andy

Your secondary skills are retrainable for free. You can drop and add them at will, you just lose all progress and start over from zero each time. Fishing, Cooking and First Aid are all freebies, you get all three independantly of the secondary skills. It is when you respec your character (change your talents and class skills/spells) that you have to pay gold. As a Warlock (goob job choosing Horde, by the way ) you will always be limited to cloth armor. It's only the melee and hybrid classes that get to improve their category of armor as they rise in level. Good luck, have fun and feel free to fire any questions my way.

Two gathering professions are the best moneymakers until level 40 or so. Skinning/Herbalism is a good combination. Mining/Herbalism is probably the best, but since you can only have your 'radar' set to one or the other it is probably best left alone until you are experienced enough with the zones to know from memory where the mining spawns are. At level 40, dump skinning and switch to Alchemy. Herbalism/Alchemy is probably the only combo that remains desirable all the way through endgame. Enchanting and Engineering can be fun, but are huge money sinks. Very, VERY few people make one red cent from Enchanting -- the cost of advancing it and buying recipes makes overall system profit very difficult. Engineering is fun, particularly for PvP. Leatherworking and Blacksmithing have a few nice bits, but overall you'll get better gear from drops or the Auction House. Just my experience, YMMV.

Very nice! Exactly what I was talking about! How did the FS take to the Clown hosting in them? I've been wanting to pick up a couple of Clowns but have been putting it off until my tank is mature enough for a Rose or BTA. I've read that Clowns hosting in LPS can really tick off the coral, and I don't want them hurting my (prized) Torch.

As a relative newcomer to the hobby (returning after a 20 year absence), I've really noticed wide discrepancies between various sources of information. I think we're at a transition point in the hobby; in the past couple of years, we've made some amazing advances and are coming to understand the marine systems we're trying to mimic much more fully. It is only natural that the 'old' information takes a while to decay -- in some cases, it'll live on as 'old wives tales' that we'd love to get rid of but never will be able to One of the biggest places I've noticed this old vs. new is with system requirements for many of the challenging (formerly impossible) species. Maybe the different information listed at Marine Depot and Live Aquaria are another example of this?

Heating elements built into the ceilings. Run a current through them (thermostatically controlled) and they heat up. They produce a pleasant heat, but are imprecise and offer no help at all if you're considering adding A/C

Bottles of frozen water seem to have little to no lasting effect.

Ditto. Unfortunately, my house has radiant electric heat in the ceilings so no ductwork. High-velocity heat & AC will run me like 20 grand :-(

I guess I'll have to carefully try and see. I really like the look of pink tip and green tip morphs side by side. I think I'll only put like subspecies together though.

My Priest60 is Undead, and I have a level 60 Dwarf Paladin but I don't talk about him much . I also have a stable of characters in their forties.

Sixty gallons. The exact size that makes one wish he had just sucked it up and bought a 90 to begin with (violin)

What 'rules of thumb' are people using when adding livestock to their systems? My tank has passed through it's microscopic mini-cycle (thanks to Keith's rock) and is ready for more. I've heard that corals and inverts can be added faster/more aggressively than fish since they present a much lower bioload -- any truth to that? How many/much coral would you add to your tank at a time to still be safe? How about fish? Is there a good rule of thumb, or do you just watch the NH3/NO2/NO3 readings and feel safe to add again when things settle out? I'm not looking to populate the entire tank overnight, just curious about good husbandry. Thanks!

I'm really active on the Uldum server -- Undead Priest, level 60. I'm just starting to get WoW out of my system.. after 18 months of play. The methadone really helps.

I did some sump sketch-ups with Sketch-It (or is that sketch-its with Sketch-up?). My poor brain couldn't wrap itself around the 3d user interface. I'd think I had got something just right in place, and I'd spin the 'camera' and find out it was only lined up in 2 directions -- the Z-axis had it placed somewhere between Chicago and Cleveland

I read that Euphyllia sp. are relatively aggressive -- does that agression include members of it's own species? For example, can I put two separate Torch corals right up beside each other? How about a Frogspawn and a Hammer? Do color morphs behave differently? I assume not, but you know what they say about assuming (whistle) Andy, Euphyllia aficionado

I'm sorry I missed it. I was stuck in traffic on hwy 18/22 for too many hours, trying to get the wife and kids to the coast to beat the heat -- there was a major accident (4 fatalities I was told) that closed the road for most of the day. It was pretty bad I guess, feel sorry for the poor victims. Also felt bad for the horses in their trailers heading to a rodeo just down the road. They looked really unhappy. Anyways, I'll be sure to attend the next meeting... wanna meet y'all and put faces to names to handles

My tank is downstairs in a daylight basement. I installed a dual exhaust fan my wife wisely picked up at Freddies, it is blowing warm room air out the window -- cool air is coming down the stairs from the upstairs in-window air conditioners. I'm also leaving the metal halides off for the next day or so. My SPS collection is limited to a single Monti frag that seems to be the toughtest coral in the world... it loves it so I think I'll be ok on the much lower photo period. Anyways, tank temp stayed below 81F all day which is a lot better than yesterday's high of almost 84. Didn't have to float the frozen water bottles, either. I'm feeling pretty lucky. I stopped in at Upscales this afternoon (returning from a failed trip to the coast... major MAJOR accident 40mi W of Salem closed the highway for hours, foring an about-face) and it was boiling in there. I felt compelled to rescue a nice little 2-head Hammer from the heat

I topped out at 83.7 :( Too high. I'm reducing and shifting the photo period on my MH lighting, and am freezing some small water bottles to float. I just float them in my sump, upstream from the heaters?

One nice thing about internal overflow boxes is they allow you to use Durso-style standpipes to help cut the noise.

If your camera can save in RAW mode, try that -- and use Picasa to edit and export the images to JPEG. That'll let you play with the white balance settings later in the workflow, much easier than messing with in-camera settings. Beware of auto white-balance settings on the camera, they often screw up...

Hey, very nice!

Buy a sheet or two of acrylic at home depot to practice on...

Yeah, those Zoas are fan-tastic. It took them a couple of days to get used to my lighting, but now they are used to it they're really looking great. Good thing Ahbrit isn't very observant, eh?

If my wife brought a magnifying glass I'd be crushed...

Oh, no apologies necessary at all -- spotting previously un-spotted creatures is the best part! A few nights ago, my wife and I sat in the dark with only the red lights on in the tank for about an hour just looking for new critters. Whoa, that's kind'a pathetic... my wife and I spend an hour together in the dark.. with a red light on.. and all we're doing is staring into an aquarium DOH!