16Nov Florida Real Estate and Family Law Attorney
Real Estate Law
Dania Fernandez has dedicated much of her time to helping clients receive affordable, legal help while trying to help homeowners keep their house. She has helped and guided many clients with mortgage modifications, short sale negotiations and foreclosure defense. She has also represented clients involved in contract disputes and has been able to get her client’s deposits back and other matters resolved successfully.
Dania Fernandez’s expertise in the area of Real Estate Law includes homeowner’s rights, foreclosure defense, mortgage fraud, residential and commercial closing (simple and complex transactions), condominium law, condominium conversions, contract disputes.
Family Law
Your future and that of your children is important. If you are going through a separation from your spouse, or are considering a divorce, Dania Fernandez can help you devise and follow the best course of action to obtain rightful results while minimizing the emotional strain you and your children may be going through. Ms. Fernandez is very knowledgeable of the Florida Family laws, and is ready to put her many years of experience to serve you.
Ms. Fernandez handles divorce, child custody disputes, property distribution, spousal support/alimony, child support, prenuptial agreements, visitation and divorce mediation. She is an advocate for mediation and has a highly qualified Family Law Mediator available.
For more information please visit: http://www.floridalawattorney.com
07Nov 7 Business Tips for Tough Times
- During the Great Deppression, while most businesses perished, many actually rose to become great powers after the storm was over. Those who did, did so while getting better, by going out and trying to sell their better services to the public, by being proactive. They did not ask, what can customers do for us in these tough times? Rather, they thought “how can we make it better for our customers so that in these tough times they prefer us over everyone else?”
Think & brainstorm how you can provide an even better product or service than what you have been providing so far. If you own a Cleaning Service, think of ways how you can clean better, faster, greener. Don’t cut corners, clean them! Your customers will recognize you are worth the money you charge and will happily recommend you to their friends and family.
- Do more than what you are expected to do. I am not a fan of discounts, what discounts do is educate your customers that first, your business can take charging less; and second, it’s okay to wait until the next discount comes around. Instead, charge a fair price and do more than what’s expected of you in the deal. Throw in a bonus for good measure. For you, this bonus might represent a negligible cost, but the value you add is much greater, and your customers will appreciate it. If you sell vitamins, give the customer a mini/travel-size vitamins jar for free. If you charge by the hour, work 65 or 70 minutes in your project or case and bill 1 hour, and make sure to let your client know the extra time devoted to her.
- If you have a website, leave links to your site at every place you can do so for free. Post useful comments in blogs or forums with a small blurb about you in the bottom if possible. Don’t make it a promotional pitch, people will tune that out and possibly even blacklist you if you come out too strong. You want to be known for the good opinions, recommendations or suggestions you share and eventually become an authority in your field not a nuisance.
- List your business and website in the new local portals that have sprung around by the numbers. Most of them are free. Be sure to include relevant keywords in the title of your listing, for example: “Miami Roofing Distinguished Contracting Group”. Some of the most popular local portals are the following:
- 411 DA
- ALK -CoPilot
- AOL
- Ask
- AssistGuide
- CitySearch
- Collarity
- DENSO Auto Nav.
- Dex
- Disney
- GetFave
- Go2
- IBegin
- Idearc
- InfoSpace
- InsiderPages
- JVC GPS
- kgb_USA/infonxx
- Kudzu
- LiveDeal
- Localeze
- Lowrance/Navico
- LSSI - Volt
- Menu Network
- Merchant Circle
- Mojo Pages
- Onstar
- Open List
- Wuebecor/Canoe.ca
- Search Bug
- Spock
- Super Pages
- TeleAtlas
- TeleMap
- Tellme
- Topix
- True Local
- V-Enable
- viaMichelin
- Vindigo/Zingy
- Windows Live
- Yahoo Local
- Google Local
- Yellow Book
- Yellow Pages
- Yellow Bot
- Yellow Page City
- YellowPagesInc
- Yelp
- YP
- Zenrin
- Attend networking events. Check out your local chamber of commerce, business association, alumni association, any place where there may be professionals that gather together in an effort to grow and promote their businesses. This may take some time and commitment on your part, but eventually, it will pay big dividends. One particularly fruitful networking organization for us has been BNI, Business Network International. BNI’s format is very structured and aimed specifically at increasing members’ businesses by referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. Go to www.bni.com, find a local chapter and go for a visit.
- Business cards & flyers. Don’t underestimate their power. They are inexpensive and easy to carry around. Always have a bundle of them with you. Leave them at the supermarket, at your dentist’s office, the pizza parlor, the Chinese take-out, in bulletin boards … anywhere where there is pedestrian traffic or where people might have to sit and wait. When you’re stuck waiting you will read what’s around you, and often more than once each piece of literature. Make it a habit to never leave your home or office without them, and to always leave a stack of them in a public place. Think of how many more places people might get the chance to learn about you and your business if you do this every time you go out.
- Nothing lasts forever, and tough times are not the exception. Brighter times will come and if you have done your very best for each and everyone of your customers, you will come out ahead. History has shown us that recessions and tough times always come about in cycles. Don’t think about how bad things are, think about how good and how much better you are getting, how you are finding new & better ways to do your business. Get a vision of you succeeding and don’t let go off that vision. One of the best business tips for tough times I once read is this: “Remember, you will succeed in the same proportion of the things that you do for others that you are not expected to do”. It makes sense. If you do only what’s already expected in the transaction how can you stand out?
06Nov Free things you can do to increase traffic to your website
Everyone is an expert at something and if you have your own business, you are definitely an expert in your area. Chances are you have a great deal of tips, insights, or recommendations you can share with the public. We’ve put together a ‘flowgram’ (a nice way to do presentations with images and sound) with some tips on how to effectively promote yourself or your business on the Internet for free. They will not only give you lots more exposure, but because you get to leave links to your own site, your rankings with the search engines will also increase, helping your site during search time.
If you can’t see the flowgram above, please follow this link http://www.flowgram.com/fg/ybdpkbdgurxtqj/
27Oct Robots and sensors to help elderly stay independent
12:42 PM CDT on Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Someday soon, older adults may not need to move into nursing homes because they’ll have a household of technological wonders to keep an eye on them when they become frail.
UTA professor Fillia Makedon displays some of the equipment as Kevin Xu wears an Motion Capture suit that digitally captures human motion as they do research at the Human-Centered Computing Labratory at UTA. The research they are doing will help build and develop devices that will help elderly people live independently.
Like smart pets that never require feeding, robots will scoot from room to room to wake the homeowners in the morning, remind them to eat and send for help if someone falls.
Sensors embedded throughout the seniors’ homes will detect when the residents have sleepless nights or forget to take their medication. Web-based computer software will notify caregivers.
“This is the future of aging,” said Fillia Makedon, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. “Technology will let people grow old at home.”
With support from the National Science Foundation and others, Dr. Makedon has created the Heracleia Human-Centered Computing Laboratory at UTA, where she, other faculty members and their students are designing technology that will allow tomorrow’s seniors to remain independent longer than previous generations.
The research facility, and a handful of similar labs across the country, will be the springboard for what experts predict will be an exploding assistive technology industry within a decade.
The UTA lab houses a make-believe one-bedroom apartment equipped with high-tech cameras, motion sensors and robots, and surrounded by computer stations.
Professors and students measure any movement within the furnished apartment and feed the data into computers that will alert them to any measurement outside a normal range.
Once the technology is perfected, caregivers will be able to sign on to a secure Web site and check how well a senior is recovering from surgery or responding to a new prescription, Dr. Makedon said.
It will also act as an early warning system for caregivers, she said. An unexplained change in someone’s gait, for example, might signal a higher risk of falling and the need for a walker.
“The goal is to create a safer environment without unnecessarily invading someone’s privacy,” Dr. Makedon said. “Caregivers will turn on the cameras only if they suspect something is wrong.”
Besides advancing basic research in the field, the lab is introducing students to the everyday problems of old age and challenging them to find technology-based solutions, she said.
Many experts hope that assistive technology will help ease the strain the aging population will place on the nation’s long-term care system.
There aren’t enough trained caregivers or facilities to accommodate the expected doubling of older adults over the next 25 years, said Mary Jane Koren, an assistant vice president at the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that studies health care issues.
And Medicaid, the federal-state program that pays for most long-term care after people deplete their personal resources, won’t be able to cover boomers’ costs without some form of relief, she said.
“Assistive technology will hold down long-term care costs, lighten the burden on caregivers and let the elderly stay at home, which is where most prefer to grow old,” Dr. Koren said.
Fears that seniors will be wary of such technology are unfounded, experts say. The AARP Foundation has found that nine of 10 older adults will agree to remote monitoring if it keeps them independent.
“We’re on the cusp of another electronics revolution,” said Anne Tumlinson, a senior adviser for Avalere Health, a health care consulting firm. “Older adults will soon rely on assistive technology as much as cellphones.”
A few remote monitoring systems and medication dispensers have already made it out of the research lab and into the marketplace. But experts expect a surge of devices in five to 10 years.
In fact, the nascent assistive technology industry is planning a coming-out party in January at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the world’s largest consumer technology trade show.
One exhibit will be “a home of the future” sponsored by the Center for Aging Services Technologies, a coalition of more than 400 technology companies, research universities and government officials.
“We’ll show people what’s already available and what other cool things are on their way,” said coalition spokeswoman Lauren Shaham.
The biggest barrier to these products making the leap from university and corporate labs to seniors’ residences will be cost, she predicted, since government programs and private insurers typically don’t cover them.
Industry officials are pressing Congress to bring together leaders from business, government and health care to figure out how to make assistive technology more affordable and available.
“This technology will require an initial outlay, but it will produce long-term savings,” Dr. Koren said. “Caring for someone at home costs far less than in an assisted living or nursing facility.”
Still, UTA’s Dr. Makedon said, the greatest benefit of assistive technology will be peace of mind for seniors and caregivers. “It’ll create a safer environment for the frail, so families needn’t worry as much.”
The professor has only to think of her own mother to understand the real-life implications of her work. The 87-year-old woman has fallen twice, and Dr. Makedon is afraid the next accident will be more serious.
“This research is more than an academic exercise.”
25Oct Google Bares Android’s Soul
As promised, search engine giant Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) 
has released the source code for its Android platform — the open source 
technology that Google hopes will be adopted by mobile application developers, phone makers and carriers alike.
The move comes just a day before the first Android-powered smartphone — the G1 — is set to hit U.S. stores. The G1 is available only through T-Mobile .
Google first announced its decision to make the Android source code public in November 2007, as part of a larger open source computing and software initiative driven by the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.
The Android project is part of Google’s strategy to dominate the nascent market for mobile search and advertising .
Movement Toward Open Source
The trend toward open source application development is evident in numerous segments of the computing and software industry.
“In the last five years, Google has witnessed firsthand through social networking sites that the applications development community at large is stronger than any collective of corporate programmers,” Colin Gillis, an equity analyst with Canaccord Adams, told LinuxInsider. “The real potential will be when the developer community gets their hands on the [Android] source code. We want to see what the community does with a powerful code base like this.”
In many ways, Google’s strategy is cut from the same cloth as Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone App Store strategy. While Apple hasn’t made any of its source code public, it has invited thousands of software developers to create applications for the iPhone. Today, there are thousands of such applications available for download — some free, some not — at the iPhone App Store.
“When you open up your operating system to other developers, you never know where good ideas are going to come from,” Steve Weinstein, an equity analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, told LinuxInsider. “Apple’s iPhone App store is great. Time will tell if Google will be as successful.”
All About Search
Despite its forays into the mobile industry, Google remains, at its core, an Internet search company. The Android operating system is just one component of the company’s plan to own the small but growing mobile search and advertising markets.
“Google wants a dominant position in mobile search,” Canaccord’s Gillis said. “It all goes back to that. Google has to keep driving more search volumes.”
The best way to do that is to appeal to a wide range of applications developers who can create compelling services that leverage Google’s commanding presence in the search sector.
“Google has to get Android adopted by developers and the major carriers so it has features that other phones don’t,” he said. “That’s the key behind this initiative.”
The G1
For Android to be successful, however, it will need to be available on more than one smartphone model.
“You’ll need more than just the G1,” Gillis said.
Today, the most dominant mobile operating system in the market is Symbian , followed by Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows Mobile and then the iPhone platform, he said.
Reviews of the G1 thus far have been mixed.
“In terms of its styling and design, G1 does not break new ground,” wrote Wired blogger Priya Ganapati. “It is thicker and heavier than the Apple’s iPhone and lacks some of the iPhone’s features, including video playback. Instead of standard headphone and USB ports, it has a proprietary combination port.”
Though Ganapati considered it a “bit of a letdown,” PC Magazine blogger Sascha Segan called the G1 “an initial solid effort” and gave it three and a half stars out of five.
“It’s missing a bunch of key features right now — like a decent media player and support for corporate e-mail, for instance. But the G1, manufactured by HTC, is a quality phone with few bugs, and given the open nature of Android, I’m confident that more features are on the way.”
25Oct Configuring storage in FreeNAS
By Gary Sims
The essence of the FreeNAS server is to provide storage that is easily accessible from the network. To this end, it is important to understand how FreeNAS handles hard disks and how they can be configured and used to provide the best and most reliable storage for your network.
This article is excerpted from the newly published book Learning FreeNAS.
Adding storage to the FreeNAS server is done in four steps:
- The FreeNAS server is “told” about a physical hard disk.
- This disk is formatted.
- The resulting storage space is mounted and made available internally.
- The mounted storage space is made available on the network via services like CIFS and NFS.
Step one, telling the FreeNAS server about the disks at its disposal, is handled in Disks: Management. On opening this page, you will see a list of disks that are already configured. To add a disk, click the add circle and you will be taken to the Disks: Management: Disk: Add page. Use the Disk field to select which disk you want to add to the FreeNAS configuration.
If you are using a hardware RAID controller, for the disks attached it, don’t use the standard device names for each disk. Instead, these RAID controllers present a virtual disk for each RAID set, using a device named after the RAID controller driver. For example, the amr driver (which supports controllers by MegaRAID and some Dell and Intel cards) presents its virtual disks as /dev/amrd*. Also, some RAID cards present their hard drives as /dev/da*devices.
Once you have selected the right disk from the drop down box, you can normally just go ahead and click Add. However, there are some parameters that you can tweak, and the field Preformatted FS needs to be set correctly if the disk is already formatted and has data on it. Apart from the native UFS format of the FreeBSD, FreeNAS supports FAT32, NTFS, and ext2.
Once you have selected the disk from the drop-down menu and set any of the optional parameters, you can click the Add button, then apply the changes. The Disks: Management page should now show your disk(s) in a table, including information about the disk name, size, and filesystem.
Formatting a newly added disk
Once a disk has been added to the FreeNAS server, it needs to be formatted. Go to the Disks: Format page and select which disk you wish to format. Choose the filesystem you want to use. The default will be UFS; unless you specifically need FAT32 or ext2, it is best to format the disk with UFS. UFS is the NATIVE file format for FreeBSD, the underlying OS of FreeNAS. Attempting to use other file formats can result in unpredictable results, file corruption, and loss of data.
You can also enter an optional volume label for the disk, but it isn’t very useful, as it isn’t used in the FreeNAS Web interface. Leave the minimum free space percentage at its default 8%, as lowering the threshold can adversely affect performance and auto-defragmentation. A final option allows you to tweak the way the disk is formatted, specifically to not replace the master boot record (MBR) with a new one during the format process. Normally, this shouldn’t be needed, but some hardware RAID cards store information in the MBR. If you find that the drive doesn’t format correctly and you are using a hardware RAID card, you can try formatting the disk with the option enabled.
Once you click Format Disk, you will asked if you are sure that you wish to format the disk. Click OK to proceed, then look for the Done! comment and the long list of superblock numbers before it. If you see that, everything is OK. If the formatting failed for some reason you will see an error message. For example, if spaces aren’t permitted in the volume label, trying to format a disk like this will result in the last lines of the output reading:
newfs: bad volume label. Valid characters are alphanumerics. Done!
Once you have formatted the disk, you need to mount it internally in the FreeNAS server. Go to Disks: Mount Point and click the add circle. There are several important fields to fill in here: Type, Disk, Partition, File System, and Name.
- Type: Here, you can select if you want to mount a disk or an ISO file. For new physical disks, you need to select disk. The ISO option is useful if you have an .isofile and you wish to make its contents available on your network.
- Disk: Select the disk which you wish to mount. This will be the same disk as you used in Disks: Management and Disks: Format.
- Partition: Under FreeNAS, if you install the server software on a hard disk, then two partitions are created, the first for the operating system software and the second for data. When mounting disks, you need to know which partitions you wish to mount.
By default, FreeNAS doesn’t use the legacy method to partition disks, which involved storing the partition data in the MBR; instead it used the GUID Partition Table (GPT), which is part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) standard proposed by Intel as a replacement for the soon-to-be-obsolescent PC BIOS. If you have just formatted this disk using FreeNAS, select EFI GPT here. If your disk has previous data on it, select which partition the data is on. If you have installed FreeNAS on a disk and you want to use the rest of the disk for data, select 2. - File System: For disks that have been formatted using FreeNAS, select UFS. If you have chosen to use another filesystem format or the disk already had data on it, select the appropriate file system type (FAT, NTFS, or ext2).
- Name: Each mounted disk needs a name to distinguish it from other disks. It does seem possible to use spaces in the name but for safety I recommend using a simple single-word mount point name. The name specified will be used to mount the disk under the /mnt directory on the FreeNAS server, so if, for example, we used store2, then the disk will be mounted on /mnt/store2 and that would be the name used to share the disk on the network using CIFS.
- Description: You can fill in an optional description for this mount point.
- Read only: Tick this to mount the file system as read-only, and even the Administrator account (superuser/root) may not write it.
Once you have filled in all the data, click the Add button. You will be shown a table with a list of the mounted drives on the FreeNAS server. Their status will be listed as Configuring. Click Apply changes. Once the changes have been applied, the newly displayed table should include the new mount point with the status of OK.
Gary Sims has a degree in Business Information Systems from a British university. He worked for 10 years as a software engineer and is now a freelance Linux consultant and writer.
20Oct Robots and Sensors to Help Elderly Stay Independent
Robots and Sensors to Help Elderly Stay Independent
Dallas Morning News (10/13/08) Moos, Bob
University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) professor Fillia Makedon says technology will enable people to grow old at home. Supported by the National Science Foundation and others, Makedon has created the Hercleia Human-Centered Computing Laboratory at UTA, where she and other faculty members and students are designing technology that will enable seniors to remain independent longer than previously possible. The research facility, and several similar labs across the country, will help launch what experts predict will be an exploding assistive technology industry within a decade. The UTA lab hosts a one-bedroom apartment equipped with high-tech cameras, motion sensors, and robots to measure any movement within the furnished apartment and relay data to computers that search for abnormalities. Once the technology has been perfected and deployed, caregivers will be able to sign on to a secure Web site and check how a senior is recovering from surgery or responding to a new prescription, for example. The technology will also act as an early warning system for caregivers, Makedon says, alerting them to an unexplained change in someone’s gait, for example, which might indicate a higher risk of falling and a need for a walker. Cost will be the biggest barrier to getting such technology out of labs and into homes, says the Center for Aging Services Technologies’ Lauren Shaham, as government programs and private insurers generally do not cover such preventative technology.
View Full Article
19Oct Major Web Directories
This is a list of Major Web Directories and reviewed web guides. Web Directories
Business.com charges a $299 annual listing fee. Business.com is a purchase more for direct traffic than link popularity.
DMOZ - also known as the Open Directory Project - provides free listings, but it may take a while to get your site listed.
Gimpsy verb based directory which charges a one time $40 fee or also list your site free if you are willing to wait 21 days.
GoGuides one time $40 fee or provides free listings for editors.
JoeANT one time $40 fee or provides free listings for editors (it is quick and easy to become an editor.)
Lycos Directory European based directory.
Skaffe one time $40 fee or provides free listings to editors. Originally Built from GoGuides core data.
Uncover the Net - Newer directory which has more link popularity than all but a couple directories on this list. My friend Shawn has done a fantastic job promoting Uncover the Net. $39 fee. Highly recommended
Web Beacon one time $40 fee or provides free listings to editors. Originally Built from GoGuides core data.
Wow Directory - Bruce Stone’s directory. Offers free inclusion, paid inclusion, and sponsorship opportunities. Highly recommended
Yahoo $299 annual fee or free for non commercial websites.
19Oct Bob Mutch recently rated 40 top directories
Bob Mutch recently rated 40 top directories based on their age, how many edu and gov links they have and whether or not they are listed in DMOZ and Yahoo!. I would contest that WhatUSeek isn’t a real directory, ISEDB is a directory of search engines and directories, and that Vlib.org should be counted as a directory, but other than those minor points this is a pretty cool study.
| No | URL | EDU | GOV | Age |
| 1 | www.dmoz.org | 128,000 | 761 | 1999 |
| 2 | dir.yahoo.com | 111,000 | 2,060 | 1995 |
| 3 | www.lii.org | 10,400 | 110 | 1998 |
| 4 | www.business.com | 2,420 | 73 | 1998 |
| 5 | sbd.bcentral.com | 955 | 23 | 1999 |
| 6 | www.whatuseek.com | 273 | 2 | 1996 |
| 7 | www.cannylink.com | 204 | 1 | 1997 |
| 8 | www.123world.com | 123 | 2 | 1999 |
| 9 | www.americasbest.com | 99 | 13 | 1998 |
| 10 | www.joeant.com | 106 | 1 | 2000 |
| 11 | www.chiff.com | 105 | 1 | 1998 |
| 12 | www.mavicanet.com | 64 | 1 | 1999 |
| 13 | www.botw.org | 50 | 1 | 1996 |
| 14 | www.elib.org | 43 | 0 | 2003 |
| 15 | www.isedb.com | 33 | 0 | 2002 |
| 16 | www.rlrouse.com | 27 | 0 | 2002 |
| 17 | www.gimpsy.com | 23 | 0 | 2001 |
| 18 | www.goguides.org | 22 | 0 | 2001 |
| 19 | www.uncoverthenet.com | 18 | 2 | 2004 |
| 20 | www.qango.com | 19 | 1 | 1998 |
19Oct Flush the flash intros and entirely flash-based websites!
True, flash animations can be beautiful to look at, they are edgy, trendy and in general plain cool. Unfortunately, the search engines like Google or Yahoo cannot see any of it. It is not even that they may take too long to load and the search engine’s crawler doesn’t want to wait and leaves, though this too is already a good reason not to have them. It is that crawlers cannot read the movement or action at all. Search engines read text, that’s what they index in their catalogs, and that’s what they will look up when you go into Google and type, for example “Web Design in Miami“.
