Why replace the stock fans? The bearings on the fans that come integrated into the hood are pretty lousy. Users frequently report that they start making grinding noises and fail to turn. Unfortunately my tank was no exception. The Biocubes also have a problem with condensation forming on the inside of the hood. Normally this is no problem but whenever the lid gets raised a lot of water runs down the back which isn’t good for the wiring or the carpet. I found a couple of guides showing how others had done this retrofit and I combined their approaches.

Step one: remove the hood. The Biocube’s hood has two plastic hinges which are held together by a pin. Slip a screwdriver into one end and gently pry.

The lid is off! Check out all that condensation…

Step two: remove the plastic lid and (carefully) remove the bulbs.

Step three: remove the metal covering the hood electronics.

Now here was where I was hoping to save some work. My plan was to put four new fans in the hood where previously there were only two. I’d have liked to wire them into the existing power supply and not have to run a new one – one less plug to deal with after all – but no dice. Not only is there not nearly enough amperage (my new fans draw 110 mA each and this transformer only puts out 150 total) but it’s AC instead of DC. Oh well.

New fan on the left, old fan on the right. The new ones are Sunon MagLev fans which are reputed to have much nicer bearings.

Step four: remove the old fans.

Step five, optional: hack away the airflow restricting interior fins underneath the stock fans. I did this using a Dremel with a flexible extension – there isn’t a lot of room going on in here.

Step five continued: do the same with the airflow restrictors along the back.

Step six: drill intakes and mounting holes for two fans in the back both blowing inward. This is a slightly harder modification than just replacing the stock fans but it is worth it. These two fans have basically eliminated the condensation problem. It comes at a cost: evaporation goes way way up. I’d recommend an auto-topoff if you are going to go the four-fan route.

A twelve-hole pattern drilled for the intakes of rear fans plus four for mounting. I used nylon screws so there’d be no chance of rusting over time.

All four fans mounted up.

Step seven: wiring up the fans. I used a charger from an old phone which puts out 700 mA at 5VDC. The Sunon fans are rated for 12V so running them at 5 is undervolting them rather a lot but that’s okay. Despite having good bearings they aren’t particularly quiet. I tried running them flat-out at 12V and it sounded like a jet engine was taking off in my living room. 5V seems a good compromise for air movement versus noise.

All four red fan wires tied to the positive output of the power supply, all four black wires tied to the negative output. Seal it up with some electrical tape and away we go.

And that’s it! Replace the metal electronics cover, the bulbs, and the plastic light cover and plug it all in.

Pros:

• The hood is much quieter after having replaced the stock fans.
• Condensation is a thing of the past.

Cons:

• The hood isn’t silent by a long shot…but that wasn’t really the point.
• The general temperature of the tank is lower than it was with only two fans but it’s still very warm. Eventually – like in a couple of weeks – the stock lighting needs to come out and get replaced with LEDs lest my tank come to a slow boil over the summer.

Recently my D&D group has started a second campaign in which the role of DM is shared between all the players. The PCs are employees at a detective agency which performs tasks structured to be resolvable over the course of a single evening. This way we can keep a semi-cohesive story but allow individual players to come in and out without complex-ish explanations (“Carl can’t play? Oh, um, I guess Dinkles the elf twisted his ankle. He’ll catch up.”).

This campaign seemed like the perfect opportunity to begin playing Hork again on a regular basis. I was having some trouble finding a mini figure so I decided to do some surgery.

Before: A stock figure from a D&D 4th Edition pack, “Male Goliath Barbarian.”

This guy’s got a ridiculously huge sword, odd colorations, hide pants, shirtlessness. That’s not quite right but the build of the character is close enough. An XActo knife and a bit of paint later and…

I realized belatedly that the haircut and short bold-colored pants make him look a bit like The Hulk. I don’t think it’s too bad for a first effort at modding and painting a figure myself

Part Two

After our hike through Portland we had some mediocre Indian food for dinner and checked out the very impressive Powell’s Books. The next morning we had breakfast at a Portland staple: Voodoo Doughnut. I’m a very boring man and only got a couple of cake doughnuts, but Courtney got a Voodoo Doll and an Old Dirty Bastard.

Voodoo Doll: Raised yeast doughnut filled with raspberry jelly topped with chocolate frosting and a pretzel stake

Old Dirty Bastard: Raised yeast doughnut with chocolate frosting, Oreo’s and peanut butter

Next up was a stop at Por Que No, a (very) small taqueria. Their homemade tacos and salsa were extremely tasty and we’d recommend a trip to anyone who doesn’t mind being crowded.

It got pretty cozy after a while

We went to the post office on the way out of Portland to mail ourselves home some laundry and then it was up I-5 to Seattle. We ditched the rental car at the airport and took public transit to our hotel at 9th and Pike.

Right about here we got a little lazy with the chronology of picture taking but I’ll list the highlights

In our entire trip to the Pacific Northwest we only got sushi once at I Love Sushi in Seattle…

We went to the Seattle Public Library…

Events that take place in this gallery are hard to find and have terrible support

On the fourth floor overlooking the third floor atrium

Top floor looking out over the street below

Top floor looking out over the same atrium pictured above

We flew to San Francisco where we stayed at the Hotel Triton just outside of Chinatown…

The room was small but rather cute and done up entirely with bamboo wood

Located very close to Chinatown

The hotel staff brought us champagne and chocolates for our honeymoon. The names are a result of Courtney making the reservations months before the wedding with her maiden name

We went to the Museum of Modern Art which has “Personal Values” by Rene Magritte…

On the last day of our honeymoon we ate clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl for lunch, took the rail lines to the Pacific shoreline just to have a look…

…and then flew home that afternoon.

Somewhere between San Francisco and Kansas City, probably not Kansas or Nebraska

Next up: the terrible things my terrible coworkers did while I was gone!

I left off last post right at our arrival in Port Angeles, Washington. We immediately drove off on US-101, headed slightly west and then south around the Olympic National Forest.

US-101: Pretty dang scenic!

This picture is currently my desktop wallpaper at work. Courtney made fun of me for being entranced by the crystal-clear waters.

Rollin’ top-down, y’all.

Sometime in here we stopped in Forks, WA, the home of the Twilight Saga. It was pretty much completely stupid. Every single establishment was flogging the advertisement angle so hard it was embarrassing. We stopped to pee in the city park and left as quick as we could.

We stopped mid-afternoon for a hike in some temperate rain forest at Lake Quinault.

Awww

We stayed that evening in Ocean Shores, WA, a sleepy little seaside town that was decidedly in the off-season.

The view from our seaside-ish hotel.

Our destination the next day was Portland. We went by way of, Astoria, Oregon, where we had heard about a fantastic fish-n-chips place. It’s an little old fishing boat that was parked on the corner of a gravel lot and filled bursting with fryers. They only serve what’s caught that day and for that reason may be closed at any given date. They were not closed that day

I think I drove past this at least once without realizing what I was seeing.

Step 1: go up steps. Step 2: order fish, chips, or some combination of the two. Step 3: pay monies. Step 4: go down steps and retrieve a can of soda from a cooler. Step 5: …

Oh my god step five yessssss

We continued our trek to Portland where we stayed the evening in a fine hotel called The Inn at Northrup Station.

We dug the eclectic decoration of this hotel.

This is the folded end of the toilet paper roll from the bathroom. I’m not ashamed to say that we stole this idea with the embosser we got for our wedding.

That evening turned out to be an adventure. Courtney had gotten a map of a homebrewed walking tour of Portland from a book called Oregon Townscape Walks. The maps are all hand-drawn and the directions are all in LEFT and RIGHTs and were sometimes fairly vague in terms of landmarks. Over the course of 4.6 miles we experienced:

A ridiculous change in elevation!

A backyard bamboo garden!

A forest preserve with narrow dirt paths along sheer drops!

Not pictured: wondering if we were completely lost because the map wasn’t clear about the exit from the forest into a medical center complex!

We were tired as heck when we got done but it was a lot of fun.

Here I will leave off until Part Three: What The Hell Is On That Doughnut?

If anyone out there likes webcomics and doesn’t read Achewood, or doesn’t like webcomics period, that’s fine and that’s good. If however you want to read a work of writing genius that became Time Magazine’s #1 graphic novel of 2007, you’ve got nine years of strips to catch up on. A good starting point is original storyline: The Party.

“What are you looking forward to most?”
“Vacation!”

We’d been planning the honeymoon almost as long (if not longer) than everything else and both of us desperately needed a vacation. I hadn’t had any non-family-related time off since about 2004. We spent the wedding night in a hotel by the Kansas City airport then bright and early the next morning we were on our way!

We flew into Seattle, arriving in the early afternoon. Apparently the weather had been a little iffy earlier that day but by the time we left the airport in our rental car it was sunny in the high 50s.

Heading north on the I-5 towards Canada.

This very fine day turned out to be a trend. The weather was actually amazingly cooperative most of the trip. We rented a convertible and had the top down fairly often, albeit with the heater blasting. People looked at us like we were nuts but saying “we’re on our honeymoon” excuses a good deal of peculiar behavior

Our righteous steed: a 2010 Ford Mustang. Would’ve been more fun with a stick shift but what can you do.

At the border crossing into Canada. The border guard was very nice and asked if we realized that it only gets colder as we go farther north.

We drove up to Vancouver where we stayed at the Sunset Inn and Suites for two nights. The hotel is situated in downtownish Vancouver on the West End, a location defined by wall-to-wall ethnic food restaurants. We rented bikes and rode around Stanley Park, went to the Museum of Anthropology, and generally walked around and ate plenty of Asian food.

The early morning view from our 10th floor room.

Biking around Stanley Park (All pictures and a movie from Stanley Park).

The Museum of Anthropology at University of BC Vancouver (All pictures from the MoA).

We ate Thai (Thida Thai)…

…Chinese (Han’s Wun-tun House)…

…and Japanese (Benkei Noodle House).

Two shawerma places right next to each other. We could eat here forever

We left Vancouver on the third day and took the ferry to Vancouver Island. We visited Butchart Gardens and then drove down to spend the night at Victoria.

One of many wallpaper-worthy photos of Butchart Gardens (All pictures from Butchart Gardens).

The next morning, we took the ferry out of Victoria to Port Angeles, Washington. This was quite a bit harder than leaving the country in the first place. The customs line boarding the ferry took an hour and a half, and the customs agent on the other side didn’t believe us when we said we were on our honeymoon and that we didn’t bring anything back. USA #1!

Goodbye Canada…

This bird probably didn’t get grilled about his lack of declarations. Speciesist profiling, that’s what it is.

This is a good place to take a break – this post could get enormous and impossible to load. “Honeymoon Part Two: The Americaning” coming soon!

Now this is a story all about how
My site got twist-turned upside down
So I’d like to take a minute just sit right there
I’ll tell you how I fixed this blog ’bout a situation rare

It’s been four months or more since a topic’s been raised
Getting married is how I’ve spent most of my days
Working some, gaming, spending time with my wife
Now the wedding is done so I can write about life

Then thirty thousand bots, they were hawking their sites
Started writing comments with lots of bytes
I tried one little upgrade and WordPress got frustrated
“There’s so much junk here, now your backup’s truncated!”

I cursed MySQL for its lack of transaction
But I thought for a second and calmed down a fraction
If work’s taught me anything it’s been “save data twice”
This recent SQL dump would make everything nice

I wrote some lines of script (about seven or eight)
And it cleaned out the spam not two seconds later
Re-imported the data and now I prepare
To write posts on this blog ’bout a situation rare

My last post on this subject was about a homemade battle grid. I talked about the potentially high price tag of playing D&D with all the Wizards of the Coast-made accessories and such, and it certainly hasn’t gotten any cheaper since I wrote that. Instead of a potentially vast collection of little plastic miniatures to represent foes in the game I’ve been using a large number of 1″ glass beads that I got at a Michael’s craft store for seven dollars. This works out well for straightforward enemies but it doesn’t really give the players a sense of “oh shit!” when going up against a large or otherwise interesting creature. When the group faced a young dragon, I made one out of origami. It went over very well but there were two general problems with the idea: first, it pushed my origami skills to the limit and second, there aren’t easy-to-follow origami instructions for making most other creatures (like aboleths for example).

Then Courtney got a block of Sculpey and went to town.

Why, what’s in this box?

Shiyali (Courtney’s dwarven wizard character) and all her effects – a Flaming Sphere, a Cloud of Daggers, a Pinioning Vortex, and two Rolling Thunder tiles. The grid that the figures are standing on is 1″ by 1″ squares.

Shiyali from the side, featuring her orange mouse Gerard.

Courtney hasn’t only been making figures for her character. She’s also been making some minis for some of the more interesting combat encounters that we face. We haven’t actually had the encounter that will feature the following monsters, but they’re so damn cool I can’t not blog about them

A beholder and two dimensional mauraders.

Shiyali ruins the beholder’s day by conjuring a Flaming Sphere between it and its guards.

Even though I don’t know the first thing about chili, Courtney and I do know some things about cooking in general. We adapted a loose-meat sandwich recipe from 660 Curries into a concotion that I called “Chris’s Indian Chili” (thank god it wasn’t a creative writing-off). My entry didn’t win but nearly everyone who tasted it complimented me on it. Several people asked for the recipe and at long last here it is:

Chris’s Indian Chili (serves 2)

Ingredients

• 12 oz ground beef (we used 93% lean)
• 1 28 oz can of diced tomatoes
• 1 1/2 cups chopped red onion
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 lengthwise slices of fresh ginger, about 2″ by 1″ by 1/8″, finely chopped
• 2 fresh green chilis, finely chopped (we used serrano and kept the seeds in)
• 3 tbl tomato paste
• 2 tsp garam masala
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 tsp cumin seed
• 3 tbl cilantro, chopped
• 2 tbl canola oil
• 3/4 c water
• Freshly chopped scallions for garnish

Directions

1. In a large skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Add cumin seeds and roast for 10-15 seconds. Add onion, garlic, ginger, and chiles; stir-fry for 3-5 minutes.
2. Add tomato paste, garam masala, and salt. Reduce heat to medium-low and heat, stirring occasionally, for 3-5 minutes.
3. Add ground beef and cilantro, cook 5-10 minutes.
4. Stir in water and tomatoes (with the juice from the can), cover and simmer for one hour.
5. Uncover and cook for another 30 minutes. Garnish with scallions and enjoy.

—-
Right now you may be saying to your computer in the ever-present hope that I’ll hear you: “Chris, I think a chili recipe that serves two would make for a fine dinner, but a cookoff? How much more would a person have to make?” Six times more. Six. Twelve chilis, six cans of tomatos, four and a half pounds of beef. Take my word for it this was a sight to behold.

Oh wait you don’t have to take my word for it

All of the veggies and spices that go into a whole ton of chili

This is the biggest stock pot I have and it was still too small by a little bit

So…much…meat…

[half of] the end result