The Learning Performance

I made east corner of my house to be the formal dinner room. It was a great idea at the design stage. But as most of the stories of joe & public go, the execution part is the problem. We've ended out leaving the space empty as it is. However, our kids and visiting kids love the area. Partly because it opens out to the patio and garden beyond. They have unimpeded space to run and play.

The only problem, and may it is only in my mind, is that, it remains "empty" and dark most of time. No good for chi!. So, I decided, after much struggle and musing over, to setup a fish aquarium there.

It wasn't a spur of the moment decision. My office is in Bandar Puteri, (Puchong, Selangor, Malaysia). The Chinese hawker store I do my lunches and occasional breakfast each day has an aquarium shop couple of doors before it. when I walked past the aquarium shop, invariably would stop and look at the fish displays. The fishes seemed to beckon me each time, cried out and ask me to take them home! So, one day, I just gave in to the calls and temptation.

Actually, the deciding factor was the price. It goes to sure that as in business, you need:
- Strategic location
- Advertisement/placement of your products
- Customer service mindset (imagine the shop owner has been rude to me even once, would I have bought?)
- Pricing
- Ease of doing business. In this case, the shop offer credit card payment option.

The fishes I got are called "parrot" fish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_parrot_cichlid), or "feng shui" fish in Chinese (see above). Under the advice of the shop, I bought 38 fish (good omen in Chinese, again). After couple of days, the fish started dying, and by the end of first week, half of them was gone. Retrospectively, we reckoned is the water quality problem (the installer directly piped water in from the main water inlet). Imagine that, the water quality in Malaysia is so low to the extend that fishes can't even survive in it! After a thorough cleansing of the fish tank and all things in it, we used the filtered water. Now the fish live happily ever after.

Oh, the kids love it. We setup a roster to feed the fish and it (roster) is following diligently.