Month: October 2012

In the tank: Notopterus Notopterus, Oxyeleotris Marmoratus, and Hypostomus Plecostomus

Max and Mina have interesting fish in their aquarium (a real one, not the ghettoquarium) – besides Pleco, the armored catfish from South America (algae eater Hypostomus plecostomus), who came with the tank from my in-laws, I decided to only stock native fish.

The first inhabitants were 5 marbled sand gobies (Oxyeleotris marmoratus) that the nanny brought from her bi-annual fish pond draining. These are actually one of the most farmed fish in SE Asia and are good eating, but I requested them specifically because I’ve seen how hardy they are – before we had an aquarium, the nanny brought a goby (local name: pla boo) that escaped from its bucket and lay on our tile floor overnight and survived. I now know that was possible because the marble goby oxyeleotris marmoratus activates hepatic glutamine synthetase and detoxifies ammonia to glutamine during air exposure (thank you internet and Singaporean fish nerds)

The second inhabitant was a bronze featherback (Notopterus notopterus) that the nanny’s husband caught in the pond across the street from our house, perhaps nine inches long. Watching a featherback swim, with its long underfin undulating, is like watching a dinosaur – almost scary on a primal level.

Unfortunately, this fish was kind of an asshole and would constantly try and start shit with the other fish in the tank. The thing is, it’s mouth is small and doesn’t have teeth, so it can’t really do any damage, it would just hone in on one of the other fish and peck at it for a while. Pleco, in particular, hated this guy. They would have these long, drawn-out fights with no conclusion because neither had the right kind of mouth to do damage with – I just recently read that Plecos can attach themselves to larger fish, but it never happened with mine AFAIK. In the end, I decided to give the other fish a break and threw the featherback back into the pond after snapping some photos.

C. Buddha’s Great Android Experiment

After clearing my calendar for our October holidays, the extra work I was planning to do fell through. I’ve spent the extra time planning for a possible simian uprising, playing with Max and Mina every day, and creating an Android application. I mostly did it to investigate the process for publishing an app on Google Play, for future work reference. However, it would be extremely cool if you would go check out the app and inflate the ratings and press Like buttons, etc., for me, since I’m an attention whore. Thank you.

Link: C. Buddha’s Blog Reader

This app is a dedicated blog reader for my blog. You install it on an Android device and when you run it, it loads my blog’s feed and lets you see new posts. If you want to comment on a post, you use the link provided at the bottom of each post to jump to my actual blog via your internet browser.

Note: There are ads in the app. They do not pay me, they pay the developer of the site I used to create the app. You cannot remove them. Then again, this is kind of a useless app, so who cares? I may eventually generate an iPod/Pad/Phone version of the app that will be identically useless, but it will probably tell you how to get somewhere more accurately than iOS Maps.

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