Today I received my chiller from Aquatic Exchange. I want to highly recommend the site and it’s owner ‘Bob’ for excellent customer care and communication. When the original one I requested wasn’t in stock, Bob offered to match the price on a more expensive one - he also checked out my work in progress for the fish tank monitor and offered compliments for the little progress I’d made so far. I’ve changed a little so that I’m scraping the straight stats from the Dr. Aquarium website then feeding them into rrdtool every five minutes to make my own graphs.

Now all I need to do it plumb it.

Also, if you look at the temp stats, you’ll see that there’s no “sump temp” being plotted. That’s because the temperature sensor no longer works and I’m trying to RMA it. Kind of a drag it broke already after two months.

The Labjack is cheaper and supports more items. However, it’s a bit more complicated then just hooking up a probe.

What’ll be really handy in the future is when wireless usb becomes mainstream and instead of running cables to sensors all over the place, you just put the sensor wherever you want.

I have often written asking for obnoxious toy ideas for my nephews and given my top obnoxious toy lists for the pre-school and under set. (by the way I have a few new ones to add) Well, here is away to get back at your neighbors when you have kids. Pay attention Evil Bastard! You will need to do this in another 18 months. I went to a birthday party accross the street from me Saturday afternoon. When we got home I fed the kids a snack before bed because I know they only ate pretzels and cake. They were too busy to be interested in eating at the party. Q and 4 tore into their Goody Bags. As I was helping Q get a plastic ring out of the goody bag, I noticed there are pixie sticks in the good bag. I look at 4 just as he’s about to bite into a pixie stick. He thought it was a drinking straw. I snatched all the pixie sticks up and quickly looked to see what other sugary dye weapons of hyperness were in the bag among the bag of bubbles, plastic rings, and plastic cars.

So from now on I will frisk all Goody Bags. Do not trust any source! I was the same house for a birthday party in January and the good bags had raisins, granola bars, and packets of little fish! Now we have smarties and pixie sticks!

For Evil_Bastard, I present The People’s Mario.

While searching online for some of the concrete plugs that people use to clone/frag their coral, I stumbled on Reefball.com.

These man-made reefs are designed to quickly transplant and re-deploy existing threatened coral - step by step how-to.

Among their accomplishments is basically rebuilding entire reefs.

Sadly, it probably won’t be enough.

I thought I’d come up with a common set of words that, in a certain social contexts, can get one labeled a Bolshevik agitiator and locked up in prison.

That’s an exaggeration, of course, but here is a list of often innocuous, yet frequently misunderstood, words.

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Hahaha, instead of random pictures of letters and numbers (aka Capthas), how about picking out the kittens? Try it out here.

The developer has allowed me a chance to beta test the newest version of software.

I finally got around to setting up all the dyndns/port forwarding etc. So, here is a live link to the web interface for graphs.

I’m reading a book called A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945, and it is excellent.
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I think they might come out something like this:

The video came as a pleasant surprise, and while I am generally not a fan of medium-budget films directed at pre-teen audiences, I am big enough to recognize the one you showed as an excellent example of the genre. So the movie played, the night deepened, and our steady driver prudently switched on his hi-beam headlights. And I suppose that the lights control must be located very near other switches on the dash, for, in turning on his bright lights, he, inadvertently, I think, switched on his public address microphone as well. From that point on, we sleepy passengers were treated to a constant and soothing hiss from the overhead speakers, soporific, like a single protracted wave endlessly in the process of crashing onto an eternal nighttime beach. This gentle soundtrack was only punctuated by occasional noises from our careful driver himself, an intermittent collection of gurgling, shifting, sniffling, throat-clearing, breathing sounds, comforting reminders of his persevering alertness, and also warm sounds in themselves, human sounds, as though in boarding his bus, we had each entered the moist security of his very womb…

http://www.jalanjalan.com/letters/pages%20and%20menus/industry.html

Apparently Gizmodo’s 4/1 prank is to zombify their website.