You can see in the above picture the three main groupings of plants.

What I did was this:

1. Untie the lead (?) wire keeping the plant stems together at the bottom;
2. Sort the plant stems according to height, and then halve the tallest ones, taking care not to cut away new roots. These are generally easy to identify as pale white strands which protrude from joints in the plant stems;
3. I then removed any leaves which appeared to be dead or dying (easily identified by their lack of colour), and removed any leaves (whether dead or new) near the bottom of the plant; any leaves buried would only burden the plant as they contribute nothing toward photosynthesis;
4. Re-group the new plant cuttings with 2-3 stems per group, and replant, taking care to ensure the roots were covered by the substrate

So, this is what my tank looks like now:

As you can see, there are now plants all across the tank horizontally. Until they grow and thicken the coverage, there is still not a lot of places to hide for my rasboras, so they will continue to hide at the back under the filter until I can provide them some more places to hide. I have read that the more places fish have to hide, the more likely they are to come out, as they know a safe place is not far away.

I will hopefully soon aquire some drift wood and river rocks to put in the tank. I’ll have to do some ‘research’ (looking at other peoples’ established tanks) to get a feel for tank layouts that not only look nice but also provide plenty of areas for the fish to enjoy.

The hardest part of setting up this fish tank has so far been my lack of patience. Most other personal projects that I work on only happen at the speed I can complete them or at the speed of my computer – this fish tank, however, requires I wait for mother nature (helped along in some respects) to do her thing. Hopefully I will learn to be patient! I will have to, or I risk wasting my time, and money, and worst of all, I risk killing my fish!

So far so good, however.

As you can see, my level of skill hasn’t increased at all. I’m still using the same elements I learnt yesterday, but I’ve combined them into some photographs to make… something. I’ll let you be the judge.

Carly’s photos:

My photos:

Unfortunately for you all, my creativeness is somewhat limited. However, Carly’s isn’t. She’s quite a good artist (although she doesn’t readily admit that); her house, and her grandparents houses who live close by, are all filled with her various paintings. The problem Carly has is that she doesn’t know how to use the GIMP. I don’t really know either, but I do know how to use Google. So, through a crazy communication and information transportation and transformation system that resembles a line of firefighters trying to extinguish the Great Fire of London with a line of water buckets, Carly’s slowly learning the ins and outs of the GIMP.

I haven’t created anything worth posting, though I did think that my blue fire was rather cool. Oh, and I love the posturize tool.

An excerpt:

Daniel_K:

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Phil O’Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

Forum Moderator
Creative Labs

Essentially, Creative has a bad history of customer support. Their driver packs typically provide less features than are advertised. Whenever a new operating system comes along (or in my case, even a new service pack for an existing operating system), Creative throw their hands in the air and shout “no!” — they refuse to support older products on new operating systems. At all.

Some of you might say, “fair enough” — but that’s not entirely the issue here. A forum member, Daniel_K, was packaging and releasing — for free — to the public updated driver packs that as I understand it were created using chopped-up existing driver packs. This was all fine and dandy until of course Creative stepped in and instructed Daniel_K to discontinue this activity, as apparently it was a breach of Creative’s copyrights.

It’s absolutely ridiculous; but you don’t need me to tell you that. You can read the thread here.