My name is Giancarlo, I was born in Florida while my parents, from Italy, were working in the US. At the age of 1 I moved to Italy, then to Australia at the age of 9. There I started to keep animals, just about anything I could find I would bring home and keep. I started with a 20 gallon tank with gold fish, knew nothing about fishkeeping but somehow managed to keep the goldies alive. I use to change 100% of the water every month or so, rinse all the gravel and change all the filter media (which was carbon chips and floss in a corner filter plus an UGF). Scary ha? Well somehow it worked until a friend of my father showed me the correct way of doing things.

Then came the guppy days, my second and probably my most missed tank was an oooold square glass cookie jar with a large cork lid, I found a small round UGF to fit inside it, multi colored fluorescent gravel, colorful guppies, some basic plants and there's my first tropical tank. Luckily no heaters required over there. Worked at a wildlife reserve for close to a year between studies, I fed the babies mostly :-)

At 22 I left Australia and moved back to Italy, there I became friends with another fish hobbyist who got me more involvolved into plants. He taught me the basics of low light tanks and the popular (over there at least) open top tanks. It was a rather simple approach but one that is a lot harder to mess up and probably the easiest to start off with. Simply rich substrate, no liquid ferts, less than 2WPG and DIY CO2 (optional). From here on I was addicted to plants.

In 2000 I moved back to the US and of course couldn't live very long without fish and a couple more animals around the house. Had to learn everything from scratch again, hardly any of the products were the same, names were different and hardware was also somewhat different. After joining a few of the online groups I caught the dreaded "fast growing" bug. Up go the lights and out come the algae! OK so it's not just about adding lights... It took a little while but thanks to the online groups I learned about "the macros and the micros" which opened up a whole new world of plants to me.

That's about it for me, I still enjoy the low light tank and can only keep up with one fast growing tank at the moment. Working in the computer networking industry and hoping to one day flip things around and turn a hobby into profession (which hobby I don't know ;-). I also enjoy astronomy, astrophotography, toolmaking and fishing. Actually that list is a little longer but I don't have time anymore for some of my other hobbies.

Some of my tanks can be seen on my website: www.gpodio.com