So the idea today (not sure if it was Luc's or my idea, it could have been Luc's) was to take one of the fish tanks into work. Totally brilliant idea. There's a good strong desk in between two people's desks, in a space that's otherwise doing nothing. I decided I'll leave the new one at home (so the neighbours can come visit their fishies whenever they want to), and take "tank 3" which currently holds about 30 baby kribs into work. I'll take the babies into work too until they're big enough to sell (a couple of them are but most are fairly small still), and then I'll try something else in the tank later on.

So tonight I drained their tank into a couple of big tubs, and moved the filters into the one with the fish. I'll take the tank in tomorrow and fill it and start loading gravel into it (I'll need some more gravel, a light hood and another filter) and take the babies in later in the week.

I enabled Gravatar on my blog today. Installing it was easy, but then I wanted to make a default image for people without a gravatar identity. And then it was the usual fight with templates and style sheets to get it looking vaguely how I wanted it (a shameless rip-off of Dave's style).

So now all we need is for a few of my more regular commenters (Ben, JC, Yvonne etc) to get themselves a gravatar :) Sign up here :)

I blame Ben for wasting big chunks of my time today. At least I didn't see his post last night and went to bed before him, otherwise I would have been up late too!

It's Wikipedia's Unusual Articles collection.

Several articles caught my fancy. There was Acetylseryltyrosylserylisol...serine, which I typed once when I was typing up "Dodger's Death" (which I'll need to find and post sometime). It's supposed to be the longest word in the english language, but when I learned about proteins at uni, all my illusions were shattered, when I realised it was just the name of a protein, and you could write out any protein this way.

Then there was the Photic sneeze reflex, the medical condition by which people exposed to bright light involuntarily sneeze. I once was walking back from lunch with someone at work, and they said they hated walking past a particular building (it was painted white and was right next the footpath) because it always made them sneeze. And I'm going "wtf?", how on earth could walking past a building make you sneeze. I thought perhaps there were weeds growing in the carpark nearby that he was allergic to or something. Then I read this article and I was like "wow" .. heh

There's an article that further confirms Dave's notion that clowns are evil, a whole article dedicated to badger badger badger, and one on the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in 1940.

Now really must get back to deciding what to do about the fish tanks..

Lost another baby krib yesterday. Who knows how many other dead ones are amongst the moss. Really should try and sell em before they all die :/

And lost one of the neon tetras in the tetra tank. This is the biggest neon tetra I have ever seen, at nearly two years old. I measured him when I pulled him out of the tank - 4cm ! Noticed he was looking a bit distressed yesterday, and tonight he'd gone :(

The betta in the tetra tank is also looking very sad. He's a year and a half old, and hasn't been well for a couple of weeks.

And finally worried about one of the black angels. She's been off her food for a week or two, same as what happened to the white angel just before she died :(

All my tanks are a disaster at the moment and I don't know why. Probably acidic water from not enough changes. That'll learn me to be a slacker .

And on an unrelated topic, one of the freakiest things I've seen in a while - pictures taken on someone's digital camera of the tsunami. The people that took them died, but the memory card from their camera was recovered, and had pictures of the tsunami rolling in.

I had a whim today. Install Apache on my NT4 P166 instead of IIS so I could setup rewrite rules to stop people stealing my images.

That was at 2:20 this afternoon, and it still isn't working right.

The server itself worked ok, but then I tried to tweak it. Things were going well until I fubared something in the process of trying to get it to show indexes of directories that don't have index files. So that stuffed things for a while.

I had to make several things work - .htaccess files to password protect directories. Check. Indexing directories that don't have index files. Check. Hotlink protection rewrite rules. Check.

So then, looking like everything was working, I tackled virtual hosts. I host ten sites on that little box, but do you think I can make any of them work? Big fat no. Been at it all night. No matter what configuration of httpd.conf I use, I either get permission denied when trying to access the sites, or they simply bring up the default conspiracy site. Not to mention that I'm trying to do all of this over vnc on a 9 year old computer. It's been one painful experience. Who says apache is better than IIS ?? If I can't make it work tomorrow I'll be going back to IIS.

If you had the choice, you would you be able to fly, or be invisible? They were discussing this on the radio this afternoon. I'd take being able to fly any day. Yes it would be very cool to be invisible, but there are still plenty of ways for people to detect you, and it's effectiveness would be diminished. I'd love more than just about anything to be able to fly. I've spent many hours over the years fantasizing about it.

Ordered a new phone today. I've had my little 8210 for over four and a half years. But the battery life frustrates me, even after we replaced its battery a while back. Ordered two others for two other people also. Getting a 6100. The prerequisites: decent battery life/talk time, and tri-band. Speaker phone also useful. So anyway. Should hopefully get that in a few days.

Had a very cool dream about Dave last night. We'd gone to visit him.. my parents were there though.. doh.. heh. Silly thing is, after all this time, I've never really had any dreams about Jason Isaacs. I used to have David Bowie dreams all the time years ago.

Watched the 9/11 episode of Zero Hour tonight. Highly disturbing/upsetting for me. Some people are just utterly sick.

Kinda puts my gripes about the others going to subway without me yesterday into perspective somewhat.

My absolute favourite line in the whole movie "Airport" is right at the end when Patroni gives the 707 a pat on the rump and says "nice going sweetheart". No idea why that does it for me. Similarly the relationship Ernest Borgnine's character had with Airwolf.

Wanted to go for a swim tonight, but as per usual, noone to go with. Two people working, three people that wouldn't come if you paid them (and they're meant to be my best friends), and one that finally got back to me after I was well and truly over it. So all you can do really is watch dvds.

Going to set a record for the quickest ever FridayQ response.. :)

FQ1: On average, how many hours of sleep do you get each night? Do you think that's a good number?
Averages about 7 I guess. I'd rather get 8 :)

FQ2: Have you any sleep essentials? A nightlight or teddy bear perhaps? Must the door and closet be either closed or open?
I used to have a bed full of stuffed toys when I was a kid. Now nothing but my pillow. When I was 11 years old, some irresponsible mother let us watch Friday the 13th at a slumber party. From that point on I couldn't sleep without the door closed, the theory being that I would at least be able to hear someone coming if they had to open the door (it squeaked). But that was only at my parents place. Once I moved out of home and into places that felt more secure (my parents place was relatively big, and had lots of space in the garage/workshop downstairs for scary people to hide waiting for me to go to sleep), I have never felt that way.

FQ3: What do you wear to bed? What color are your sheets? How many pillows under your head?
I wear pjs to bed. Sheets range in various colours. They're mostly inherited from my parents place or my nana's. In fact I don't think I've ever bought my own set of sheets. I just have one relatively thin pillow (I sleep in my tummy quite a bit).

FQ BIG SLEEP: Share some helpful advice you use when having trouble falling asleep.
The only thing that vaguely works for me is totally clearing my mind. Visualising nothing except that blackness I can see and the slight ringing in my ears that I can hear. Clearing your mind is actually a very hard thing to do, and requires much practise (ask anyone that's been on a vipassana)

Postscript. After reading My So-Called Strife .. I used to be afraid (and vaguely still am), that if I hung a limb over the edge of the bed while in it, a guilotine like device would slice whatever was protuding clean off. I think I also used to be vaguely afraid that things would reach out from under the bed and grab my ankles if I stood there too long, so I'd have to get into bed quickly :)

Three new seasons of tv tonight.

Three episodes of The Amazing race (well one long one from last night and the one from tonight). Lotsa fun, the usual crazy mix of crazy people.

ER, into it's what, twelfth year? It's been so long since the end of the last season though had trouble remembering everything they left off on.

And Lost. Has potential I guess. Although the "yeah right" factor is pretty high. Like a plane falling from 40000' and the entire front 10m of the plane in perfect condition, no dents, scratches or crumpling, and the pilot still alive. Yeah right. And one of the engines of the plane still running after the crash. Yeah right. Still, everyone is raving about the depth of the stories and characters, so maybe I'll watch a bit more.