mode
I wake up and go to feed the fish and notice that the tank temperature is down over ten degrees… it’s 65 in there! PANIC! Something is very wrong. It’s the heater or the thermometer. So, I toss the thermometer in a bucket of cold water, temp readout drops to 50 degrees. Then on to a bucket of hot water, temp readout starts rising. Thermometer is working so I pull it out and shove it back in the tank. It must be the heater! Toss the heater in a bucket of cold water and crank it up. It kicks on but takes forever to get the water warm. Hmmmm… yup. Must be the heater. (I’m totally not thinking here and not realizing that heaters don’t work well in STILL water. Oops.) Off we go to our favorite LFS… no heaters in stock. Okay, plan B, Petco… The only acceptable choices are a 300w AGA heater made by Hydor or a 200w Visi-Therm Stealth. Well, the Visi-Therm gets higher ratings most of the time and all, but seeing as I have a dead one at home… forget that. AGA/Hydor it is! We get home and drop this thing into the sump… we set it at 67, trying to be conservative and not shock the fish again. It kicks on for about 30 seconds and then shuts off so I bump it up to 68. Again, 30 seconds. I pull the heater out and slam it into a bucket of cold water. It stays on for several minutes before it kicks off. At this point, I should really have a clue as to what’s really broken here but it’s just not registering. I’m in too much of a panic about which pieces of livestock i’m about to lose!

07/01/07 - Problem solved!
Temperature still not rising. No matter what I do, I can’t get the temp over 67 and kicking the A/C on in the house drops it back to 66. How weird. Just then, the still water paradigm hits me and we notice the water level in the wet/dry is WAY too high compared to normal. Oddly enough, the skimmer hasn’t erupted salt water like it normally does, but that’s a story for another day. After some serious amounts of checking, turns out the filter medium was too dirty. We recently switched from the super porous spongy stuff to the thin felt-like stuff. Gets ALOT more out of the water, but nobody told us that you have to clean that stuff once a week and sometimes even more! Oops. We pull that out and clean it, water levels return to normal and the temp in the tank goes up 1 degree within a few minutes. That must have been it. Not wanting to shock the fish, I set the heater back down to 68 and wait a while. Heater keeps cutting off. Probably b/c it’s too tall for our sump. Knowing now that it probably wasn’t the original heater but the filtration material… I replace the new heater with the old one.

07/02/07 (Early morning) - Maybe that wasn’t it. Part 1
It’s midnight, i’m still up. Temp still won’t go up. The heater is now at 72. By 2AM, i’m done. I reinsert the new heater and go to bed. The girlfriend wakes up in the morning, sees the temp still low and bumps it to 75. I wake up, see the higher heat but still nothing on the thermometer and throw in the towel. It must be this new heater not getting the right amount of flow. Next thing you know, the skimmer is out, the filter material is gone, chemi-pure is out… we’re at max flow… nothing. Still nothing. Same old 67 degrees in the tank and the heater is on 80.

07/02/07 (Evening) - New sump… that’ll fix it!
For quite some time, i’ve been wanting a bigger sump. The wet/dry is fun and all, but I want a better skimmer and some more room to work. And I don’t use the bio-balls anyway, so the wet/dry is nothing but a fancy airation chamber with tight proportions and a huge potential for overflow. I’d also like to have some more water in the system. 50g is fine and all but 60g would be even better! So at around 5pm, the swap begins. By 8pm, the new sump is in, heater in place, and operation is restored. Just to help out, I used the powerhead from the old skimmer to push water over the heater and keep things moving in the sump… but I still have the same problem. Can’t make the water heat up any more than 68, yet i’m sweating when i’m around the tank and it’s humid as hell. Then it hits me… It’s the thermometer. It’s always been the thermometer. It was the thermometer on day one. Back to the early picture, the tank was never 76, even though that thermometer showed it. My 150w visi-therm heater was set to 83 and if I had to guess, the temp was somewhere in the low 80’s. It explains a lot. I’ve had really bad problems with algae, even before my T5HO lighting setup. Oh sure, all tanks have algae, but not this bad. The tank has been a petri dish for algae.

I slapped another heater in there… New Heater : 83F, Old Heater : 66F. The fact that I haven’t lost livestock at this point is AMAZING. Now I begin the slow process of backing the temp down slowly so I don’t shock them.

07/03/07 - Another Thermometer?
While at the fish store, I picked up another heater for when I do water changes. Sure enough, it’s within 1 degree of the other new heater, and at least 10 degrees away from the old one. Tank temp is now 81F.

07/04/07 - Happy Fish
Tank temp is now 79F and i’ll continue to lower it slowly until I get to 76F. My fish are very actively swimming now, the Coral Beauty isn’t attacking the smaller fish anymore, and everyone is eating like mad. I fed both of the anemones today and they’re all puffed up and happy. I’ve been adding a touch of Garlic to their food lately so the fish colors and bright and vibrant. Everything looks great!

The moral of this story is that you need two heaters and two thermometers. Also, heaters stick so use an external temperature probe and an aqua controller so the heater doesn’t stick in the “on” position and boil your fish.

* Thanks to Jungle Rob for his speech bubble idea and the template drawing.

Okay, so i’ve now played all of the latest consoles several times. I’m gonna have to stick to my Xbox 360. No PS3 or Wii in my immediate future. As many problems as people have had with the 360, I love mine. It works perfectly. Of course now that I’ve said that, it’ll probably break tomorrow.

I’ve excluded the Wii from the running and decided to stick with true next generation consoles here. After I saw demo after demo with cartoon-esque graphics, lack of HD support (480p doesn’t count guys), and those super gimmicky controllers, I was sure that i’d never own a Wii. Sorry Nintendo, i’d have easily tossed you another $50 or so for a better GPU. Oh, and yes, I played Wii Sports, it’s fun and all, but I rarely have people over to my house and Zelda isn’t my thing. Red Steel was an indicator that i’d never really enjoy long hours of shooters with that controller. Gears of War on the 360 reminded me of what you could do with horsepower if you’ve got a powerhouse like Epic writing code.

Between the Xbox 360 and the PS3, it boils down to a few things in my opinion.

• Price - Can anyone actually afford to get ALL of the consoles anymore? Xbox 360 Premium at $399 and PS3 at *gasp* $599, then toss in a Wii at $249? No way i’m putting out that much just to have the entire set. In the previous generation of consoles, I had a Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox. Of course, I waited until the PS2 & Xbox were all $199 each, and the DC was $99. So, for $500, I had them all. My “Gaming Experience” was top notch.
• HD media support - PS3 gives me the Blu-Ray drive. Pfffffffffffffffft. So what? I’m not buying anything HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until they come out with a standard or an affordable dual mode player. No offense kids, i’ve been down the early adopter road way too many times. Xbox 360 has the addon HD-DVD drive. Not buying that either for the time being. In the end, I want to PLAY GAMES with the thing.
• 1080p support - Both consoles do it. My TV upscales everything to 1080p anyway, so I personally can’t tell the difference between 1080i and 1080p. The only reason I notice 720p is because of the bars. *Attention fanboys* Xbox 360 DOES do 1080p over the component outputs… trying to get an HDTV that does 1080p over component, that’s another story. You can thank the industry for persuading TV manufacturers into gimping their TVs to not support 1080p over anything but DVI or HDMI. There is enough bandwidth to run 1080p over component outputs. It’s just not digital.
• Controllers - The PS3 controller has motion sensing… but no rumble? What the? Yes yes, I know. Sony and Immersion. I recently heard that they settled that and will be giving us a new controller with rumble. Thanks for not listening to what the customers really want and being bitchy about a few million bones to Immersion. Hint to Sony… JUST PAY THEM OFF! YOU MADE ENOUGH FROM PS1 and PS2… GET OVER IT AND GIVE ME MY RUMBLE. In the Microsoft arena, it’s more of the same, but somebody in Redmond listened. The controller is better sized this time, has better button placement, and it’s wireless! I love the wireless guys, it works quite well. Not to mention, being able to turn the console on and off from the controller ROCKS. Thanks again guys.
• Titles - In the glory days of the PS2, the other 3 (DC, GC, Xbox) competing consoles couldn’t keep up with the exclusive title rampage that was the PS2. Looks like those days are over. I think Sony just learned a hard lesson here. The cell is neat and all if I want to do Folding@Home or run a crazy Linux machine, but most people really don’t give a crap. I already have a Linux machine! (with a lot more peripherals I might add) I want to PLAY GAMES. I need titles to do that. Come back to me in a year when you’ve got the titles that the Xbox 360 has and then we’ll talk. Oh, and drop that price some too. $599 and you’re still losing money on each console sold? That’s got to be hurting right now. What the hell though… right? All of these years of proprietary formats must have paid off by now…. right? Betamax! No wait, that didn’t work. Mini-Disc! Nope… UMD! Oh crap, another flop. Well, hopefully somebody saved all of that cash from the millions and millions of PS1 and PS2 consoles that were sold.
• Online - MS continues to impress me with their improvements to Xbox Live for the 360. It’s so different from the old days. I’m very happy with it as it stands now and look forward to the next upgrade. Not to mention, it seems like every time I hit the marketplace, there’s more and more there for me to download. I love that.

Long live Xbox 360. Now let’s see if Sony can pull a rabbit out of their hat and give us what we want next time. It certainly appears as those Nintendo and Microsoft figured something out after their last attempts.