14 March 2009

Simple Way to Have a Koi Pond

A few weeks back, I ran across the koi pond screensaver while my mom had a coupon for 10% off of "anything that would fit in this bag" at Office Max. I had to buy it. I've often thought that if I lived in a warm enough climate, I'd like to have a koi pond in the back yard. Here you'd either have to have a place to keep them in the winter, or heat the pond, or just replace them every summer, none of which appeals to me. The screensaver is absolutely beautiful, and allows you to take screenshots. A few of my favorites are below:


This one is actually cut down from the full image, because I particularly like this bit. The other images are full screenshots.







I have a few slight complaints. It would be nice if there were an option to choose which pond would be visible and/or how long it will be before it switches to a new pond. As is, the software is automatically set to randomly cycle through all its ponds with no user input. It would also be nice if you could specify how many and/or what kind of fish would be visible, the frequency of dragonfly appearances, and so forth. On the other hand, not being able to specify those does make it a bit more like a real koi pond. However, no real koi pond that I have ever seen has such crystal clear sparkling water! I'm not sure koi can live in that type of water. I realize it wouldn't sell very well if the water looked dingy and murky, and the images are quite beautiful, so this is more of an observation than a complaint.

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