Seems that I blog about my forth aquarium earlier than my third aquarium. How come?

Well, after my mini planted aquarium (which is my second one), I decided that I’m ready to start another planted aquarium at bigger scale. So there it was, I’m blogging about my “third” aquarium.

Remember my first aquarium? I have guppies, neon tetra and panda corydoras in, where I transfer them all to my matured “community” mini planted tank. So my first tank is empty now, and I was thinking of getting new fish.

Went to the nearby fish shop. Bad thing about these small fish shop is that, they don’t have the label telling the name of the fish. It’s no use also to ask the owner, as they will start giving “kampung” name to the fish, like ikan muka kuda (cichlid), ikan DBKL (pleco), ikan tulang (glass catfish) and plenty of other funny names.

I just happened to be attracted to that ikan muka kuda, and get a few of them, and place it in my first aquarium. With the help with the fish species book that I bought long time ago, I finally managed to identify the fishes that I just bought. Oh my. All of them are cichlid.

Cichlids are very aggresive, and very territorial. My small first tank wouldn’t be suitable at all to put cichlid in. I saw them quarrel a lot. This is when I decided to get another aquarium, which I will setup first before I started another planted aquarium. So I was getting this cheap aquarium and tank (without the top).

So this one becomes my third aquarium now, and the previous one that I blog (used to be third) now become forth aquarium.

Different from my community aquarium before where I can virtually mix any species of fish that is peaceful, cichlids are advised not to be mixed with other species. So people call this species tank. And here is my new cichlid tank.

Cichlids that I have are Malawi species, which naturally came from a rift lake in East Africa (Lake Malawi) that is very much alkaline, pH 7.5 to around 8.8. Good. Rocks that I put inside has helped to make the water alkaline.

And what happened to my first tank? Here how it looks now, really empty.

I have a plan already. I will turn aquarium to goldfish tank. I never had goldfish before. Been reading a little about goldfish – very sensitive fish, prone to disease, not suitable to be mixed with other species. Sounds fun. So stay tuned to see the development of this tank.

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This is really a quick one. Merdeka day is just around the corner. Went on the internet earlier to seach for a nice Merdeka flash greeting card, but to no avail. Then decided to design it my own then.

Search for flash Malaysia flag on the internet, and I end up at this URL – http://www.national-flags.com/. That’s really a cool site. It has lots of animated country flags, done using flash.

Then downloaded the Text-Osterone software from http://www.verticalmoon.com/ to do that text effect.

Arranging all together in Macromedia Flash, and this is the end result. Pretty plain as I’m not a computer artist, but this will do for my template header change this time.

View my past template headers at
http://www.mohdimran.com/_blog_header_/

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Dato’ K will be depositing his MONEY into CT-bank tonight.

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Yesterday, after signing to my blogger, there’s one link of the sidebar with the word beta in. I am really a beta junkie. I’d like to try new things, even they are still in beta. It happened to be that Blogger now has a new version Blogger in Beta.

Without further ado, I converted my blog to beta. There’s a warning, if you converted your blog to beta, you won’t be able to go back to your old blog. Hell yes. I’m ready for it.

Anyway, to convert to Blogger Beta, you need a Google account. If you are Gmail user already, it already means that you already have Google account. Nice. At last, Blogger has been integrated into Google account and become a part of what I called Google Suite ;)

After the conversion, I tried visiting my blog. Oh. It’s not accessible at the moment. Tick tock.. tick tock… I’m waiting for the confirmation email.

Yay! After 5 minutes, I received an email telling that the moving to the new Blogger is complete. Man. I can’t wait to see what new things that Blogger has in store.

Upon logging in, the Dashboard has a new look. That’s nice. At least I see something new. And when I go to the Posts Listing, it has a new look too.

Now you can see how many comments that you have for your post right from this page. You can also filter what to be listed – all posts, draft posts of published posts. Very handy indeed for me to find draft posts that I did long2 time ago, but never had chance to finish and publish it.

One major thing that I notice it, no more publishing. Yay! I believe other blogger user that constantly change the template has to go through the process of republishing the whole of the posts. This is no longer a case in Blogger Beta. Once you published you post, it’s there already. If you change something in the template, changes are applied to all the posts without the need to republish the whole blog.

One of the drawback that many find about changing the way their blog that use Blogger should looks like is the raw HTML template editing. Not many rather want to go through the learning curve of learning HTML language. Furthermore, every elements are dumped into a single file, not like Blogdrive where it has been seperated into components – header, sidebar, links etc.

Will this change in Blogger Beta? Well. I tried going to the template setting of my blog, and I’ve been given an option to upgrade if I want to customize my template.

But wait. Before I go on, let me backup my current template first, even though it says that the copy of my current template is kept automatically.

Nice. Very nice indeed. Not blogger template is made up of different elements, and you can arrange the elements just by doing drag and drop using your mouse. Just click edit if you want to edit that element.

You can also add new elements to your template. There are several 2 elements that interest – labels (now you can categorize your post using label) and blog archive (nested tree view of your post).

But the bad thing as for now is, you are bound to use the templates that have if you would like to use this kind of layouting. I tried edit the template, but the raw template editing is not available yet at the moment.

But I see a bright future about this. Later, I have a strong feeling that there will be an API where people can create custom page elements, the same as plugin concepts for those who are using Wordpress before. This is going to be really interesting.

Lastly, do you ever think of using Blogger as you diary? I do, but it’s not a good option. The fact that anyone can go and read your blog entry, I rather not to write something that is too personal in my blog.

Blogger Beta makes this possible. Now, you can assign who are allowed to read your blog. I tried making my other experimental blog (the one that I use for template experimenting, and test entry) private.

Then, I tried visiting the blog. Walla! The blog is unaccessible, and I have to login first before I can enter the blog. Sweet!!

I’m so glad that I’m using Blogger as my blog, and I’m eager to see what more Blogger has to offer its user. Blogger teaming up with Google in the past has set me in this vision to see Blogger to become a very powerful blogging platform to choose.

I’m waiting with a hopeful heart….

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Dato’ Effendi ucap tahniah kat Dato’ K, katanya “Khalid, you untung dapat pakai CITY baru. Aku pakai TIARA secondhand je.” Datuk K jawab “Pi lah jumpa Chef Wan kot – kot boleh pakai SERENA baru”

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Just watching another movie tonight. Well, just watching another free movie tonight. And it is another free ticket from the kind Mr Farihad for the preview of The Ant Bully at GSC Mid Valley.

Thousand thanks to him, and what about free admission to Shiela On 7 concert this Sunday at Bukit Jalil? Praise to him. Hehehehe…

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I’m ready for my forth aquarium (timewise and financially). Why forth aquarium when you haven’t have the third one yet? Well, this is an editted entry. There’s conflict of interest really, whether I’m going to make another planted aquarium, or go for cichlid tank (will blog about this later). Later, I decided that I’ll go for planted aquarium again, after the learning curve that I went through setting my up mini planted aquarium. Then cichlid? Forth aquarium maybe (will blog in seperate entry for this).

As usual, before I started building up the aquarium, I have to stock the necessary equipment first. It means that it is another visit to LFS. I like to visit those that I haven’t visit before, checking out the price and also stock that they have. Been to Pandan Indah last 2 weeks, and today, I went to 88 Pets Mart Sunwaymas Commercial Centre.

Operating hours and business hour. For my easy reference later.

I’m a bit impressed. 88 Pets Mart do have quite good selection of stocks on display.

And I was there for almost 1 and 1/2 hour, browsing through the things that they have there, also visited the pet section on the second floor. I’m also now thinking that I’m ready to have a cat as a pet. Having a cat as a pet is like adopting a child. You have to make sure that you have time for them. Anyway, I also browse through things that can assist you in raising cat – cat food, travelling cage, cage (in the event that I’ll be away), feeding tray, shampoo etc.

Then, went down to first floor again, and do the shopping. I will go ADA setup again this time. I’m getting 1 big bag of Africana ADA soil, driftwood, cooling fan, rocks, broken bell as ornament (for nocturnal fish hiding), and lastly, blood worm, hikari small pellets and hikari cichlid food.

Getting them paid, and at the same time, I’m filling in the form to become a member there.

Different from The Pet Safari and The Pet Family where you get 5% discount after being a member, here it will give you 1 stamp for every RM20 you spend. After you get 16 stamps (that means spending RM320), you will get RM25 voucher. After a simple calculaation – RM25 divide RM320 times 100 = 7.8%. Hey. It’s even better. It’s like you are getting 7.8% discount. But there’s a catch. You need to get 16 stamps in 6 months time.

Anyway, for the shopping alone today I get 14 stamps already. 2 more stamps to go and I will entitle for RM25 voucher. My next purchase I guess (next month).

So I guess, after next salary, I will do another big shopping, and I can then proceed with setting up my third aquarium. I can’t wait.

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It’s the second day here in Cameron Highlands already. I was having a very good sleep last night. I really enjoy the cold temperature. I wish Malaysia is this cold all year round. No fear of electricity running high from those air conditioned room. How I miss cold weather (minus rain) in UK during my 3-year degree program.

Anyway, checkout from apartment and we will visit various places today in Cameron. Our first stop is Cactus Valley. Cactus is something in my shopping list already.

This gigantic enterance greet us once we got there.

I’m so fascinated with variety of cactus that are on display here. I’m wondering where the hell that they get that much types of cactus. Also, cactus is synonym with dessert, hot, dry. And how on earth cold place like Cameron Highlands have cactus growing happily?

Walk around here a little first to the top, and took this panorama photo.

There is also a good view of Brinchang town from up here. And it’s another panorama photo taking.

After all the walk and photo snapping, the last thing to do here is to buy a few of cactus pots.

The next stop is, Boh Tea Centre. Since Cameron Highlands is very synonym with tea plantation, I guess this is a must visit place.

Ahh great. The centre is just about 200 metres away from the place where we park our cars, and they have this bush walk where you can walk between the bushes of tea plants to the tea centre.

But this has turned out to be one of the worst 200 metres of my life (and most of my other friends). It is actually 200 metres of hill climbing walk to the tea centre. Darn. Only the half way I ran out of breath already climbing those steep narrow road to the top of the hill. See the other level road? We should took that one instead.

Anyhow, we manage to reach the top at last. Sit for a while to catch back my breath. But it is really worth it. The green scenery really soothing.

It’s a good time for tea break I guess. And tea is all that they are selling here with cakes and sandwiches.

It’s time now to go. Final stop here is the Tea Shop.

Plenty of different type of tea sold here. Actually, all of these you can find them too everywhere in KL. And why bother buying? Well. It’s the feeling that counts. The idea of knowing the fresh tea leaves are picked, processed and packed here, and went to the shelf right out of the factory.

I bought a few types of flavoured tea that I haven’t taste before.

Back to KL after that. It is really a relaxing and fun 2 days in Cameron Highland. There was also a discussion on where to go for the next gathering / outing. Pangkor Island trip maybe?

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There are 2 groups of people going to Cameron Highlands this time – the Penang group, and my group from KL. The original plan was, on Saturday morning, both of the groups begins the journey, with the Penang group exiting at Simpang Pulai exit, and KL group exiting at Tapah exit, and we just meet at Cameron.

But anyway, my friend thought that it will be fun to go and drive there together. Furthermore, we never use Simpang Pulai exit before, which the road is much much better that the narrow and winding road to the Cameron is using Tapah exit. So my friend decided to go to Penang first, so here I am in Penang since yesterday.

Our journey to Cameron Highlands starts. Not having enough sleep last time, I end up sleeping most of the time during the journey, and happened to be awake for a while during the dispute that no one don’t know how to get to Cameron Highlands after Simpang Pulai exit. Well, there’s a sign board at last telling where we should be heading to.

Then I continue my sleep. Hehehe. And the next time that I awake, we are already in Cameron Highlands. Guess we better go and check in first. Staying at Villa Dahlia this time.

I’ve been longing this steamed sweet corn for so long already. You can’t this kind of sweet corn anywhere else (well, I haven’t seen it anywhere else). The corn size is big, and the taste is really sweet.

While my friends went out for the vegetables shopping for tonight’s dinner, they get me a cup. Here I am, enjoying every spoon of the corn.

I didn’t realize that so many of my friends are a good cook. All of them are so eager to cook – I guess so eager to let others try their cooking. This is good, all I have to do is just sit and wait for the dinner to be prepared.

All the vegetables have been chopped already.

And the cooking begins.

Finally, walla! A dinner feast at last.

Burrrpppp… I’m so full. But hey, isn’t it AF4 final tonight? Too bad the place where we stay doesn’t have Astro. So we end up having to go to one of the restaurant nearby with Astro and watching AF4 final.

Then, back to the apartment again, played some games, and I just fall asleep right away after that. Quite a tiring day.

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Cuti – Cuti Malaysia mood strikes again. I’m going to Cameron Highlands this weekend for a weekend break. There will be 14 of us going there. Oh my. I think this will going to be so much fun.

I will definately get those tea from the tea shop this time, which I haven’t had a chance to get those the last time I went there. Well, was planning to visit the tea factory on our descend back to KL, but when we got there, the factory already closed (closed at 4:30pm). Will try to go there earlier this time. And also, buying cactus is a must this time.

Akademi Fantasia 4 final concert? Well. I will just download that from torrent once I’m back to KL.

See you all next Monday……

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