Pek Pongpaet

This is the first episode in what I hope to be a series of short clips of yours truly messing with one of our cats Peepers and Tara. This one features Tara in one of the things I enjoy doing to her. She likes to play catch the tickling hand. She’s a bit of a biter but she doesn’t realize she bites too hard sometimes so naturally I do my best to avoid getting bitten. It’s also fun just seeing her twitching side to side. Hours of amusement.

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I’m a little behind on my blogging. I was wrapping up my old job and started a new job this week. This week’s favorite links features sites that I found useful to me and therefore hopefully to my readers as well:

• How to Easily and Inexpensively Create Eye-Popping Video Ads
• Nine Signs of an Effective Blog Post by Darren Rowse. He’s a 6-figure professional blogger. I listen to what he has to say.
• Yelp Angers Its Merchants By Deleting Their User Accounts. Just when I thought I had it bad because they were deleting my reviews. They have to work on creating a good balance between good service and good content quality.
• Picsviewr – a really user friendly Flickr slideshow generator. I have to keep an eye on these guys – they might be trouble. I’m pretty impressed with them.
• Stanford Technology Ventures – Entrepreneur Thought Leaders podcasts. I just got an iPod touch and was looking for podcasts to subscribe to and found this little gem site worth its weight in gold. As you know, I’m too cheap and lazy to actually get an MBA but I’ll settle for this sort of free stuff.
• 10 Ways to Optimize a Popular Post on Your Blog. Another great post by Darren Rowse. I will need to study this post more carefully as I did have some great posts last month that accounted for much of the traffic.

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The Hagakure, written by Tsunetomo Yamamoto in the 18th century, is thought to be one of the most authoritative documents on samurai values and code of conduct. It was secretly circulated for the next 2 hundred years until in 1906, it was published. It is said that the Japanese ruling class was greatly influenced by it and anyone looking to get a glimpse of the mind of Japanese men from businessmen to politicians should look into it. The book Bushido: The Way of the Samurai is the first English translation of the Hagakure text. The book is a quick read at less than a 100 pages not including the foot notes.

In Hakagure, Yamamoto covers deep philosophical issues such as the essence of Bushido and honor, courage and spirit to the trivial and mundane such as how to stop yawning or the samurai’s toiletries. There may be as little as 2 sentences written about each topic. Some of the stuff is probably not going to be applicable to the modern day westerner, but I was surprised to find how much of it was very applicable to me in all aspects of my life, including my personal life, my work, and of course, my martial arts.

The Hakagure starts off with a bang. The often misunderstood or misquoted first line reads:

I have found the essence of Bushido: to die!

As I began reading this, I already started forming wrong impressions on the philosophy of Yamamoto and probably wrote him off as a lunatic. Once I started getting into it and dove deeper and deeper, I began to understand what he meant. What he didn’t mean was to throw away one’s life needlessly and seek death. What I took from this was that one (in this case, a samurai) should live and act as if one were ready to die. That is to live and act with no regrets, giving it your all as if you had nothing to lose. That is the way of the samurai. This reminds me of a scene from the movie Gattaca, where Ethan Hawke’s character, a natural born unenhanced human, is swimming across the lake against his genetically modified superior younger brother. Ethan’s character manages to beat him and his brother asks him how. His reply was that he never saved anything for the trip back.

Here are some other takeaway points:

• Trust those who’ve made mistakes as opposed to those who are perfect and have yet to make mistakes. Place your trust in people who have experience.
• Nobody’s perfect, take and learn from the strong points of each person.
• On loyalty: “If you want to see the true mind of your friend, then you should get sick.”
• On spirit: “Sane men of calmly composed mind cannot accomplish a great enterprise.” You have to be a little crazy.
• On failure: “Fall seven times and get eight.”
• On changing times: “… do your best according to the requirements of the present generation.” Those who are stubbornly nostalgic cannot succeed. Likewise those who ignore the past cannot hope to learn from it.
• On judging your own abilities: you can’t. Ask others.
• On challenge and difficulties: “If the water rises, the ship rises too.” The harder the obstacle, the more you will need to rise to meet that challenge.

There are many more lessons covered in this book, but these ones were the ones that resonated with me. It’s such a small book that you should just read it as your take will be different from mine.

One thing I learned about the word “Ronin” is that it doesn’t necessarily have a negative connotation that the Hollywood movie by the same name seems to connotate. Ronin are samurai that are asked to leave their Lord’s household either for punishment or as a way for them to gain life experience by tasting the miseries of life.

Other book reviews you might enjoy

• Founders At Work Book Review
• Crossing The Chasm Book Review

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My wife got some Target coupons for $5 off $25 in her email, and we were more than excited to go do our grocery run there this weekend. We had 2 of them and being cheapskates that we were, we were going to split up at the counter to get our $10 off $50. So we shopped and more than filled our cart. When it came time to pay up at the counter, we were told that they do not accept those coupons anymore due to fraud. Both of us begrudgingly paid and left.

Now don’t get me wrong, we LOVE Target. We love their Archer Farms line of products, and we love the affordable yet stylish clothes there. Once I picked up 5 pairs of summer shorts no kidding. However, this episode left a bitter taste in our mouth. It’s a total bait and switch. How can you NOT honor an email coupon? The idea is great. Send your customers email coupons; they send it to their friends some of whom may or may not even shop at Target thus introducing them to this wonderful store. So yeah, Target loses $5, but they have so much more to gain. By back peddling on their offer, not only have they pissed off their loyal customers but also new potential customers who try Target for the first time thinking they were going to take advantage of this coupon. Our grocery run just now was more than $130. Was a $5 coupon really going to break their bank? Just when we were slowly buying more from Target and relying less on Jewel. I guess it’s back to Jewel.

Let’s talk about 2 companies that do it RIGHT. Take Bed Bath and Beyond and Linen and Things. These 2 companies REGULARLY mail 20% off paper coupons to our household. The wonderful thing about both of these companies is that they will honor the OTHER’s coupons and their own regardless of the expiration date. They know that if the customer is at the counter with merchandise in hand ready to spend their hard earned money on them, and they jip them on this little gesture, the customer can just as easily switch to the competitor the next time. So they take the long term customer service view and say we’ll do right by you even if it’s a slight hit on us because you’re here and not at my competitors.

Now I’ll still shop at Target. I just love their Archer Farm chips and granola bars too much. I think they’ve come a long way as far as positioning themselves as affordable and having good quality. However, if more episodes like this ensue, it will definitely makes us think twice.

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Shelfari.com, in their own words, is a social media site focused on books. It is an online community of readers who come together to share their passion for books. To that goal, they give you various tools with which to share your love of books such as ratings, reviews, tags, friends, groups, suggestions, etc.

Shelfari was launched in 2006 by Taste Makers Inc. In 2007, Amazon.com reportedly invested $1 million in it which explains the heavy Amazon influence on the site.

This is all good and all, but I’ve tried participating in the community and making friends – by first approaching people who had similar reading interests. This seems like a no brainer, but nobody seems to want to be my friend. Perhaps I need a new profile pic? I don’t really participate in groups and other social features so most of the “social media” stuff is lost on me. What I do use Shelfari for is their visual bookshelf. When you add books to your collection, they are added to your virtual bookshelf which looks quite wonderful.

The whole site is very interactive and visually pleasing. The bookshelf visualization apes a piece of Mac software called Delicious Library which lets you catalog your books, dvds, and cds. The interface of the website is very AJAXy. For example, when you add a book, you are presented with a drop down that lets you easily add the book to your wishlist, your reading list, or your collection, all in one click. They also have a widget that lets you put your Shelfari books in your blog. Here’s what that looks like:

If you do any reading and want to share your collection and reading habits online, you should check this out.

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