darylh

:evil: :evil: :evil: What's with all these slanderous posts????? Cichlids are not aggressive ... neither are people who keep them. And I'll flatten anyone who says different. :evil: :evil: :evil:

Bill and Caryl, if you two can't be nice to one another I'm going to cancel your tickets altogether ... I know I put them somewhere around here .... :-?

Interesting ... I'm sure we wouldn't get away with it in Victoria ... you probably need a permit to build a bird-bath here. It would probably require a safety fence as well.

Hi Caryl, not quit a holiday maybe ... junket is the usual term used when the help goes away on a business trip with the boss. While I'm not particularly happy with the colour-scheme myself, I was concentrating on setting-up the system itself the way we wanted it, rather than the colours. Although a lot of colour changing has been involved, because the original theme had a lot of red and blue that was unreadable anyway ... and trying to get a handle on CSS as well, I've never actually applied it before. Marvelous stuff ... I might even go back and re-do all the web site stuff, it's a bit trashy because some of the original html is so old (c1996) and it has been added to in bits and pieces here and there. If the general membership gives the go-ahead for the board to continue to exist tonight (in the name of the VCS anyway, I'd really have to think about going solo) I will look around for a nice-looking theme. One thing it will not have is any white areas. I spend most of my life in front of a monitor, if there is too much white my eyes pack it in after only a few hours. Hence the determination to rid our board of white columns and even input boxes (that was hard) as it is me who will have to look at it the most. I might see if I can turn off the background graphic ... might improve it a little.

Siphoning crap from under a UG ... don't just stick a hose down the uplift and suck. Fill the siphon hose with water and stick it down the uplift (much easier if there are two uplifts) but don't let it draw water off yet. Stop air from escaping so that under the plate fills up with air. When your pump can no longer stand the strain or bubbles start to escape from some point in the gravel ... let it all go, siphon and air. Water rushes back through the gravel and stirs up all the muck ... you'll be amazed at how much more you get out of there. It's child's play with two uplifts. But if you muck it up and fill your tank with all that gunk, don't blame me ... get a gravel cleaner. PS: don't put that stuff down the drain ... the vege garden loves it ... you'll have tomatoes the size of watermelons

Hi Bill, I was just wondering about the reasoning behind the council regulations that required a fish house to be underground. This is something that I had thought about doing myself ... putting my fish house under an existing concrete slab at the front of the house. Earth is a great insulator. It puzzles me why anyone would be required to do it though. Obviously Oz (Victoria in particular) hasn't cornered the market on strange council regulations.

Hi, my name is daryl.. I have been keeping fish since I was a little kid and cichlids since 1972. Well I had Angels, Rams and Apistos before that, but I still remember the first time I saw a pair of "real" cichlids. Believe it or not, they were Rainbow Cichlids, but they were in full breeding dress (gold and velvet-black) in a fully planted tank and they were so beautiful I just had to have them -- even at the totally exhorbitant price of $25.00. The pair were probably F1 as they were much larger and more colourful than the runted, pale imitations we see today. When I rebuild my fish house, that is a fish that I will start a project with to see if we can return some of their former glory via selective breeding and lots of live food. My first fish was not a cichlid though, it was a Blackfish caught in Gardiner's Creek, Ashburton. I'll bet you thought it was a drain didn't you. No ... it used to be a healthy waterway containing Blackfish, Galaxias, some other little fish I never identified, as well as huge Golden Bell Frogs and an assortment of other herps in and around it. My interest in native fishes has extended to my making several expeditions to North Queensland, and even living there for 18 months (in the 70s), catching and shipping fish to Melbourne for a living. In 1973 I discovered the Victorian Cichlid Society and have been a committee member on and off since then in various capacities: Prez, VC, Treasurer, Editor and Librarian as well as various sub-committees and Public Officer. I have met a lot of good people via this activity, a few not-so-good too, but nothing's perfect. I seem to be meeting a lot of good people just lately ... which is great. They are not a dying race after all. My work is in IT and this is probably why the job has fallen to me to bring the club into the electronic age. Our web site has been around for years: http://cichlids.web.com and has recently been refurbished. Now we have a bulletin board which is developing a life of its own even before it is officially launched (Wednesday, 6 August, 2002 -- if sanctioned by the members at the general meeting on that date): http://pub37.ezboard.com/bvictoriancichlidsociety That's where I started meeting the latest batch of the aforementioned good guys ... some local, some from the other side of the Tasman. daryl..