It’s funny that I should say that I have a new outlook on life because this article is precisely about how I’ve eliminated one outlook that I couldn’t seem to work around. And when I say outlook, I literally mean Outlook…Microsoft Outlook.

For years I’ve used Outlook as my primary communication tool. Calendars, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, and E-mail all contained in one convenient location. For years I’ve cursed at my computer time and time again when what I believed to be the necessary evil (Outlook) would fail to open, crash, slow my system down, you name it. The only reason I stayed with it so long was because of Exchange Server. The two together make for a seamless integration of all of your devices, keeping all of your data in one location accessible anywhere.

Trapped in the confines of Microsoft’s infrastructure has been the only option until recently. And by recently, I mean within the past year or so. You see, the functionality offered by Outlook and Microsoft Exchange is not exclusive to Outlook and Exchange. It is a concept; an idea that all of your information should be in one location and you should not have to do things more than once, and that duplicate information is inefficient.

The problem has been that the only tools available require spending more money than any of us want to spend on these things. How much does a day-planner need to cost? That has changed.

I credit this personal shift to a conversation I recently had between Loren Kutsko, Director of Strategy and Information Management at Food for the Hungry, and Mark Kaech, Grassroots Campaigns and Special Projects, also at Food for the Hungry. It’s inevitable that when you put us together, we’ll talk about the latest tools and happenings in the technology world. When I expressed my apprehension about making some major shifts in how I manage my information, which ultimately translates into a more seamless transaction in the real estate contract process, I was met with the reality that I was still doing things the “Gen-X” way, and not the “Gen-Y” way and that the tools that I need are available at a fraction of the cost.

As someone who considers himself open to change, to be struck with the possibility that I’m not standing at the front of the technology-progress boat anymore caused me to reassess my ways.

The Challenge

I’ll keep this simple. I want my contacts on my iPhone to be identical to my contacts on my computer. When I read a message in my inbox and it’s marked unread, I want it to be universally marked unread so I never have to read it again unless I need to re-visit the message. I want my calendar on my phone to have the same information as my computer, and the same information as my online calendar at Google.

I want complete and seamless synchronization of all of my data so I can get to it anywhere, anytime.

The Old Solution

Microsoft Exchange Server in concert with Mobile ActiveSync, Outlook, and Outlook Web Access. If not self hosted at my own facility with over $6000 worth of hardware and software required, at the very least, paid for on a single-user basis at an exchange hosting company for about $10.00/month.

The New Way

This is so simple it amazes me that I didn’t think of it before. A note of caution. If you aren’t willing to rethink how you manage your information, almost completely, you’ll be very frustrated if you try to do this.  In fact, you may not be able to do this. There are also some pre-requisites that are assumed prior to making this type of change.

• You need your own domain name.  Lose the gmail extension, the yahoo account, the free e-mail identity.  Get your own domain name and start branding yourself personally so you never have to change it.  If your company gives you an e-mail address, use it for company communication only, and get your own identity.  you@yourname.com is far more valuable than you123@yoohoo.lame.com.
• You need a smart phone, and preferably, an iPhone.  More tools will emerge at lower and lower costs, but this is where I am today.
• I matters not whether you have a MAC or a PC anymore.  Entourage and Outlook are no longer needed.
• Please use either Firefox or Chrome as your primary internet browser.  Internet Explorer should only be used if the idiots on the other end of the website you need to use have failed to develop a more compatible site and it requires Internet Explorer to work.  Safari will suffice, but I personally avoid it.  Firefox is my first choice for now.

So What are the Changes I Actually Made?

I moved all of my data from Exchange to Google.  I moved my calendar to Google Calendars, my contacts to Google, and all of my e-mail to Google.  My notes are kept nice and neat using Evernote, my tasks…well, I never used tasks because we still need a good system that supports task dependencies and hierarchical action plans.  My website resides at another hosting provider, but all of the e-mail traffic is bounced to Google and handled by Google in a very easy to use Gmail interface.  No, I do not have a @gmail.com address.

How did I do this?  Well, it didn’t happen overnight.  I have lots of information that needed to be moved, and I’m still sorting out a few things here and there.  My website never went down, but my e-mail was interrupted for a few hours, so if you do this, you should make it a late night event.

All of these steps were accomplished in phases to ensure it was going to work, but there were some leaps of faith involved.  I made sure to get into the forums on Google to search for potential problems, then I dove in.

Before you do anything, backup all of your Outlook data.

Step 1: Establish Google Apps account for my domain.  (assumes you have a domain name already: www.godaddy.com to solve this problem.)

This is so easy.  Go to www.google.com/apps and sign up for Google Apps for Business.  It’s $50.00/year per user.  Go for the free 30 day trial (you can click here for that).

Step 2: Using the MX settings that Google gives you after you’ve setup your account, go to your domain manager at Godaddy.com or wherever you registered your domain, and modify the MX records.  Don’t screw it up and record the settings that were already there.  If you need to call someone there, do so.  They’ll help you do it.

Step 3: Watch the mail start rolling in.  It takes about 2 hours or so to kick in.

Step 4: Setup a new e-mail account on your iPhone using the gmail settings.  Now you have completely synchronized e-mail on your phone and through your gmail interface.

Step 5: Export all of your calendar data from Outlook or Entourage, or from wherever you keep it.

Step 6: Import your calendar from within your new Google account.

Step 7: Export all of your contacts from whatever program you’re using.

Step 8: Import your contacts into Google.

Step 9: Setup a new mail account using the Exchange option on your iPhone.  Follow these simple instructions to do so. Since you have already setup a mail account on your phone, make sure that your iPhone is set to sync only Calendar and Contact items, not mail.  The iPhone only allows one exchange configuration, so having a recent backup is going to make your life much easier at this point because you can delete your current exchange setup (if you have one) without losing your data.

Step 10: This is the last step.  Login to your Google Apps account (http://www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com), click the Service Settings tool bar item and then Mobile at the bottom of the drop-down menu.  Make sure you enable Google Sync at the bottom.

That’s it.  Your e-mail will be delivered to Google, you’ll be able to use the Gmail interface to manage it, and you’ll have it on your mobile device on demand.  Your calendar and contacts will begin to fill up in your phone, seemingly magically, and everything will be synchronized.

Mashable.com recently published these findings regarding Gmail vs. Outlook. I stand with Google now.

Oh, and the very very last step.  Uninstall Outlook .

If you need some help walking through this process feel free to contact me and I can help you through.

So, as I’m reading along, a title catches my eye, and I click on it.  I notice right away that even though my interest has been captured by a catchy headline, there’s absolutely no logic applied to how the article is written.  No sub-headlines, no highlighted important words, and no pictures whatsoever.

I’m the type of person who will be “more likely to read” if you eliminate the text and replace it with video.  In this shifting business place, where recording high quality HD video is a matter of a small inexpensive portable HD camera, short of being absolutely, unequivocally disastrous on film, it’s time to start dialing down the text and dialing up the video.

If you haven’t figured out by now, video has been taking over for quite a while now, and will continue to take over, and it will draw the eyes of thousands and thousands of people and hold their attention much longer than reading text.

You see, attachments aren’t a space issue per se.  They may hinder your ability to send and receive e-mail because of your e-mail provider being uber cheap about hard drive space, but the space taken up by one attachment isn’t the issue.  It’s the fact that attachments are duplicated, over and over and over again.  One person sends an attachment, it gets forwarded, then replied to, then forwarded and replied to and CC’d and BCC’d and pretty soon you have 30 people with a copy in their in-box, a copy in their sent folder, and a copy saved to their hard drive somewhere.

The real problem with e-mail attachments is the risk of outdated material.  With so many copies of documents that tend to change with new revisions, there is certain to be a trail of nonsense to sift through, and that takes up valuable time.

The solution to e-mail attachments is to post an original copy of a document in one location, then give everyone access to view it.  Not a new concept.  In fact, that’s what you’re doing right now.  You and hundreds of other people are reading this information, which was published one time, and stored in one location.  Granted, it’s now published, and not password protected, so anyone can see it, but there are plenty of systems out there that allow you to secure information for specific authorized people to read.

So, the next time you think you need to pass along an attachment, think about how you can upload it, then simply share it, to ensure it’s always up to date and it doesn’t get stuck in transit for being too big.  There you have it.  E-mail attachments waste so much time, in fact, they’re inspiring me to waste time expounding upon how they waste time.

1.  Firstly, the Tweetdeck window opened with icons only, and no tweet columns.  I could manipulate the windows, maximize, move, restore, and minimize, but was unable to interact at all with it.

Solution:  Use the Log Out/Change Password button to ‘disengage’ Tweetdeck and force a new logon.  This will reset the application and allow you to actually use the program.

2.  The second problem caught me by surprise, and to my knowledge, is a common problem amongst those of us with dual monitor setups.  When I re-opened Tweetdeck, I was prompted to login, but then after logging in, the windows sort of disappeared.  The taskbar showed that TweetDeck was running, but the application was nowhere to be seen on screen.  If I right clicked the application in the task bar, I could maximize the application, but I was unable to move or resize the window.  If I restored, I noticed that the minimize animation quickly shuttled the window from the upper left (Monitor 1) down below monitor 2, but off screen, so i couldn’t see where it was nor access it.

Solution:  Maximize TweetDeck by right clicking TweetDeck in the Taskbar.  Once the application is maximized, click the third button from the right on the TweetDeck toolbar which is designed to show the application in “Single Column Mode.”  This promptly solved my problem, restored the window to the primary monitor (Monitor 1) and allowed me to resize it and move it where I wanted it.  Problem solved.

Threaded E-mail

Most e-mail clients, depending on your user settings, will quote an original message in your reply so the recipient will be able to remember what the original message was.  Then, when they reply to your reply, the same thing happens, creating a very long thread of messages within an individual e-mail.

Problem:  If you reply to a message, then you reply to the same message again (assuming you may have left something out), you now have two sent messages with different replies.  The recipient, when he or she replies to your reply, will only quote one of your original replies, breaking the thread permanently.  This broken heirarchy can grow exponentially as time passes, messages change hands, and recipients grow.

E-mail Space Requirements

Keeping every message that ever comes into your inbox is inefficient in more ways than just taking up space on your laptop or computer, or server for that matter (that’s a whole different topic.)  Not only does it eat up space, it also eats up your time because you end up with a mountain of e-mail, and unless you have a clear system by which you read and sort your e-mail, and an effective plan to ensure your messages are permanently archives OFF SITE, meaning not on your laptop or computer, then you’re asking for hours of wasted time and frustration.  Storing your e-mail in folders is one solution, but it doesn’t remove you from the same risks and problems associated with having it all in one spot.

Keeping your e-mail on your mail provider’s server also poses a problem, because eventually it will cause your mail quota to be exceeded, and this ends up costing you time and energy, and sometimes added fees from your service provider if you don’t clear it out from time to time.  Clearing it out means eliminating it.

Support Ticketing System

The computing world is run on databases.  What better use of a database than to capture all of your important communications that you may have to refer to later?

A support ticketing system is a middle-man that automatically archives every message sent through the system and offers easy access to that system for future reference.  There are many flavors of ticketing systems out there, but I use one that I have found to be far superior to the rest.  The reason this is the case is because it takes on one feature that many other ticketing systems do not.  It allows the end user (the person who initially contacts you) to start a new ticket simply by sending you an e-mail.  It also has a zillion other fancy bells and whistles, and it runs on your own server, or a hosted server, so you have complete control over it.

How does it work?  Easy.  The support ticketing system is setup to monitor a single e-mail address (or multiple addresses if configured to do so.)  When someone sends an e-mail to this address, it sits on the server waiting for the ticketing system to check for the e-mail much like you would if you were using Outlook Express or another mail program.  If the system finds a message waiting in the wings, it “parses” the message.  In other words, it looks at the subject line to determine if there is an existing ticket number in the subject line or if it’s a new message.  If the message is new, the ticketing system assigns to it a new ticket number, records the message in the database, and forwards a notification along with the message to me, or the designated operator, at a different e-mail account.  If the message has a ticket number in it already, it adds the message to the last message that came through with the same ticket number, thereby recording the conversation permanently, and at the same time, notifies me, or the currently assigned operator.

When I get a new message with a new ticket number and reply to it, it goes to the same address that the ticketing system is monitoring.  In this case, when someone sends a new e-mail to whatever@realscottsdaleliving.com, my reply will also go to whatever@realscottsdaleliving.com.  The address is always Whatever@realscottsdaleliving.com, and every message involved in the conversation will bounce off of this address, leaving a copy of each subsequent message in the database.

Because I have this system in place, I know that every message that has a ticket number on it can be deleted from my mail client immediately after I’ve read and replied to it because all of the messages are safely stored on the server, permanently, including all attachments.  I no longer need to stack up messages in my in-box.

Researching tickets simply involves visiting a public website that allows me to search by many different methods to locate the information.

In the ticketing system, I am referred to as a Support Operator, and I am assigned to a specific Department within the ticketing organization.  Ticketing systems allow you to create multiple departments with multiple operators for each department, each with their own custom automated responses, knowledge base articles, and independent e-mail addresses.

The amount of customization you can do within your ticketing system is off the charts.

Right now, if you are a REALTOR and you inquire about one of my properties through the ARMLS system, the message goes to whatever@realscottsdaleliving.com and creates a ticket number.  All replies are tracked in my own system.  It gives me complete control and ownership of the messages that I communicate throughout the course of a day’s business.

Even if you aren’t a REALTOR, and you happen to send me a message at whatever@realscottsdaleliving.com, you will be assigned a new ticket and our conversation will begin.  Since most people don’t manage their e-mail in-boxes effectively, I can count on you keeping that message in your in-box so that if you reply to it at a later date, the ticket number will have remained in the subject line and your response will be added to the system.

One of the other nice features of a ticketing system is the ability to assign the issue to other Operators in other Departments that have been defined in the system.  Since the system is based on the internet, there is a web interface that allows anyone on your team to become part of the support system.  Moving issues and conversations between people within your organization while maintaining a consistent record of an entire conversation becomes very simple.  Imagine how difficult it would be for more than two people to monitor the conversation thread if all you had was individual e-mail accounts where messages were downloaded to different computers.

Nightmare.

Ticketing systems are a perfect solution to help your business create an identity that will never change.  Imagine Judy working the front desk for 5 years.  For her entire time of employment, she sends mail out to the agents in her office and the agents get used to sending mail directly to her using her e-mail address.  But what happens if Judy moves on?  Now you would have to notify all of the agents that Judy’s e-mail address is no longer the point of contact.  Rather, James has taken over.  So now everyone updates their contact list and a ton of uneccessary work is required from a whole lot of people who don’t need to be spending time doing that work.

Wouldn’t it be easier to give your office administrator position an e-mail address, then assign Judy, or James to that position as an operator in the ticketing system?  The agents wouldn’t know the difference, and they’d never have to change anything.  They would always send their requests to admin@company.com, or support@company.com, or accounting@company.com.  Whomever is assigned to each department would receive the requests.  If that person moved departments, or left the company, the IT director would simply remove them from the department and add the new person.

On my end of the equation, however, I implemented a support ticket system which automatically tags the message thread with a tracking number.  Every time someone responds to the original message, which is tied to a specific e-mail address, a database of messages is built which gives me the freedom to delete new mail after I’ve read it instead of letting it stack up in my inbox.

The bank, mechanically, has no idea this is happening and it works out just fine.

Enter bank secure e-mail, a new niusance designed to do nothing more than eat up my time.  Last week I received communications from a negotiator who previously used standard e-mail to communicate.  Now they have implemented a system by which the negotiator posts their message to their secure e-mail system, and then their system notifies me that there’s a message.  Then, I have to register to use their system (only once) and then login to their website to read and reply to their messages.

The disadvantages are many, but the most obvious is that I no longer receive the actual message in my e-mail inbox.  My ticketing system receives a new message every time the negotiator responds because their system sends out a new notification without the ticket number in the subject line, so every notification causes a new ticket to be created.

I can see how this security measure may be good for the bank…er…no I can’t.  Each bank seems to be using their own version of this type of system, and since it’s a proprietary system for each bank, there’s no connection to my system at all.

There’s nothing more annoying, in my opinion, than systems that are implemented in the wrong context.  The idea behind this system is to put the messages in one location to take ownership of the correspondence, but by doing so, without transmitting the actual message in the e-mail, it adds steps.

In high school, during those adolescent days of discovering freedom through juvenile activities like chinese firedrills, lawn-forking, and water balloon fights at camp, we had a good time pulling pranks on people at intersections.

Here’s how it went.  When our carload of hormonally imbalanced youths pulled up to a red light, provided there was enough time, one of us would hop out of the car, look startled, and run forward pointing into the sky.  We would stop, and look amazed, like we were watching Godzilla.  The inevitable reaction from the rest of the cars around us was as expected.  They would look up, as though there was something we had spotted in the sky.  We were entertained, and their attention was captured for a split second.  Some laughed, some ignored us, some just thought we were idiots.  One person fired a pistol at us (no, not really.)

In San Francisco, there is a man who sits alongside the sidewalk in a busy pedestrian area hiding behind twigs that he holds in front of him.  When an unsuspecting ped-o-person walks by, he jumps out from behind two branches usually scaring the crap out of people to entertain them.  People who know, watch and are entertained.  He earns tips by entertaining and some people like him and some people don’t.  But he gets their attention for a split second.

Twitter is a world wide sounding board.  It’s like that intersection where we would hop out of the car and point to something.  It’s a place where the things that I do on a regular basis can be published without any effort, like pulling up to that intersection and saying, “hey, look over here.”  Those who wish to look can.  Those who aren’t interested can listen to someone else.

The one way that I have seen Twitter provide value for my business is additional exposure.  All of my online publishing platforms have a Twitter plug-in installed.  Any time that I post a new article, the blog notifies Twitter, and anyone who is following me will see that there is a new Tweet that points to a new article on my blog.  At that point, they can either click through and see, or ignore the Tweet (the act of sounding off on Twitter.)  The people that are visiting can subscribe to my feed so they never have to visit the site again, or they can read and participate right there on the site by leaving comments or interacting with me directly.

Now that you are able to search Twitter for specific key-words, it’s possible for you to intercept the Tweets of people you would normally not have known about to find others who are interested in the same things you are.  Interested in aerobatics?  Set up a search and you’ll be notified when someone tweets about it.  Are you an aspiring chef who wants to know when someone is tweeting about Creme Brulee?  Creat a search and you’ll know who’s talking about it.  You may be surprised by what you find when you click through someone’s tweet about a topic you’re interested in.  It’s allowing us to create micro-niche-groups comprised of small groups of people in far-distant places.

Inevitably, every time I post an article, someone, somewhere follows my Twitter account within 15 minutes of the posting.  Today I received 3 new followers after posting an article, most likely because something in the Tweet triggered their saved search to notify them that I had “tweeted” about their preferred topic.

When I create a task, or a calendar event, not only do I need to know that it’s coming up, I need to see how many days until it’s due.  This is very valuable for the core of my business which is short sales.  Since many short sale properties are already on the road to foreclosure, there is a date at which the Trustee will sell the property at auction.  When the Notice of Trustee’s Sale is delivered, the tax records are updated, and I know about it.  But, keeping track of all of those properties is a challenge.

Enter the event countdown genre of applications on the iPhone.  I have chosen 2 countdown applications to review that are available free of charge in the Apple iTunes Application store.  The following are the results of my findings:

CountDown by Strangely Simple Software

This was the first application that I used, and it certainly is strangely simple.  The main screen presents you with a list of events that you have added with a desktop calendar countdown icon.  There’s nothing fancy about this application, and it does its job well.

On the main screen, you have the option to add a new event, edit the list of events by deleting or re-ordering (simply drag the event where you want it to fall), and at the bottom of the screen, you can order the events alphabetically or by the number of days until the event occurs, keeping the closest event at the top.

When you touch the arrow on a given event, you’re presented with the event editing screen where you can define the date that the event will occur and the time at which it will occur.

Days Until by Richard Shearman

If you’re looking for a much more robust countdown application, then Days Until will fulfill far more than the simplicity of Countdown.  Days Until is feature rich, utilizing the data that you input in much more dynamic ways.  For starters, the icon on the Homescreen of your iPhone can be configured to display the number of events that are going to occur in the next 10 days, or it can show the number of days until the nearest upcoming event, or it can be turned of completely.  There is a detailed help section that outlines every icon and feature as well.

On the main screen, Richard Shearman has kindly entered an event for you which exploits all of the features of Days Until, including a custom photo for each event.

From this screen, you can create new events, adjust the size of each line from small, medium, or large, adjust all of the settings for the application, and edit the list of events by quickly deleting them.

Yes, you’ll have to put up with the advertisements between the events and the toolbar, but it’s a small price to pay for such a robust countdown tool.

Creating an event is simple.  Press the plus sign, and a new event will appear on the main event list.  Tap that event to change it, and you’ll see all of the features that you can use to customize your event.

Start by selecting a photo to represent your event.  You can either choose from your iPhone’s Camera Roll, or you can take a new picture.  At the bottom of the screen are the controls that enable you to set the font, the date of the event, and the color of the text.

It’s a good application, however, for practical use, it’s a bit much for me, even if it is feature-rich.  Of the two applications, which are the only two that I see fit to use free of charge, the simplicity of Countdown by Strangely Simple Software will keep my attention because of how little attention I need to pay to the features.  Quick, simple, and effective.

Here’s how it works.  You create an account on soonr.com.  You download the soonr application and run it.  In the application you tell soonr.com which local files and folders you want to keep updated at soonr.com and away it goes.  Soonr will mirror your local folder to their website and then give you the ability to share it with others or synchronize it with another computer.  Login to soonr.com and there you’ll see all of your documents, which you can view online, send, print, and edit right there.  The best part about it is that there’s a free iPhone application for it that allows you to access your word documents, powerpoint presentations, pdf files, images, you  name it, you can do it.

Apparently the world is catching the buzz on Soonr.com.  Since this article was published, which was only a few hours ago, one of the “folks” over at Soonr.com commented with a few more features that I didn’t yet know about:

“When you are away from your office and you need access to your documents, why wait until later. Do it Soonr.”

That was the founding principle. Have you discovered that you can share your printers just like a document? The cool thing is that you can print to any shared printer without having to deal with drivers, etc. So if a client calls and wants an updated quote and they are using Soonr, you can print directly to their printer – all from your iPhone or iPod Touch. I love that feature.

Or a more personal use…you want to send a picture to your friend or family member. Send it directly to their printer then call them and tell them to go look. It freaks them out, “How’d you do that?”. Great fun.

My backup needs have just been met.  The caveat?  Only 500 MB storage is given to you free…but if you do the math, the current price on an 80GB hard drive (old school, internal) is about $40.00, and they’re giving you 500MB.

Give it a try today!

A photo that I recently took at a listing was unacceptable to me. The floor needed to be cleaned, but there wasn’t enough time to worry about it. I simply needed to get the picture and get the listing on the market.

To remedy the situation, I used photo editing software to essentially clean the floor, making it look more appealing. The tool that I use primarily is Fireworks from Macromedia Studio 8. My preference is Photoshop, but a recent disaster rendered my laptop useless and I lost Photoshop. I actually paid for Studio 8, so I feel no guilt about using Fireworks, even though I miss Photoshop desperately.

In Fireworks, just like in most editing software, there is a blur tool, but more importantly, there is a smudge tool. Using the smudge tool on the floor in the following photo resulted in a rather smooth fix.

Here is the Before Picture:

And here is the after picture:

The differences are subtle, but the process made the dust on the floor vanish.

If you’re not a digital photo editing junkie like myself, you may find this to be out of your area of expertise. I happen to enjoy it and it’s a hobby of mine.

Keep an open mind when you’re taking photos for a listing. Sometimes the most obtrusive element of the photo is something that can be removed in Photoshop. Just make sure that it can be removed in real life too. In one case, I was asked by a colleague to help him add his sign post to a listing photo that didn’t yet have a sign post installed. The bank was requiring it in order to proceed, and sign post installation was set for a day later. I actually inserted a sign post exactly where it was installed later that week and the bank was satisfied.

If you don’t know how to do this type of work, but you think that it may save you some time, give me a ring and I might be able to help you out, for a fee, of course.

Short Sale

If a property is being listed at an asking price less than what the owner owes on the mortgage, the bank needs to approve any future offers prior to closing escrow.

Now, there is a field that is designed specifically for Short Sale Approvals, and the field that was previously Lender/Corp Approval has been changed to Relo/Corp Approval for corporate relocations.  This is a good thing.

I’m not a big fan of calling a listing a short sale unless the bank has pre-approved a sale price that is short of what is owed on the note.  After all, a sale is a sale, and a listing is a listing, and if it’s being sold for less and the bank hasn’t approved, it should be property marked and stated that short sale approval is required.

Potential Problem

Regarding the recent change, there are probably going to be some problems with the unexpected data modifications.  ARMLS has opted to sweep the records to change all listings that weren’t Relocation/Corporate Approval Required so that they weren’t using that field.  They updated the listings to show the Short Sale Approval Required field to be marked.  In some cases where this is incorrect, you’ll need to ask your Realtor if they have checked into this.  Of course, if they’re on top of things, they’ll be calling you to explain what has happened .  This outlines another internet issue that we all have to face, and that’s that the data we enter into ARMLS isn’t our data, so they can do whatever they want with it.  Granted, an uprising would be few and far between, albeit possible, but I don’t think that ARMLS is going to do anything to hurt their relationships with the techy geeky data guys like myself.  I’m fine with positive changes that have slightly adverse short term effects.  Bring’em on.

Used in millions of homes throughout the last quarter of the 20^th century, asbestos insulation can become a real dilemma for homeowners due to causing a variety of health problems, including Peritoneal Mesothelioma and Malignant Mesothelioma. These types of cancer take the lives of thousands each year.

Non-regulated asbestos material can be legally performed by homeowners, regular contractors, or licensed asbestos abatement contractors as long as the National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) are not violated. Asbestos removal in public facilities, homes and workplaces must be undertaken by a licensed asbestos abatement contractor. Once the removal is complete, green insulation options should be given serious consideration, such as: Cellulose, Cotton Fiber and Lcynene.

The United States Green Building Council (USGBC), in a study conducted in 2003, estimated a savings of $50-$65 per square foot for well-constructed green buildings in the U.S. (see table below) during that year. The numbers continue to improve as more eco-friendly options become available, and those kinds of figures have
finally begun to attract those who thought eco-friendly construction was just a bunch of hogwash.

This article focuses on a lighter side of technology specific to the iPhone…Ringtones!  How do we create our own ringtones.  Some of you might be nauseated by the notion of custom ringtones and I fully agree, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a billion dollar ring tone market.  The frustration for those of us who do like to have a custom reing tone is that we have to pay for them.  Well, I’d say paying for something of value isn’t really a problem.  But what about when we have to pay for it twice?

In order to create a ring tone in iTunes, it typically requires that the song you’re making into a ringtone be a song you purchased through iTunes.  I’m here to show you how to make a ring tone out of any non-DRM (that’s a song that is not digitally protected, in other words, a song you did not buy in iTunes) song.

I’ll credit this knowledge to my friend Loren Kutsko at Food for the Hungry since he is the one who rattled off the steps that are required.  On to the good stuff.

How to Create a Ring Tone in iTunes (Example performed in Windows Version, not MAC)

1. Open iTunes
2. Find a song that is not protected with digital rights management.  This would be a song that you did not purchase from iTunes, or one that you added from a CD.
3. Play the song and find a 30 second section that you’d like to become your ring.
4. Right click the song and click Get Info.
5. Click the Options Tab.
6. Under Start Time and Stop Time, enter the starting and ending time within the song that you want to become your ring tone.
7. Click Okay.
8. Right Click the song again and select “Create AAC Version.”  This will encode the 30 seconds of play time that you defined as a new file in the same folder as the original full version of the song.  You should see a little orange icon under your left menu heading “Playlists” for a short period and then you’ll hear the same sound you hear when you get a voicemail on your iPhone or when you rip a CD.
9. In the search field, search for the song you just converted and you should see two copies.  One will be the full version, and one will be 30 seconds long.
10. Drag the 30 second version from your iTunes library to your desktop.  (Note: You may want to adjust your folder options [ Control Panel --> Folder Options ] to NOT hide file extensions for known file types.)
11. Delete the song from the iTunes library, moving it to the recycle bin.
12. Right click the file you moved to the desktop and click Properties.
13. The extension on the file should be song_title.m4a.  Change the “a” to “r” so the file is song_title.m4r.  This will force iTunes to put the song in the ringtones section.
14. Now that your song is converted and staged for importing, use the File menu in iTunes to Add File to Library.  Browse to your desktop and select your newly created m4r song.
15. Confirm you have a ringtone by clicking on the little ringtones item in the left menu in iTunes.  Your song should be there.
16. Connect your iPhone to your computer and adjust the sync settings to include your ringtone.
17. When it’s done sync’ing, you should see the new ringtone on your iPhone under Settings –> Sounds –> Ringtone under the Custom section above the Standard section.
18. Congratulations!  You have a new ringtone and it was completely free.