I have been tangentially involved with the creation of some websites for professionals. I have to say that the site for Ohio lawyers Luftman, Heck & Associates is a good looking, functional, and informative site.

We all know of course that the ‘If you build it, they will come’ line was some corn farmer’s delusion. That is why the law firm is sponsoring blog posts.

Luftman and Heck provide a wide range of legal services related to bankruptcy, estate planning, traffic violations, OVI/DUI laws, criminal defense and more.

I think that trust is the most important thing in the lawyer client relationship. I am not looking for a lawyer, but when I try and put myself in the head space of someone who might be looking for a good lawyer in the Columbus area and I look at the personal profiles of the four lawyers in this firm I feel like I can trust them.

I have only dealt with lawyers for real estate purchases and a divorce. This firm does not claim to work in family law. This might be part of the reason why they look happy in their profile photos.

If you are an Ohio resident, you can fill in a form in order to receive a free consultation call from the firm’s paralegals.

The legalese that I have the most recent experience with is small business related. Luftman and Heck look like they are very interested in helping businesses get started right. They will work with an entrepreneur to help them decide which kind of business organization is the best fit for their plans and then they will help them put together all the necessary stuff like Articles of Organization, Corporate Regulations, Stock Subscriptions, Partnership Agreements, and Buy/Sell Agreements.

Something that I am woefully unprepared for is um, dying. I really need to put together a will. If you get these guys to draft a Will and Trust, you can avoid having an estate opened in the probate court, thereby saving time and money for your loved ones.

I did not find anything today. Yes, I did go outside.

If you want to see things that are visually novel, I suggest going to YouTube and searching for Mardi Gras videos. I should also mention that there may be a live webcam or two trained on the action in New Orleans. I looked at one a few years ago, before the disasters. I was working very early in the morning on the east coast and it was 3am or something in New Orleans the street corner that was on camera was very much full of litter and there were only a few people in view. I was out to some carnival events here over the weekend. I like the groups of 6-12 women that are all wearing the same costumes. It somehow makes the costume more significant.

I am trying to figure out this new kind of mortgage that they are calling the One Account Mortgage.

Typically, a mortgage accumulates huge amounts of interest during the time you are slowly paying it off.

With a One Account Mortgage you are combining the debt into a current account and your monthly salary (while it is in your account) is offset against the mortgage balance.

So, while you have some of your monthly income left in your account, it is counted towards the mortgage debt and thus you pay interest on the reduced sum.

Add to this account any savings you have built up and this can be counted against the mortgage debt too, thus further reducing the amount that you are paying interest on.

You can repay extra money on your mortgage at any time without a penalty. You also have the option of taking a break from mortgage repayments if you find yourself in a tight spot. The principal advantage however is that you get to add to the one account mortgage any savings you have managed to build up and they can be counted against the mortgage debt too. basically it is a way to reduce the total amount of interest that you end up paying on a mortgage.

I did a quick search on the internet for opinions about this type of mortgage. The consensus appears to be that they are a good idea if your income is high enough that you can actually use the one account mortgage in the way that it was intended. If you are stuck in a situation where you are constantly dipping into the current balance, then the savings just won’t be there for you. To make the right decision, you need to look at your income, your other options for mortgage rates and also your tax situation.

I am going to admit something that many people are too ashamed to admit. My kids brought head lice home from school once a few years ago. I had a quick fix to safeguard my own scalp, I shaved my head. For most people, this is not an option that they would ever even consider.
Having gone through the frustration of trying to rid my family of this scourge I want to use this blog to spread the word about the most effective tool we were able to find.

This comb works. The key with combating anything like this is persistence, you have to break the life cycle of the little things. I am not being paid to talk about this product. I just want to spread the word about it because I hate the thought of kids having toxic pesticides poured on their heads in a failed attempt to get rid of head lice. I don’t really think Britney had head lice.

Las Vegas is a place where things can happen fast, both in terms of success and of failure. If you lose your shirt there, be sure to wear lots of sunscreen. Real estate opportunities are not the same as gambling. For one thing you are allowed to use lots of tools and information to give yourself an advantage. Millionsaver.com can help you.

Just like in every other real estate market, the Las Vegas real estate is composed partly of homes that are on the market as a result of foreclosure. You may have heard of some really great savings to be had in this way. You need to know that banks and other lenders are now taking the real estate market more seriously and they try to get something close to market value out of homes that they end up owning. There are still savings to be had in the neighborhood of 10% or so. You need to be aware that banks sell homes ‘as is’. That means that the buyer is responsible for having an inspection performed by a licensed contractor at the buyer’s expense.

Here is the most important point that I came away with when I read Millionsaver.com’s page on buying foreclosure properties. The good ones go fast, you need to have someone professional like the agents at Millionsaver watching out for them for you. Years ago, in a real estate market very far away from Las Vegas I lived on a small property that was bordered on two sides with a very big, partly forested lot. The owners were not residing in the county and they were in arrears on their property tax. I knew this because a coworker of mine was the son of a clerk in the sheriff’s office. He had told me that, as a friendly gesture he would give me early notice of when the property might go up for sale. To make a long story short, it slipped his mind and the next thing I knew I had new neighbors on what I had wished to buy for myself.

One of my guilty pleasures in life is Bluegrass music. I think it really should be grouped in with World Beat music, but I guess they don’t have drums generally. Also, America is really a seperate entity from the World.

I also think the best music is full of life. Singing about death has it’s place but having genres and subgenres of music that obsess about it is just pretty messed up and sad. I would like to do some kind of Trojan horse thing whereby I would plant a really good Bluegrass band in the middle of some multi-band show of one of these lame perishable genres of music .

Paintball is one of those pastimes where you tend to think about it and talk about it for way more hours than you can actually get out and do it. These days lots of people are making videos of their paintball battles so they can really get a lot of mileage from one outing.

Paintball is a game for adrenaline junkies that don’t spend all day everyday sitting at a computer. The PBVids site is very, very active. 30,556 members strong. I wonder if the government is keeping a close eye on these people. I wonder if they wonder if the government is keeping a close eye on them. I wonder if the government wonders why I am wondering all this stuff.

These paintball forums are setup with paintball videos in mind. When I saw that the tagline for the forums was Uniting Paintballers Around the Globe, I checked out the member list and it is international in scope. Beyond being a place to showcase videos, it is also a place to learn about tools and techniques for making better videos. People also share pictures and stories. There is also all the typical forum shenanigans that you come to expect on any forum that appeals to young people. Avatars featuring muppets in compromising positions, battles to see who can get their name as the last poster in every category, heady stuff like that. The fact that the moderators have guns does not seem to dissuade people in the least.

That stuff is pretty much kept in the general discussion. If you go to the forum for help or advice, that is what you get. If you want feedback about some video you made, you get feedback. If you go there looking for trouble, that is what you get, oh and banned.. I don’t like to go to forums that are afraid to ban people. The rules on the forum aren’t made to make it safe for your grandmother to look at, but they are enforced. Go check them out.

If proving to everyone that she is not predictable was the point of Britney Spears’ barbarous act, I applaude her. If it was a cry for help, I hope and pray that she gets the help she needs. If it was just stupid…um…well then it was just stupid.

Last words, it grows back.

Expect to see her wearing a very nice looking wig within the next few weeks. There is a really awkward stage after about four weeks where your hair can’t decide if it is going to stand up or lie down. That’s kinda like what Britney herself seems to be going through these days.

britney

It has been a few years since I have had my own fish tank. I do have a great appreciation for a well established and well cared for group of plants and animals in an aquarium. I think that as a preamble to my review of these particular fish tank forums, I will tell a few anecdotes about fish tanks gone wrong.

My 4th grade teacher was a progressive kind of guy and he thought it would be a great learning experience for us to have a salt water aquarium with mollusks like starfish in it. The trick with marine life like starfish, was to keep replacing the seawater regularly and also to keep it from getting too warm. I give my teacher a failing grade on this particular project. I think things began to go horribly wrong in the tank during a long weekend.

I was inspired by his project though and I would stick to freshwater species as they tend to be a bit less tricky.

As an adult, I had one mishap involving my small children pouring their juice into the aquarium. Did they make a television commercial with that in it because it happens a lot…or is it the other way around? Now I snorkel and I like to imagine that the sea is my big, low maintenance aquarium.

So now about the forums…they are busy, friendly and many of the people are very knowledgeable.
A cool thing that I saw is that some members have a list of everything in their tank as their signature. Some have every detail right down to how many pounds of sand and rock they have.

Oh, and the pond people are there en masse as well. Spring is coming and making a fish pond is something a lot of gardeners consider. This board would be a great place to familiarize yourself with caring for a fish pond.

I found a domino on the street. It had two dots on one end and one on the other end. I didn’t take it home because I thought that maybe a kid had dropped it while out on walk with his mother and that they might be looking for it on their way back. I put it on the top of a sign that was attached to a wall. In Barbados, people playing dominoes commonly refer to the zero as a “turd”.

Here’s a popular video showing a guy setting up some dominoes to demonstrate their effect.