My Blog

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For more information about what I'm interested in, see the Ponding pages.

New plants for the pond  15 May 2002 I ordered an Egyptian Papyrus from The Watergarden Shop along with some other supplies. Two plants arrived remarkably quickly and are now already sending up new shoots. Of course, I'm not following the instructions on planting, but if it gets as big as they claim, then I'll have to repot it. I also ordered Super Clear from them to try and clear up the murky water. I was suspicious of the bottle which said 'results within 24 hours'. However, within 24 hours the water was distinctly clearer. I don't know whether to accord credit to this stuff, or whether the filter/waterfall combination got their act together. The only failure was some floating plants that the fish promptly ate. Anyway, they are a store that exceeded my expectations. [I have no connection with them, apart from being a satisfied customer.]

Pondcam turned off for the Winter  11 Nov 2001 This weekend is the pond cleanout weekend. The camera is out of the pond, to return in the spring. It turns out that there is a small water leak as there was about a teaspoonful of water inside the housing. Happily it hadn't reached the camera module itself. This year we have too many plants to fit in the bottom of the pond, so some will have to overwinter in the basement. We are going to leave the baby fish (now up to three inches) in the top pond. This means that I need to get another pump and airstone for it. Unfortunately Tetra have stopped making the TetraLuft pump that I use for the bottom pond. Update: I got a Tetra DW96 and hooked it up, and it seems to work. I can't take the waterfall pump out as one of the valves doesn't fully close any more. I need to visit Home Depot to get more plumbing parts!

What a lot of hits!  28 Oct 2001 Somebody added a link to this page from a pond chat bulletin board. The number of hits that I got was about 10 times my daily level.

Lots of Salamanders  26 Sep 2001 I received 28 Northern Two-lined Salamanders from a friend who scooped them out of his swimming pool. We added them to the top pond and they promptly vanished. Some of them climbed out and hid under the rocks around the edge. Some of them climbed up plants. Some hid under rocks on the bottom. I guess that this is more than enough for one pond. We will see in the spring whether they return to breed!

Picture gallery working again  19 Sep 2001 It turned out that the fish gallery stopped working when the unix time rolled over to 1000000000. I was using alphabetic sorting to find the most recent image (the image names contain the unix timestamp). This doesn't work as I didn't have leading zeros on the old 999999000 numbers. I wonder how many other people have been bitten in the same way.

The Pondcam is BACK!  27 Aug 2001 I finally got around to replacing the pond cam. I'm using a small NTSC camera mounted inside the old housing. I'll update the camera construction web page over the next few days with more details. The focus doesn't appear to be quite right, and the water is rather cloudy so the image is not all that it might be. I also haven't yet added the anti-fouling circuitry. I am using a glass view port rather than the pexiglass one which was starting to cloud up.

One of the frogs is in the newspaper  14 Aug 2001 As you may recall (if you are a frequent visitor here), we evicted a number of bullfrogs earlier in the year. The recipient of one of them wrote up her experiences for the local paper -- the Framingham Tab. You can read the article here.

Code Red Worms!  3 Aug 2001 This is not really a pond issue, but I stuck up a page to monitor the progress of the Code Red worm. If you don't know, this is a computer worm that infects Microsoft IIS servers and replicates quite virulently (for the first 20 days of each month).

Pondcam repairs  3 Aug 2001 This weekend should see the pondcam reactivated. I bought a CMOS 640x480 camera that seems to work nicely, and I was also given a piece of coated glass to use as the front window. By passing a small current from the glass and another electrode, the idea is to prevent algal growth. Apparently this scheme works in the ocean, but according to the literature, nobody seems to use it in freshwater.  more...

A Salamander arrives  16 Jul 2001 OK -- the salamander arrived by car from a friend's swimming pool where it had fallen in. You can see a picture of it on the Pond life page. I stuck it in the top pond as I suspect that the big fish might eat it. We will see whether the frogs eat it anyway.

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cwop
The Citizen Weather Observer Program is a loose collection of amateur weather station operators.