Examples of aquarium journals

[JHawlz9989]

i recently started keeping an aquarium journal. it's a PIA, but i do believe it's been worthwhile for me, and i believe i'll benefit in the long run. i just wanted to post mine and see what you guys thought on my level of detail. it's only been a few weeks, and i have a two or three month lapse in the journal, but i've been much more diligent over the last few weeks, and my husbandry has improved as a result.

would any of you care to provide your journals as an example, or just out of curiosity?

 

[Alsshon]

I prefer Excel more. I keep a log of my aquarium water chemistry, changes in my aquarium and my mainentance routines. The journal is in Finnish language, but I think you'll get the point.

 

[blakers82]

I do mine by hand because I don't want to get my pretty laptop wet.

I date every update and have symbols for Water Changes and even document additions to the tank, significant changes, etc...I haven't thought about retyping it all out. I also have an ACIII so I keep tabs on things that way too.

 

[4realestate]

Can the AC download info into a hard drive ?

 

[dixiedog]

I use a clipboard, a legal pad and a ball point pen.

 

[reeferstace]

Check this out......it's legit.

http://download.cnet.com/ReefCon-2000/3000-2130_4-10055503.html

 

[disc1]

I do handwritten too. We scientists like our notebooks. Mine is about half data log and half diary. Absolutely no effort towards being concise and absolutely everything goes in there. You never know what you're going to want to remember. It's got names and phone numbers of stores. There's even a note on one page that someone from the reef club owed me $40 for a RO unit I sold him. I grab it when I do research on something and use it to take the notes. Sometimes it turns into a wasted page, but a wasted notebook page is ALWAYS better than lost information.

The number one thing I taught students about notebooks, NEVER worry about wasting space. You can always go back and condense, but you can never go read what you didn't write down.

I've also been thinking about putting test parameters into Excel, but never really got to it.

 

[disc1]

Can the AC download info into a hard drive ?

I wrote part of a Visual Basic program to pull values out of the XML files you get on the ACIII web interface into Excel. It worked as long as I was logged into the ACIII from the computer already, but I could never figure out how to get VB to log onto the ACIII by itself so I stopped.

I could go back and write that if someone knows how to write a macro that can log onto the ACIII so the script running in Excel can download the XML files. I found a few work arounds, but no solid solutions. After that, it's just parsing the XML file and that's cake, even for a C guy like me.