User:Quatermass
How it started...[edit]
My name is Stuart Halliday, I'm a 45+ year old married man who works in the IT industry, trying to keep the company I work for up and running despite my Users trying the opposite! ;-)
I live in Livingston, Scotland, UK. But I'm really an Edinburgh lad at heart.
I've only been keeping Fish since Dec 2004. But I do however like to fully research any interests I have, so I did a lot of reading (my wife works in libraries!) and being a IT guy I popped into a lot of Yahoo, USENET and various web forums to gain knowledge of the hobby. I even visited the good (and bad) fish shops around Scotland.
I first got into the fish keeping via keeping 'Sea Monkeys'.
When I was a very young lad (1970s?) I used to buy American comics and in these were weird adverts for the Sea Monkeys product.
Well these were not available to me obviously in Scotland so I could but dream of what they really were.
As time went past, I often remembered those crazy adverts and when I walked into a local toy shop in 2004, there on the shelf was a Sea Monkey kit.
After hatching them out, I was very disappointed in the experience.
Of course for years I knew what they really were - Brine Shrimp. But there seemed to be little to get excited about in raising these tiny creatures. Even if they did put them in a fancy plastic 'tank'.
TRIOPS[edit]
Then I noticed a Triops packet in the local Toy Shop. I was curious as they seemed to be like Sea Monkeys, except that they grew big very fast and hey they reproduced!
Then a week later they were on the national news! Triops had been discovered in a nearby forest just 20 miles down the road!
This sparked off me finding out more about them and I got hooked on raising them and I even put up a central web site [1] as I found the Triops sites on the web were very fragmented.
So I started raising Triops in a 10 Litre and then 20L and finally into a 60 L tank that got me into keeping fish as well. I've now got a 250 Litre tank amongst others.
I've now got Triops, Fish, Shrimps, Frogs and Snails in my various tanks!
I'm a keen photographer as well and so I naturally put my pics of the Triops and fish on my web site.
Wiki[edit]
I liked the idea of the Wikipedia, providing free information to the people that anyone can edit is a very powerful tool in my opinion. Maybe more powerful than the invention of the wheel perhaps?
So I started editing the Wikipedia's fish pages and then Brian introduced himself on one of the mailing lists I was on and so I started adding pics and pages to this site.
Interests[edit]
My wife, Fish/shrimp/frog keeping, Photography, Science, Good Science Fiction television, Films, Doctor Who, Medicine, History, How things work or came into being and my four nephews. Not necessarily in that order!
