Drifter

My buddy has that same camera he used for fishing trip. It's a great little camera you're gonna love it doc. On a side yet similar note, I have about a 10 yr old Nikon point & shoot I take on fishing trips with me because I don;t want to take a chance on ruining my good Canon SLR. So I keep the little Nikon in my fishing vest pocket. Well over the weekend I was taking it out to snap a pic of a fish and I dropped the damn thing in the river. I grabbed it immediately but the whole camera was actually in the water for a good 1-2 seconds. Would you believe it never missed a beat, no problems at all (it's not a waterproof camera either). Just blew my mind I expected to see smoke coming out of it when I pushed it on lol

Never heard of a Jicama but that sounds interesting, if it's even remotely like fries I'll have to try that one.

Sucks man I know you probably feel bad for having to do that, but you gotta protect yourself so sounds like you had no other choice.

Haven't even owned it 12 hrs yet and it's already tanking shape Was in much need of cleaning. The stand had paint marks on it from from his grand kids and the tank itself was covered in dried on algae, but after some elbow grease and scrubbing it all cleaned up very nicely. Glass has zero scratches on it which is nice. The background I'm doing for this one is super thin so it does not take up much room since there's not a ton of room to start with. After the background is done I an thinking of using some spray on type foam to make some round underwater "vines/roots" that will adhere flush to the background itself then paint the vines brown to give it a realistic SA type look. Current state of tank And where I decided to put it. Since the 265g is in the adjoining room which is my office I decided to rearrange a few things so I could have this tank in my work shop area so I can enjoy this one while I work at the bench since I spend so much time in this area.

Haven't got into saltwater marine. I love the looks of a salt tank, and the fish too, but with the amount of fishing trips that I go on I would most likely have issues with water parms on some of my longer trips. As it is now I am okay with freshwater and auto feeders for trips like my annual 2 week one, but with salt I think I would have issues being gone that long and away from the tank.

Yes it's yet another tank but I can't be blamed for this one. A buddy gave it to me completely free so how could I turn that down? Obviously needs a good cleaning, but with the extra height of it (it's 2ft tall) I think it will make a good home for a nice pair of Angels. Now once I clean it I just have to find a place to put it that is not already occupied by a tank lol.

I've probably got a total of around 12-13 hours of work into this one Dave. Since I have built so many rods in the past 10 yrs I can do it in less time than most now.

I pretty much agree with the others about the shout box. It's along the same lines as the "like" button so it does prevent activity as well. Also shout boxes are actually a bit past their prime and give sites a bit of an outdated look I think.

Way to be on things Dave, nice to see ya zapped the "like" button already. I honestly think that is a good step forward IMO. I'm no site guru but I have helped run a number of successful fishing and rod building sites over the past 10 years so I'll just toss out a couple other things that I feel helps to get a site active. One thing to try is to condense the number of forums as much as possible. Reason for that is because if a potential new member comes here and looks at a whole wall of 20+ individual forums on a site and lets say there's only 5 of those forums that have new topics at a rate that is anything close to often, then that person is going to think to themselves that 75% of the site is dead most the time and they will end up not joining. So it's better to have less individual forums on a site that are active, than more forums on a site that sit for days or weeks at a time without a new post icon next to it. It just gives the "look" of a more active site to potential members is all. So if there' some forums on here that could be made sub-forums, or combined with other forums then I would suggest trying that as well. One other thing to do is rotate through the moderators each week giving the mods the job to start some new topics. Here's what I mean by that...and I can't remember whom all the mods here are so I'm just gonna pick a few fake names... Lets same your mods are Johnny, Jake, bob,and Larry. In the Mod forum set up rotation list like this... This week- Johnny, next week, Jake, 3rd week Bob fourth week Larry. When it's your week then that mod needs to dedicate a little time to searching the internet for what ever is the latest gaming news then starting up a few posts about it. Same with the next weeks mod, and so on and so on. Obviously you don;t want to start a post that is pointless or lame, but it shouldn't be that hard to find some relevant gaming news that people would like to hear about and discuss on a gaming website. And it would only take a few minutes each day for the mod who's job it was that week to start some posts. We did that on some of the sites I run and it worked very well. Then after the first year or so of doing that the sites were active enough with enough new people that we no longer had to have mods kick start things and the sites kept going on their own accord. Anyway, just a couple suggestions.

In a sense I would say it was "gone" a long time ago, wouldn't most of us agree? lol

Oh and also. That "like" button here on this site is killing participation as well if you ask me. Use to if someone posted something cool then you had to reply to their post to let them know. Which in turn got them to reply back to you and others joined in and activity went up. Now with the "like" button all you do is click "like" and that's it. No reply, no conversation, no activity level. Yet again another thing from FB that is killing sites (the like button). IMO that like button should be removed from the site if you want to try to boost activity. Just my .02

Honestly I think times just simply change and internet forums are starting to see a lack of participation all over the place. Facebook is killing a lot of forums IMO. I run a few fishing websites, and am a member of a half doz other fishing sites and I have noticed the activity level on all those sites go down by at least 50% over the past 3-4 yrs now. And I've seen a lot of the people I use to know from those sites be active on FB now rather than on the internet forums because they feel it takes less time and they can keep in touch easier that way. Personally I don't care for FB anywhere near as much as I do internet forums because I feel FB is just less personalized than forums, but I do think FB is a big part of why forums all across the internet are slowing down at the rate they seem to be, sadly.

Slideshow of pics from the weekend

Just got back about 4 hrs ago from probably one of the best fishing trips ever, just a great trip. Best friendship, great weather, awesome fish caught, you name it. Have tons of pics to resize & edit before I post but had to post this one because for 20 + yrs now I have tried to catch a 20" river brown trout on a fly, and today I finally did it, so had to post this pic from this morning! Will post more soon as I edit them, but this if from this morning (Sunday morn).

Thanks guys, and you Tommy, glad your father in law likes his rod bud.

I'll try to soon as I get some time Jay. Gonna be on the Au Sable fishing the next 3 days though starting tomorrow morning

As some of you know I run my own business building custom rods for a living. Lately I have been wanting to build just an absolutely insanely modified fly rod that would test my skills with all sorts of tricks and extras on it. Pretty much build with excess for no other reason than because I wanted too lol. So in between customer rods I've been building this fly rod. Everything on it is all hand turned and custom made, I hand made the grip with various 1/2" cork rings and blue foam accent rings (craft foam) then did 11 coats of polyurethane with each coat hand smoothed and buffed between the next coat. All the colors you see on the rod, the blue, silver, black is all wrapped thread with finish over it. used a piece of hand turned Lacewood for the reel seat, pretty much just wanted to build a show piece of a rod. So this is what I ended up with.

Escape Plan- (Stallone and Arnold) Was pretty good, I like the fact that Stallone has been doing so many movies lately that are an obvious throwback to the 80's style films.

Watchin' a pretty cool Metallica/300 vid at the moment. There's some pretty cool stuff music/movies on youtube if you search for it.

The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway is a great read and a total classic. I read it for the first time last summer and loved it. Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer is a true story look at what the movie was based on and very moving with things that were true yet not in the movie, great read. Walden by Henry David Thoreau is a good read. I'm about 60% done with that one. Good read, but be warned, it's written in old English style (1800's) and a bit hard of a read, but good.

Gotta bump this again ...as of today weight is 245lbs. That's 155lbs lost. Still working out a lot, doing curls every day with 60lbs now which is going well. Hope to get up to 70lb curls in the next year (few months) plus more miles per week with my walking/joging. Going well, better shape now at 42 than when I was 22

Yep get that a lot too, lots of people tell me that I embrace it though, it gets me the older chicks 40'ish (my age) lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OTvTv0EgIg

BTW...yours?? if so...NICE beautiful weapon man.

He is amazing man. I had never heard of hi before, but after seeing him the other day I looked him up and found numerous vids of him and what he can do. The guy is just flat out incredible. For those that have not seen him, whatch this one for example... And keep in mind, that is not an auto pistol, thats a revolver..

Been on a huge Linkin park trip lately for some reason .... . . .