TCOBaG – kNow ThiNkIng AllOwEd

We’ve been debating this for some time, and we’ve had a couple of different garden companies stop by to give us some estimates, and even though the advice I’ve received from friends who’ve had these (mostly along the line of: Don’t!! Don’t do it!! You’ll be sorry!! ) made me wonder, we ended up doing this ourselves.

Estimates from the garden place near our home were around $2000.00 (US) for the whole thing, most of that being labor, and the fee for removing the dirt they dug up.

In the end, we decided it would be a good project for the family to do, and ordered a ready-made pond from Remix, the tropical fish and pet store just down the street.

We bought the second largest (177cm x 120cm x 30cm) since the largest didn’t look like it would balance well with the flower bed already in the corner of the yard. It cost us about 48,000 yen (about US $500) and we had a fun time bringing it home sticking out the hatch of our Tiida, but no incidences and we arrived home safely (it is just under 1KM from our house to there).

We ended up getting a new spade for about $25.00 US, and that’s pretty much all of the expenses, and leaves us to take care of the labor.

Balcony 'before' view

From the balcony, tools, koi pond, Sulseob, Allen (me!), and Ahn

Okay, we’re under way, about 9 am.

Bynn starts the digging

Ahn digs this, too

One thing that wasn’t easy was measuring things and figuring out where/how to dig. The answer?

Marked off the inside measurements of the bottom with chopsticks!

Koi pond is starting to take shape

Supervising the koi pond digging, one of my strong points

Koi pond, okay, it fits. Look at all that dirt, yikes!

The boys left for swimming school, Dad (me!) got busy.

It was a lot of work shaping the hole, and though the sides were beveled there were some gaps, so…

Koi pond: filling in the extra spaces a bit.

koi pond: finally filling it with water

Koi pond: welcome to your new home! 11 small kingyo somewhere in there.

Balcony shot of the koi pond - after

Balcony shot a little closer up

I’m expecting it to settle a bit, so the sides are still a little raised. It settled just a little over night, but after a few more days I hope it will be close to level with the ground.

These final shots were taken this morning, the day after. We finished up everything by around 5 pm yesterday, so it was a fair amount of work, but it turned out to be a really great way to spend the day together. Granted, I put a bit of a burn on while Sulseob took the boys to swimming school so I could be sure we’d get finished in a day, but I let them dig, and play in the dirt along with me. They were also a big help in lifting the pond in and out when we were testing the measurements. It’s best to have help so you’re not wiping out your markers or crushing and caving in the lip of the hole by dragging the pond in and out over them.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of this kind of work (uh, PhD in Literature aside, hehheh) but any time you can work this long, this hard, and then look back and ‘see’ the results of your labor and be pleased with it, there’s a good feeling that comes with that.

Today it’s great to look out the balcony and see it, and though the photos don’t show it so well, you can see the fish swimming around in it. They’re not so big now (yet) only a few centimeters long, but I’m sure they’ve got room to grow now. They’ve also got a much better chance of surviving the marauding crows who’ve knocked of the screen covers of the ceramic bowls they were living in and snacked on their brethren in the past.

Oh, and yes, I know it’s not technically a koi pond since it’s not koi, but kingyo, but my heart still feels like it’s a koi pond, okay?

EDIT: To Byron, and anyone else wondering about the company that makes these here in Japan.

The company name is Takara, but being the wonderful marketers they are, there is no website address listed in the catalogue, only their address and phone numbers.

Here are a couple of quick photos of the pamphlet:

The first has the model we ended up going with (the A-2, 177×120)

Takara pamplet koi pond models 2

This is a shot of the back with the name/address/phone numbers of the company.

Takara pamphlet back address

For what it’s worth, we saw this, and several very similar in other garden magazines. We ordered this one from the Remix tropical fish and pet store here in Meitoku, Nagoya.

Another EDIT: Thanks to Byron, I have a pdf of that brochure so no need to upload more of the images from it. Instead, just get it here:

Takara Catalog

Last week we broke down and bought a Mac Book Pro.

After about 20 years of being a PC, hehheh, and having not bought nor used a Mac for the last several years, well, other than the ancient iMac taking up a corner of my desk in my home office and acting as a glorified jukebox, I bit the bullet and went (back) Mac.

The shopping experience was certainly something. The Apple store in downtown Nagoya has a great bunch of staff there. I was prepared to talk things out in Japanese, but was pleasantly surprised by the English abilities of the salesman I worked with.

I was also pleasantly surprised by his lack of pushiness which we see all too often in computer stores in the states. He was really helpful, and I felt quite honest about getting a machine to meet our needs.

I’m hoping to use it mostly for video and photo editing, and for doing some simple multi-track audio recording using Garage Band.

We also go the free with rebate, wireless printer, and an iPod Touch which would have been free with rebate had we not opted to go for the 32 GB version instead of the 8. I think it’s a great toy, and I’ve added some guitar apps and a math app that the boys are enjoying a lot. I didn’t get any wifi plan (don’t really need connectivity outside since I’m not outside that much really) and only use that with the wifi I have set up for my home and home office. That’s not bad though.

It is interesting to see some of my web sites on there though and see what that browser does to the layouts and designs.

Things I like:

Speed — everywhere, from bootup to opening/closing video files that are being edited, I’m really happy with that speed (2.88 mhz and 4GB of Ram)

Clean desktop – okay, it’s new, so that would/should be the case with most new machines, but also while you’re working there’s not a lot of clutter.

The boys love the iPhoto and playing with the built in effects on the video and photos. Ahn has been playing ‘on the scene reporter’ and taping videos of himself in front of the various backgrounds doing these mock ‘live reports’. Very funny, too. Some of them run for several minutes — I think his longest is in the 6 minutes plus range — but I don’t think any CNN reporters need to be  worried, yet

Things I’m getting used to:

All those new commands. After using a PC for so long, there are just so many things you take for granted, like copying folders or files to folders, opening new windows or new tabs.

Safari in general. Pretty much like Firefox as far as I can see, but haven’t surfed much with it.

The video editing software doesn’t seem to be as able to handle things like title pages or converting, but part of that is just me not knowing my way around everything yet.

Anyway, that’s where I am with it now. Hoping to get more time to play around with things during the upcoming Golden Week holiday here in Japan.

"Be Unreasonable" author, Paul Lemberg

My friend Paul Lemberg, author of the book “Be Unreasonable” (a very good read, with some really good information on getting more out of life, and your business — this coming from me, a guy who really doesn’t need to read about being unreasonable ) just told me he’s planning on taking a trip to Madrid for 3 weeks with his wife.

Paul travels a lot, and I’ve heard him speak about some of his experiences and it was very interesting and insightful.

He also told me that this time he’s going to be posting to a special blog about his travels as he goes along so we can follow along with him on the journey. Sounds like fun to me, and since Spain was the one place me and my wife didn’t visit when we were in Europe, I’m looking forward to hearing what he’s got to say about his travels there.

You can follow along at the blog located here:  www.lembergstravels.com

He’s also trying to plan a trip here to Japan early next year, so I’m hoping I’ll catch him there, and that he’ll be blogging about those travels as well.

I, like many others out there who have a number of domains (er, especially un/under-developed ones get a fair number of enqueries about them. Most of the enqueries are just junk, some are actual spam, but this one appears to be a scam for an appraisal service.

email’s like this:

Don’t know for sure what the scam is, but appears to be trying to drive folks to the first appraisal site link (fleos.com –sound too much like ‘fleece’ to anyone besides me?) which was registered in July of this year, and offers lower prices than Sedo (um, who doesn’t?

A couple of notes on checking authenticity:

1. Real buyers that represent companies don’t use gmail (well, except to forward/manage email) as their primary contact information.

2. Real buyers don’t ask for your payment options and promise to send the money before you have worked out the transfer process.

Good luck selling any domains or sites you have, but do your homework and deal with reputable buyers/sellers.

A recent discussion on an email list I love (Paul Myers’ TalkBizNews) about how email marketers lie, trick, and cheat to get you to open their emails, made me pay extra attention to a recent post from a guy I trust a lot in the Public Relations field about similar tactics in PPC advertising. While some PPC services are very, very (read: sometimes wayyyyy too strict) some, as in this example, or way too lax.

Here’s an article by PR specialist Don Crowther on what not to do to win customers’ trust, and the sale. He gives a great example, well, _great negative_ example of a current ad running on Facebook.

Bottom line? Make your ad intriguing, but be honest, and upfront. The long run, what we’re all in it for, will see better results.

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