Planning and construction of the new tank has pretty much zero distance since the last update.  Simply have been flat out at work and home (with construction of filtration equipment for others) trying just to catch up with things.  And it hasn't really been helped that much by the fact been sick a couple of times and other things keep on cropping up that eat into time.  Going to have to really make it a priority now so that I can get things rolling along.  Although, I have still been thinking about things in the back of my mind.

Actually, I have decided on the dimensions of the tank, it will be 1200 x 900 x 450 mm.  The back 300 mm or so of the tank will be the sump, which will be separated off by a smoked glass baffle/weir.  The extra width of the tank should make it look great, with plenty of space for the reef structure and open sand areas.  Are limited to the height of the tank, as can't be too high since it will be a coffee table tank.  Next entry here I should have a rough plan to show what it is going to look like, in terms of sizing.  It might start to make some more sense then on how I am going to do this.  As number of people I have told about the project don't understand how I am going to do some of the things.  All in good time

New Tank Journal

On the journal page here, if you look down on the left hand side, under the main index for the OZ REEF website, there is a new menu down there (6th Grade Huntsville ).  That is for the 6th grade at an elementary school in Alabama, US, that is setting up a marine aquarium who I am going to help out along the way with advice.  So far they just have a tank filled, no life in it yet.  So check out their blog to see how things are progressing and provide comments or help to them if you wish.  Note that the comments are moderated, so only constructive comments will be allowed through.

Here is the photo of their tank as it currently stands.

 There will be a gallery as well, where you will be able to see photos of the tank as things progress.

New Camera

Well, after using the great little freebie camera that Paul threw my way, we have finally gone out and purchased our own half decent digital camera. Main reason for the purchase is in the next two weeks we are going off to a number of events at the Commonwealth Games (which are being held here in Melbourne, where I live).

Didn't really want anything too expensive, just something relatively small to carry around that takes good photos and has a good optical zoom.  A few years down the track we will go the full hog and get an SLR (and currently have a good film SLR), so just needed something for more general day to day use. 

Today took a walk down along Elizabeth Street in Melbourne, where there is a significant number of camera stores in a row.  Had a look around, compared prices, and as always ended up paying just a bit more than initially though.  Seem to do that with just about anything.  The camera that walked away with in the end of a Konica-Minolta Z3.  Was for a very reasonable price, 4M pixels and 12x optical zoom (which is pretty darn good for that price range).  It has been out for a couple of years, so isn't exactly cutting edge technology, but it is vast jump compared to the previous digital camera I have been using.  Plus there are some mixed review on how good it is, particularly that the image quality is not quite the best.

Yet to try it out, but once I do will show some photographs here to show what it can do.  Really looking forward to using the super macro feature, which means you can get down to within a couple of centimetres of the object you are photographing. 

Frustrating Software

You might have also noticed that with some of the content here on OZ REEF, you can now comment. It is also meant to be active on the 6th graders blog as noted above, but I am having a bit of fun trying to get things correctly configured so that it all works as it should.  Seems that the various components and bots I am using interact with each other.  Of course they shouldn't if they were written correctly, but of course when they were written the authors probably didn't think about the possibly interactions.  So hopefully I will get that sorted out properly in the not too distant future.

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