Here's some pretty amazing video of indoor trials riding. Looks like even the spotters have tough jobs here. I'd like to see this sort of thing live, it looks really intense.

indoor de toulouse: toni bou / adam raga
Uploaded by photobysergio

Sunday

The guys over at Aztec8 rock! I called them Friday morning about a 5-3/4" dual headlight kit for my SV1000. They caught the fact that my Gixxer 1000 forks taper out where the brackets mount and ensured that I got the right size, then they put some extra effort into making sure that my order was prepared and shipped same day. It arrived yesterday. Fortunately I had kept the headlight harness from the stock crashed SV headlight assembly. With a bit of soldering and splicing, I was able to use that harness to power the Aztec lights for a clean plug and play installation. I think it looks great!

Saturday

Last night, Christy and I went to see The Golden Compass. It was a cool youth magic/adventure style movie. I expect that the book is better. There were a few characters that were obviously very complex but the movie format didn't really allow for sufficient time to develop them. The ending was quite good in that they obviously had more to do but it was a good time to break the action before the inevitable sequel.

In the reef tank, things are going pretty well for most inhabitants. The Tonga leather however is worrying me. She's looking rather shriveled and her filter polyps or whatever they're called are not spending much time in their extended and feeding position. There's a symbiotic, photosynthetic algae that grows within these corals and provides the bulk of their food. In light (nice pun,eh?) of this, I moved the leather to a spot closer to the light. I'm also about to go get a Calcium test kit and some Calcium dosing product (on the advice of my reef mentor and former owner of the tank). Hopefully things will turn around soon.

Thursday night, Colin had a Christmas concert performance, he was quite good and we have some footage of that to post as well. He's been at my mom's house since Thursday night and Cailan went to Christy's mom's house yesterday afternoon. They don't often spend time away from each other, so this is a little new for them.

Colin Xmas concert

Minor Update

There hasn't been much going on in the reef tank lately. Or rather not much that I feel the need to write about. There are no pictures in this update.

I pulled the live rock out of the tank last night and removed as much of the red bubble algae as I could reasonably see/access. A secondary achievement was discovering that my Turbo Snail is still alive, despite being seemingly pissed at me for some reason.
I did my first water change plus filter sponge rinsing on Sunday, was a largely uneventful process. It looks to me like the Zenia is preparing to split or otherwise self propagate. Aside from that, it's live as usual in the reef tank.

In all honesty taking daily tank pictures and writing them up in a blog is something that I knew wouldn't last forever. I suppose I thought it would last a little longer than this, but it looks like that is not to be. If this blog is to be updated at all, (hard to say at this point) expect that the subject matter will be more variable.

Day's Three and Four - 12/06-07/07

Weird stretch of time. Work commitments had me awake for 24 hours straight. I then slept for three hours before getting up and running a bunch of errands. Needless to say, I'm a little loopy at the moment. I got some more neat pictures, see for yourself.

Joe brought me a couple pounds of GARF grunge out of his frag tank. A crab hitched a ride in as did a bunch of tiny stars, they have very small centers and relatively long spindly legs (tentacles?). Hopefully a good number of amphepods and copepods came over too. It's still settling so the tank is pretty murky at the moment.

King Prawn chowed down on a Bristle worm today. It seems that this is not a common occurrence.

Day Two - 12/05/07

Not much time to reef watch this morning, mostly just turned on the lights before heading off to work. Stopped at Pet-Mart on Busch blvd before coming home today. I bought three more red legged hermit crabs, a pair of blue legged hermits, and a Sally Lightfoot crab. The blue legged hermits are tiny, but at least one of them seems to have growth aspirations in mind. Within ten minutes of being added to his new home he inspected cleaned and took ownership of a larger shell. It was very cool to watch. Sally the Lightfoot is quite agile and started eating as soon as she touched down in the sand. So far she staying on the floor but I expect that she'll be helping King Prawn out with rock cleaning duties before too long. The other crabs are fun to watch too. The bigger hermit crabs like to forcibly inspect the smaller crabs at random intervals, no fourth amendment rights in this tank.

The two Margherita Snails were in some sort of struggle. One was attached to the other's shell and kept flipping him over. I separated them and put them on opposite sides of the tank. Hopefully they get back to eating up the brown hair algae and leave the cage fighting to the guys on Pay Per View.

Reef Tank Day One

The tank is a 12 gallon Nanocube. Purchased from a friend as an established tank, there are some modifications as compared to a "stock" Nanocube, all executed by the previous owner. The hood was replaced with a Sunpod HQI 1058 metal halide light setup. The pump was replaced with the highest flow capacity pump that would fit in the back of the tank. Half of the pump housing actually had to be removed in order to fit the pump. Several tactically placed holes have been drilled to increase water flow to targeted locations in the tank and as a safety valve for the filter inlet grate which has a tendency to get partially clogged by coralline algae over time.

There are quite a few inhabitants already. The most readily visible is "King Prawn" he's a Peppermint Shrimp, he molted on his first night in my house. There's at least three snails and four or five crabs. There's a nice Xenia frag, a leather, and some reasonably well established green star polyps in a couple different locations around the tank. There are three Hidden Cup corals that live in the shadier spots towards the front of the tank. They seem to be more active at night, opening up and extending long clear tentacles into the water to gather food. There's a lot of hair algae that I'm told should be subdued by the addition of more crabs. There's also some red bubble algae growth in multiple locations around the tank, no one cluster is particularly large. I suppose that I'll have to try my hand at removing these before too long.