Be Safe on the Road: Leave Your Headphones at Home

You love your music and you splash out on buying those awesome noise-cancelling headphones, so that you can have your fun while you are running to burn those pesky calories. But here is the catch, the same headphones may lead to … [visit site to read more]

Be Safe on the Road: Leave Your Headphones at Home is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site – Gaj-It.com

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How to Buy a Home With Good Feng Shui

Buying a home is usually a stressful experience. So much rides on a new home because this is where you relax, have fun, sleep, eat; in short, it’s the place central to your life. Not only that, but homes usually cost a whole lot of money and represent our single largest investment. Most homebuyers can usually find the objective requirements of house hunting, such as location, size, and price. But, there are also intangible factors when searching for a new home, but most people don’t know what to look for.

Helping you find the flaws

This is where feng shui comes in. Using feng shui, you’ll be able to spot the problems -or the potential — in a house that exist outside of the objective requirements of number of bedrooms, amount of storage, etc. These are features that you might not notice, and a realtor will seldom, if ever, point out to you. But, with this checklist, you can at least feel more confident about your decision to go with a particular property.

Look at the space with “feng shui eyes”

When you are looking at a house – or any space for that matter – and considering whether to buy it, it helps to look at it with “feng shui eyes.” You will want to do this once you have considered all the other objective aspects of the house, such as square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, living areas, location, price, etc.

The next step is to run down a checklist of the subjective feng shui considerations that will help you make a feng shui assessment. Even if you aren’t house hunting, this list can give you some important information that might be very revealing about the house you are already in!

The list below provides some of the more serious feng shui problems.

Exterior

Street: Is house at the end of a cul-de-sac, dead end or T-junction?

Topography. Is the lot sloped away at the back? Avoid yards that slope down toward the rear. Select home with a rise at the rear. Is house below street grade? This will make for a constant “uphill” struggle while you live here.

Landscape. Is there a tree or pole directly in front of the front door? Dead trees or shrubs? Dead lawn?

Garage. Is it ahead of the house or front door?

Neighbors. Is this house smaller than houses on either side? Do neighbors’ houses have sharp angles pointing at this house or appear to overpower or dominate the house?

Views & proximity. Can you see or is it close to church, temple or other house of worship? Can you see or is it close to funeral home, cemetery, hospital, police station, sewage treatment, abandoned building or run-down house?

Water. Is water, lake, river, ocean at the back of house or too close to front?

Lot. Regular or irregular-shaped? House sits too close to the front of lot? Does backyard fall away from the rear of the house?

Paths. Driveway ends at house instead of garage? Walkways end straight at door?

Interior

House style. Split, bi-level, or center hall colonial?

Front. Front door lines up with back door? Does front door face stairway?

Structure. Overhead or exposed beams? Ceilings too high or are they low and slanted? Skylights over sleeping areas or kitchen? Foundation cracks or problems? Serious plumbing or electrical problems?

Entrance. Do you see toilet/bathroom door from the entrance? See the kitchen/stove from the front door? See the dining room from the front door? See the bedroom from front door?

Toilets. Located in NW, SW, center, or corners of the house? Bedroom, dining area or kitchen located under or over toilet?

Staircases. Spiral staircase? Staircase stops at front door? Split or scissor-style staircase?

Hallways. Too long? Divide the house into two sections? Too dark?

Bedrooms. Over garage? Over bathroom or laundry? Have empty space below, i.e., patio area? Is master bedroom too close to the front door?

Fireplace. In the NW portion of the house? Is it in the Southeast (wealth) sector?

Major locations. Problems with or missing sections in Northwest (man), Southwest (woman), North (career), or Southeast (wealth)? Bathroom, laundry, kitchen in center of house?

Odor. Smells musty, smoky, putrid?

Enlist a professional

Still not perfectly confident? Well, a home is a major purchase and we must always consider that important point. Most people take a used car to their mechanic before buying it — and its purchase isn’t as important as a house. So, if you’re still confused or just want to proceed with the sale in confidence, why not talk to a feng shui specialist about looking about the prospective house?

A professional feng shui consultant should be able to tell you what you can expect from this location, such as good financial or business opportunities. Or, maybe you’ll find out that buying this house means your health will suffer, you’ll discover an afflicted portion of the house, such as a toilet in the SW sector that can hurt your marriage. Give serious consideration to hiring a professional.

Fortunately, most problems have a feng shui fix

It’s important to know that every house has “feng shui flaws” and that no house is perfect. However, you should be aware of what you are buying so that you are knowledgeable about what kinds of problems might be associated with the house. The good news? Most feng shui flaws can be corrected.

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Decorating Do’s and Don’ts for Home Sellers in 2007

Home sellers contemplating placing there home on the market in the next year and want to prepare, should consider what trends home buyers are saying yes too. This tips are based on a survey of 923 real estate agents, managing brokers and association executives who responded to a survey request in Agent to Agent. Agent to Agent is distributed monthly to real estate professionals in all fifty states and Canada.

Do’s

-Consider glass as an option to ceramic tiles. Ceramic doesn’t offer the decorative benefits of newly re-discovered glass tiles that reflect light and add a glisten and glow to kitchens and bathrooms. The cost difference is minimal.

-Specify drawer-style refrigerators/freezers and dishwashers. You’ll love the deign flexibility to place where you want them. Perfect for contemporary kitchens where you want only base cabinets with open shelves above.

-Research exotic and reclaimed woods. Recycled wood salvaged from soon-to-be-demolished buildings and eco-friendly rosewood is in growing demand as homeowners mainline individualism and earth-friendly wood finishes.

-Luggage rooms. With today’s on-the-go family, where to stash all their luggage is a growing problem. Most harried travelers want it in one place, to find the right piece for the right trip and to have their travel sizes of 3 ounces or less in at-a-glance place.

-Look for bolder, deeper colors for trim like shutters, doors, and window frames. Professional color forecasters believe this is the next big trend.

-Textures. Mixing natural materials such as slate and stone, wood and natural fibers, earthenware and recycled barn wood. Anything weathered; wood, metal and glass gives newer homes a sense of history.

-Install engineered stone compound countertops. Cheaper than granite, but come in a variety of colors and finishes, this synthetic alternative to nature is cutting edge in 2007 kitchens.

-Place a second laundry in your Master Suite. Walk-in closets are everywhere, why not put your own laundry next to your dirty clothes? They’ve been popping up more and more in 2006, and sure to go mainstream in 2007.

-Put up a wrought iron fence instead of a wood or chain-link fence. Wrought iron says luxury to homebuyers.

Don’ts

-Install bowl-shaped above-counter bathroom sinks. The splashing and over-all up-keep has earned these the reputation of nice to look at, but don’t want one.

-Install too many glass kitchen cabinet doors. It looks great in magazines, but busy homeowners don’t have the time to keep their kitchen cabinets organized to keep the picture perfect look. Plus if you hate washing the windows, having more glass in a greasy room like a kitchen is high-maintenance.

-Minimize breakfast bar countertop overhang. Buyers hate when they can’t pull up a stool comfortably for a cup of coffee. Make sure yours extends past base cabinets at least twelve inches, preferably fifteen-eighteen.

-Go cheap and omit trim around interior window openings. Drywall finishes-only around windows doesn’t say contemporary, it says like a bullhorn; cheap.

-Utilize concrete-blocks in exterior walls in new construction. One, it’s ugly and two, unless they are properly sealed at installation and every three years thereafter, they’ll leak moisture. Mold is a big by-product of improperly installed and maintained concrete-block, inside or out.

-Specify spiral staircases. Once the rage for mid-seventies make over’s, now death to a home seller. The boomers have aged, their kids don’t like them, unfriendly to pets and young children. Take yours out and put in a standard staircase (inside or out) before you sell.

-Underestimate softness of Bamboo wood floors. The first user reviews are in on this popular eco-friendly flooring, and they’re not pretty. Easily dented and scratched, and prone to warping from variations in climate and humidity levels.

© Copyright 2006 Mark Nash

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Home Office Tips – Eliminating Distractions When Working From Home

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If you’re new to working from home, you’re probably discovering that the distractions are constant.

Sure, you had people randomly approaching your desk to inquire about things in the office and other such nuisances, but you knew that with your boss watching, you had to snap back to it quickly and at least appear to be working.

At home, there’s no such motivator. It’s just you, the television and a bag of Doritos — who’s gonna know? And when you miss your first deadline and don’t get paid by your client, you’ll realize that it doesn’t matter whether anyone else knows or not. You need to be your own motivator and stick to the task.

There are two sets of people that you need to defend against: yourself, and other people. It’s not just the lack of oversight that can make the home more distracting. It’s other people. If you have a family or roommates, they’ll find the novelty of your presence a great thing. They’ll interrupt you all day. You’ve got to put an end to it somewhere.

After seven years of working from home, I like to think I’ve got a system that works. I know that I’m less easily distracted in my home office than in any corporate office in the world. But it’s only by training yourself like one of Pavlov’s dogs and training those around you with the threat of severe consequences that you’ll be able to work like this too.

Use Your Door as a Signal System

Over the years, the use of my door as a signalling system for members of my family has proved much more efficient than using a sign and allows me to balance family and work much better than a blanket “If I’m in my office, leave me alone” system.

Your office always has a door, and that makes it the easiest tool to use in teaching those you live with when you can be interrupted and when you absolutely cannot be interrupted.

My system is simple: if it’s closed all the way, leave me alone — unless one of the kids is dying or the house is on fire. If it’s half-closed, interrupt me for important things — for instance, if my wife needs my card to go get some groceries — but not for anything trivial. And if its open, it means it doesn’t really matter. I’m catching up on industry news or taking a break and I don’t care if one of the kids wants to come in for a game of Angry Birds.

Set your boundaries and enforce them. Someone comes in for a pointless chat while the door is half-closed? Use a flamethrower or whatever it takes to dissuade future infringements.

Headphones: Signal & Moodsetter

If your office is in a more public place such as in the corner of the lounge room — perhaps you haven’t moved to a place that can accomodate your work-from-home lifestyle yet — headphones can serve as a good replacement for door signals. Put them on to indicate to the rest of the world that you’re not up for interruptions.

But even if you have an office, many people find that using headphones whenever they need to concentrate eventually evokes a Pavlovian reaction. It puts them in the mental state to work: not to fluff around on YouTube or pretend that all that Twitter chat time is “marketing”. The more little rituals like this you associate with work, the more triggers you have to induce a productive mood.

Music Keeps Your Pace Up

Since you’ve got headphones on anyway, put some music through them. The rhythm that’s present in all but the most experimental of tunes serves to set a pace to your work, and the majority of people find that they get more done with tunes rolling than they do to a backdrop of silence.

Some have suggested that lyrical music is too distracting and that soothing tunes work best. I personally don’t buy it — music with a strong rhythm is the most output-inducing in my experience — but if relaxation music works for you, by all means listen to it.

Just don’t listen to hip-hop — spoken words register differently to sung words and our brain is trained to focus on the sound of another human talking. Plus, I did say you should play music.

Productive Distractions Are Still Distractions

Need to get those dishes in the dishwasher before you start work? Need to tidy your desk? Stop kidding yourself. You’re trying to delay the work, and the number of dishes in the sink don’t make a bit of a difference to your ability to focus.

It’s the greatest temptation of the home worker: using housework and busywork to escape from the real work. Even when we say we’re not going to do it, we end up doing it without realizing. You need to commit to noticing when you’re distracting yourself with things that seem urgent or productive but really aren’t and get yourself back on track.

Cultivate Focus with Technological Crutches

Apps like Vitamin-R for the Mac are particularly useful: essentially, it puts a timer on your next task and tells you to get it done before it hits zero. When we feel as though we’re on a clock, we’re less likely to pay any attention to the distractions that come our way. The deadline is the ultimate motivator. Internally-set deadlines — telling yourself to get something done by a certain time even though its well before the real deadline — are more prone to failure, but when the computer is screaming at you to hurry up, the technique is effective.

Develop a Work Ethic

A lot of criticism of productivity advice suggests that the advice is porn for the weak-willed. To an extent, it is, but there are also a lot of tools that are helpful to the weak-willed in that toolbox. The point of productivity crutches is to redirect your mind to the work while you have a weak work ethic until that mental muscle becomes exercised enough that you don’t need the gimmicks.

As far as advice that teaches you to avoid distractions — excluding distractions forced on you by others — treat it as a training dumbbell to get you to a point where you’re focused naturally.

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Mariah Carey Names Son After Room in her Home

Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon have named their son after a room in their apartment.

Mariah Carey’s Cribs episode broke ground in the house-tour arena. Floating amidst the seemingly endless floors of her downtown New York apartment, Mariah bedazzled with schizophrenic costume changes culminating in a bubble bath.  The episode was not only replayed, but given it’s own retrospective, with celebrity commentary from Sharon Osborn, Da Brat, and T.V. ‘personalities.’

Watching it, and then watching a remembrance of watching it, I feel like I’ve finally been invited to play at the rich girl’s house. The one who gets to wear dress up clothing everyday and has LIPSTICK. She literally has butterflies everywhere. And the fact that she won’t let me see some things (Mariah doesn’t show us her bedroom because as she put it, “Then what’s left for me?”) only serves to make her home, and her, more enticing. How many floors are there? Why do we have to play in the basement? You have Marylyn Monroe’s piano? Who knows when she’s lying, I feel like she might be secretly abused, but I can’t wait to try on her leotards. As the MTV commentator articulated, Mariah’s closet tour shows us, “The true meaning of the walk in closet.” That meaning (spoiler alert) is that she can walk really far into it!

This lady’s material possessions clearly make her really, really happy. And so it’s no surprise that Carey has named her daughter after the late icon whose piano she has, Monroe, and son after a room in her house, Moroccan, reports The Philadelphia Daily News. If I were to name my children after my favorite possessions and room, they would be named, respectably, “Nodding Off,” after a framed picture of a heroine addict I found, and Office/bedroom/living room. That or Murphy Bed.

“House tour” is nearly synonymous with “Bored housewife seeking a sense of control and possibly superiority.” But Carey’s tour was a gift: a jubilant, sexy, mysterious, fantastique. She took a bubble bath.  If Moroccan is anything like Mariah’s Moroccan Room, then I bet he’ll be well groomed, butterfly themed, and adored by his be-lingeried mother.

Essential Mariah

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Greening Your Home: Sustainable Options for Every System In Your House

Greening Your Home: Sustainable Options for Every System In Your House

Greening Your Home: Sustainable Options for Every System In Your House
252 pages | Dec 12, 2010 |ISBN:0071499091 | PDF | 7.5 Mb

Choose Green Systems That Conserve Resources While Matching Your Budget and Lifestyle A vital conservation and money-saving tool, Greening Your Home provides helpful information that will help you select sustainable green options that match your specific needs for every system in your house. This “one-stop” guide provides the latest information on systems and materials that conserve resources for a cleaner, more energy-efficient home. From the lively writing, with illustrations and examples, you will learn how to incorporate sustainability into your house in beautiful

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TourFactory Virtual Home Tour #511530

www.tourfactory.com For more information, contact: Robert E Hill Inc 718-884-2200 Robert E Hill Inc Gracious 1935 three bedroom home set on a hill with lovely gardens. First floor features entrance foyer with cathedral ceiling, a powder room, inviting living room with wood-burning fireplace, heated sun porch, formal wood-paneled dining room, breakfast room and large working kitchen with laundry. Second floor – Master suite, two bedrooms and full bath. Spiral stairs lead to storage attic. Full, partially finished basement and a detached two car garage. The lovely enclosed garden is private and features many mature plants and a patio for back-yard barbeques. Walk to shops, restaurants, near transporation and Riverdale’s finest public and private schools.

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How to Plan, Contract and Build Your Own Home

How to Plan, Contract and Build Your Own Home

How to Plan, Contract and Build Your Own Home
425 pages | Dec 12, 2010 |ISBN:0071448853 | PDF | 7.5 Mb

There are countless reasons why building your own home makes good sense. But for most people, the chance to create the home they’ve always wanted is #1 on their list. And this all-in-one guide can help you every step of the way toward realizing your vision — from hiring the right vendors to picking fixtures.

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