Since learning is hard, I’ve let a bit of my geeky tendancies come through and started working on a project about learning a language instead of actually learning a language like I should be doing. I guess it’s a way of procrastinating while feeling productive at the same time. In any case, here it is, in its infancy:

The Learning Linguist

It’s not much at all yet, but I’ve got some ideas and possibly lots of time coming up to work on whatever the heck I want to work on, so we’ll see where it goes.

I upgraded the hard drive in my tivo this past weekend. The old 40GB drive made a constant, high-pitched whining noise that has been bugging me for a long time. I had to go to Fry’s to pick up an external hard drive for my wife, so upon seeing a $40 160GB internal drive, I decided to take action and relieve tivo of its misery.

I followed the step-by-step directions at Interactive TiVo Upgrade Instructions. It was a fairly simple procedure: remove the hard drive, attach both drives to my old PC, boot the PC with a special linux boot CD, run one command to initate the data transfer, and attach the new drive to the tivo.

I also changed the fan, since that was also pretty loud.

The results:

The whining noise is gone and I’ve quadrupled the storage space. Now that the whine is gone, I can hear the actual drive access clicks and whirs, which is a little distracting. The new fan also didn’t make a difference and may even be louder than the old one. It’s hard to tell, since the old fan noise was drowned out by the loud hard drive.

I’ve uploaded a few more photos to a Flickr photset.

An interesting feature of Tidal Gardens is its greenhouse aquaculture facility. It houses three 1,000-gallon reef systems. There are several benefits to using a greenhouse for growing large volumes of coral.

First, it provides arguably the best light available. Some aquarists spend a great deal of time and money assembling complex lighting systems complete with timers and moonlight effects. One can argue that a greenhouse is essentially the perfect light on the perfect timer with practically no maintenance.

The second benefit is the greenhouse’s resistance to water damage. Large volumes of salt water can really damage the immediate surroundings of standard construction. Salt spray and humidity (especially considering the volume of water involved) would make quick work of most residential style buildings.

Lastly, the greenhouse provides a very temperature stable environment for the corals. Even on cold winter days, the greenhouse is a warm 80 degrees when the sun comes out. It is only during the cold winter nights that the gas furnace activates.

The greenhouse setup drew a great deal of interest, so we decided to give our readers an inside look at the process of building a greenhouse for coral reef aquaculture. It came with its own set of unique challenges, but the finished product was very rewarding.

Tidal Gardens is now open for business, so if you’re in the market for some fine aquacultured coral for your saltwater reef tank, stop by for a visit.

Technorati tags: coral reeftank aquarium saltwater aquaculture

For example, previously the interesting words for Throwing Food included “oil” and “olive”. Now, though, it more appropriately combines those into “olive oil”.

I’d like to increase the size of phrases to at least 3 words, but I’ll probably have to do a bit of rearchitecting to keep performance in line. And, honestly, 2-word phrases are probably good enough.