Greg In The Desert

It’s been over a year since I last wrote anything about my aquarium set up and the last few posts were about my issues with keeping algae under control. Since then I’ve had a problem with a particular gold gourami that became extremely territorial and quite the bully. It didn’t matter what fish I put in with him, short of smaller fish like zebra danios, he would eventually kill them all. Not knowing what else to do with the little shit, I left him in the tank by himself (with a few zebra danios)

My last post was on my troubles with the Otocinclus cat fish. Despite my best attempts they just would not live more than a few weeks. I decidied to try something I never did before and stock the tank with a few cherry shrimp. I purchased 10 of them from a person on the aquariacentral message boards and they arrived as tiny little clear animals. After the first month I thought they had all died off. After the second month I started to see a few full grown adults. A year later I have hundreds of them living in the tank. After the population began to boom they literally stripped the tank clean of algae.

They don’t keep the tank 100% clean however, there’s still a fine layer of algae on the glass. I also made the mistake of putting the java moss that came wit the shrimp in to the tank and now it’s just a grown all over the place. The shrimp eat it but don’t keep it under control which requires me to pull as much of it out of the tank that I can ever few months.

The shrimp also make a good meal for the fish. I don’t feed the fish at all, they eat the plant materials and the shrimp. Even the zebra danios can been seen pooping red (the adult cherry shrimps are red).

The Gold Gourami died a few months ago and I’ve done very little tank maintenance during its life. With that much water and so few fish not much waste is produced but there was still a some of cleaning to be done before I start stocking the tank again. Besides the filter, gravel cleaning and algae scraping I’ve reduced the amount of time the lights are on from 12 to 8 hours and will run the UV sterilizer for a few weeks.

The Hydor Prime 10 canister filter I bought many years ago is under sized for this tank. I like the filter, it’s completely quiet and does a good job but its not going to be enough when I have a few dozen fish in there. I’m looking at the Eheim Pro 3E or the Lifeguard system. That will be a post for another day and another budget.

I primarily listen to my music collection through my iPod. I don’t care what Apple says, the shuffle feature of the iPod (and to a lesser degree iTunes) does a poor job of preventing the same Artist from playing randomly. Even with the the scheme I came up wit here, my iPod still played 3 songs from Metallica in a row the other day. These methods do a good job of addressing the issues.

I start off with master playlist called “Filtered”, it’s filtered for genres. Second playlist is “Filtered – 4 Stars + Played”. This ensures that songs which are rated have actually been played. I ofter will rate new songs high but not really listed to them (I have another playlist for new songs). The next playlist is “Filtered – 4 Stars + Played last 14 days.” Finally I’m to my primary playlist, “Filtered – 4 Stars + w/o last 14 days.”

Unfortunately the iPod does not automatically update these playlists, they only get updated when I sync my iPod with iTunes. At one time “The Stroke” had 2x as many plays as any other song, I like that song but not that much, this does a reasonably good job of reducing this effect. I’d prefer to have a playlist that removes, say the top 10% of played songs, but iTunes doesn’t have this option in the filter lists. This also doesn’t prevent the same artist being played in a row.