We had an interesting local-line/internet outage yesterday. End of the month, and the lines dropped exactly at 5:00 and came back up exactly at 6:00. The "technicians" had no idea what the hell happened in any case. Someone, somewhere, had a planned outage they didn't tell us about.

But, during this time, Zippy and myself were the on-staff IT folks. We chatted, bitched about reality TV, played some video games, and just generally hung out and behaved like guys behave while we waited on the techs. It almost seemed like the guy was just a normal guy who gets a bit of a beat-down from his wife from time to time.

Then this morning the boss says Zippy won't be in because he worked so hard last night getting the lines back up. I calmly explained what we actually did while we stood around waiting for the techs and the boss basically shrugged it off. Somehow I managed to make it in at 7:50 this morning, but Zippy just couldn't get out of bed after that extra hour of playing video games.

Me is not amused.

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We had a cuntractor that was showing up whenever he felt like it, sitting around the office for a few hours, then billing us for accomplishing nothing. He's been doing that for months. Meanwhile, the system he's supposed to be setting up is being worked on by another contractor, one who actually earns being called contractor and not some derivative derogatory sound-alike. This guy's actually halfway decent.

Anyway, cuntractor got his walking papers from our offices yesterday, with a notice that if he shows up again he'll be escorted out of the building, quite possibly from the roof.

Bravo, the boss found his spine.

Then promptly ripped it back out when dealing with the obviously planned line outage.

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In thinking on the aquarium I've decided to try something new to me and do a "natural" aquarium. Low flow, good light, good substrate, planted. The tank is a very fancy little thing, with a built-in lighting unit that holds two Power Compact 18 Watt bulbs. It was intended to be used as a micro-reef/nano-reef tank, so I may need to change those bulbs to something more appropriate color-wise. But outside of that, the only thing I'd need is a slow circulating pump just to keep the heat even in the tank.

That's more difficult to find than you would think. Seems like 100 GPH is about the bare minimum you can get in a powerhead or aquarium pump, and I'm thinking that'd be way too much stirring action in a ten gallon when all I really want is a barely noticeable flow. And no bubblers because the idea is to reduce surface agitation in the low-tech planted tank. Keep the CO₂ in the water, so the plants can make use of it.

Got the heater, got the lights, got the tank, all I need is substrate, to figure out how the water processing in the city has changed since the last tank I had and get the propper conditioner, and line up my plants. Got basic "ground cover" figured out. Just have to figure out background plants to sprout more upwards. Not exactly sure what would be a good candidate for that.

I'm hoping for a very simple water-garden I can keep up easily and only have to prune a bit here and there with either one male betta, or a few schooling fish in it. Very few. Should entertain the pets even more having lots of plants the little guys can dart in and out of, and should look nicer than a big empty glass box with a rock or two for decoration.

I guess we'll see if my green thumb extends into the water. Another of those things I've always wanted to try coming slowly into focus.

This space left blank for people to fill in rants about filters and high flow and fertilizers and CO₂ injection.

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The right-to-lifers are pushing the abortion ban back on the general ballot. It didn't pass last time, even after their fear-mongering that it puts the mother at risk every time! and other general crap. It's not gonna pass this time. But I see them pushing it on the ballot every time until, by some miracle, it scrapes by. Then they'll do everything they can to prevent it from ever getting on the ballot again.

Just like the proposed public smoking ban and tax. On the ballot every year until it passed, then it just disappeared as if it were never an issue and that barely-scraped-by passing was proof positive that people everywhere always loved the idea.

No wonder I hate politics.

Enough. Outs.