Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

Home holidays: Homes with resort-style features, such as 3 Callemonda Rise in O'Malley are great for holidays at home. Photo: Supplied

The annual summer trip to the South Coast has become a Canberra tradition and at this time of year you will see more ACT licence plates on Batemans Bay streets than NSW ones.

But for some, that getaway is not always possible and a resort-inspired lifestyle at home is an attractive option.

The swimming pool is the obvious summer solution, but there are a range of other features that will allow your home to become your own personal oasis.

Home holidays: 3 Callemonda Rise, O'Malley. Photo: Supplied

Maria Selleck Properties principal Maria Selleck says outside amenities have become just as important as indoor spaces because the outdoors becomes the centre of entertainment during the warmer months.

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"Under cover alfresco dining areas to accommodate a crowd is a must," Ms Selleck says.

"A barbecue grill is only one component. An outdoor kitchen, pizza oven, full bar, refrigerator, burners and other kitchen features are some of the features that buyers desire for alfresco entertaining areas."

Property consultant Maureen Dwyer agrees that the outdoor entertaining area is one of the most important features of any resort-style property.

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Canberra's resort style houses a holiday at home with bar, pool and spa

Experts are starting to see a real trend toward cloud convergence over the next 12 months. This prompts an important question for MSPs: When mobile, social, cloud and big data are all under the same umbrella, what happens to consumer expectations?

Unified Technology Landscape

As noted by a Dec. 23 article from Business 2 Community, these four "critical streams of technology are gradually converging into one powerful force that is making way for a huge shift in the current business landscape." This is no surprise, since mobile, cloud, big data and social media share many of the same feature sets and overlap when it comes to both form and function. A more unified technology landscape can therefore be seen as inevitable, but why is this transition happening now? In large part the move is thanks to maturing cloud technologies, since it is now possible to support social, data analytics and mobile offerings on a single cloud backbone or distribute their functions across multiple public and private clouds without impacting efficacy.

This results in a kind of ubiquity that opens up new avenues to reach consumers, gain customer insight, provide fertile ground for innovation and improve collaboration. But for MSPs serving midsize businesses, this cloud convergence also comes with a caveat: Companies will quickly start to expect more than single-channel service from providers, especially as they come to terms with a mobile-enabled, cloud-savvy workforce. So how do MSPs manage expectations in a converged world?

Already Happening

One option is to wait it out by continuing to deliver solid service in existing areas but without building in new functionality. The problem? This will not work for long. Just as consumers want simplified cloud access and real-time analytics, they expect desktop and mobile devices to work interchangeably. As a result, waiting for cloud convergence to "finish" puts MSPs behind the curve.

Managing midsize expectations requires a two-pronged approach. First, MSPs must recognize that midsize business needs can both meet and exceed enterprise requirements since many smaller companies cannot afford to pay multiple full-time IT staffs. Next, service providers must be willing to adapt in anticipation, rather than on demand. Converged cloud services provide instant access to a pool of ubiquitous functions, and scaling up in anticipation gives MSPs breathing room for the growth of midsize expectations.

Convergence is coming. Increased ease of use, however, means increasing expectations: MSPs cannot be unprepared for ubiquity.

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Excerpt from:
Cloud Convergence Coming in 2015: How do MSPs Manage Expectations?

As Congress opens its session on Tuesday, several Maryland interests including chicken farmers, environmentalists and federal employees will be watching for signs of how the new political landscape on Capitol Hill will affect issues they say are critical to the state's economy.

With Republicans in control of both the House and Senate for the first time in nearly a decade, Washington is bracing for more battles over health care, immigration and government spending. But there are indications that agreements might be possible on overhauling the nation's tax code, funding for infrastructure and finalizing trade agreements with Asia and Europe.

All of those issues could have implications for Maryland.

Meat and poultry groups, including those that represent the Eastern Shore's poultry industry, are hoping trade agreements include stronger enforcement mechanisms to limit overseas markets from blocking imports. Federal employee unions want lawmakers to increase or at least not cut compensation for their members. Environmentalists worry about the potential rollback of regulations and funding.

"As was shown in the 1990s, there are areas like trade, tax reform, and support for biomedical research that Republicans and Democrats can jointly support," said Rep. Andy Harris, a Baltimore County Republican, referring to deals between Democratic President Bill Clinton and the GOP-led Congress at the time.

But Harris said President Barack Obama has jeopardized the possibility of finding common ground with what he called his "unconstitutional executive overreaching" on immigration and other issues.

Obama and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell have signaled a willingness to work together on trade, including deals pending with Asia and Europe. Free trade agreements are often more popular among Republicans than Democrats, who worry they lead to a loss of U.S. jobs.

"Global trade is extremely important to the future of manufacturing," said Michael Galiazzo, president of the Regional Manufacturing Institute, a nonprofit association that represents Maryland manufacturers. "Manufacturing in Maryland benefits greatly by doors of opportunity that get opened for us to sell our products overseas."

Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, said the group would like to see a trade agreement pending with Pacific Rim countries to loosen Canada's restrictions on poultry imports, for instance. And the group has long raised concerns about safety standards it believes other countries sometimes impose as a form or protectionism.

Other groups are waiting to see if previous GOP proposals will remain priorities now that the party is in control of Congress.

Read more here:
Md. groups closely watching new Congress, political landscape

DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT Gray-green plateaus and rock formations in a palette of fiery oranges and browns take up much of the landscape on the 400-mile drive from St. George, Utah, to Dinosaur National Monument. Arid and sprawling, it's not the subtropical terrain that made up the late Mesozoic era, but that didn't stop the 5-year-old aspiring paleontologist in the back seat from imagining a hungry allosaurus or herd of sauropods pounding across the land in search of dinner.

"We're in dinosaur land," Theo chanted repeatedly.

Indeed, we had gone to Utah on the trail of dinosaurs. My son's fascination with the giant reptiles began at age 2; three years later, his bedtime stories still feature triceratops and stegosaurus, and the majority of his toy collection can be split into two categories: carnivores and herbivores.

So it seemed like a good time to expose him and his 9-year-old brother, Jack, to the real land of the allosaurus and brachiosaurus. Last spring, the kids, their dad, John, and I set out from Los Angeles to Utah on a seven-day road trip across a craggy, ever-changing landscape to Dinosaur National Monument, the mother ship for any enthusiast of the prehistoric beasts.

Home of the 30-foot-long meat-eating allosaurus (it's the state fossil), Utah has some of the country's richest fossil deposits and what scientists believe is the world's largest concentration of bones of carnivorous dinosaurs. No one knows why they're there, says Ken Carpenter, director of the Utah State University's Eastern Prehistoric Museum in Price. "There's something odd that attracted predators to that site, and then they died," he said.

We managed to squeeze in a few modern-day attractions along our route, but ultimately we all ended up embracing the dinosaur culture right along with Theo. We learned about Andrew Carnegie's role in the Gold Rush-like search for fossils that swept the country in the late 19th century, and found dinosaur links in such unexpected places as Pipe Spring National Monument near the Arizona border and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. On a lighter note, we picked up pterodactyl-hunting licenses at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum and snapped photos of the giant pink brachiosaurus statue and other Flintstonesesque kitsch that marks Vernal, the town closest to Dinosaur National Monument.

All in all, it was a vacation full of unexpected discoveries you get only on a road trip that doesn't always follow the map.

St. George, two hours north of Las Vegas, was our first stop. Home to a small museum, the town is known more as the gateway to Zion National Park than as rich dinosaur territory. Yet the Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm is a jackpot for anyone with even a passing interest in the prehistoric world. Built atop a sandstone slab that holds some of the oldest and best preserved dinosaur tracks in the world, it opened in 2008 after a local optometrist, Sheldon Johnson, discovered tracks as he was leveling a hill on his property. Research revealed an early Jurassic lakeside environment with hundreds of tracks left by meat eaters and swimmers, including the footprints and foreleg marks of a crouching dinosaur, one of only five such impressions ever found.

The on-site laboratory makes up the museum's main room; to date, 3,500 tracks have been documented within a 10-acre area surrounding the museum and the beehive of fossil research activity, even on weekends, indicates there are many more discoveries to come.

From St. George, it's a swivelly hour-long drive to Pipe Spring National Monument, once a polygamy outpost for breakaway groups of the Mormon church. Millions of years earlier, the barren landscape also apparently attracted at least a few large theropods, and rangers are happy to guide visitors to their tracks, discovered in 1995, on the half-mile trail that loops behind the 1870s fortified ranch house.

More here:
Hunting Utahraptor and his kin in modern-day Utah

Highway 162 Land
Before land clearing.

By: Nathaniel Cabell

Originally posted here:
Highway 162 Land - Video

The Manchester Land Conservation Trust continues to make improvements to the 1-mile portion of the historic Cheney Rail Trail that it owns.

The most recent change came in November, when the group used a grant from the Manchester Road Race committee to buy 260 tons of stone dust to apply to the trail to make running, walking and biking it easier.

Built in 1869, the 2 1/4-mile Cheney Railroad was important to the success of the family's silk mills. Not only did the railroad transport raw materials into and finished goods out of town, it also served as a commuter train for workers living in the north end of Manchester.

The railroad ceased its passenger service in 1933 but continued a freight service into the 1980s.

"It's unique to Manchester," said Susan Barlow, a member of the Manchester Land Conservation Trust and the Manchester Historical Society.

On Jan. 31 at 1 p.m., Barlow will lead a free hike of the rail trail, which takes her imagination back to the time when workers would leave their north end homes and hop on the train to work at the silk mills.

"The fact that the Cheneys had their silk empire and needed this transportation and shelled out the money themselves, it's hard to imagine," Barlow said. "And it's right here in the center of town. It's really quite convenient. We know people use it."

The trail is now used by walkers, runners, hikers, parents with strollers, bikers and others, Barlow said. She even knows of a few people who use the trail to walk to work.

Doug MacGillvary, the land trust's stewardship chairman, managed the installation of the trail's stone dust. The trust acquired its portion of the trail in 2005 and immediately recognized its potential, MacGillvary said.

"When I first got on this board, we were looking at what potential there was for some of these pieces of property that we weren't [being realized]," MacGillvary said. "This was obviously one of them. It was two or three years of nothing happening. It didn't happen overnight. We've been working hard on this."

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Land Trust Continuing To Improve The Cheney Rail Trail

Tom McAllister cleared disused plot of land next to his recycling business The 68-year-old said he could not find legal owner in government records But lawyers said patch belongs to Lord Home, son of Alec Douglas-Home Judge ruled in Lord Home's favour after he took Mr McAllister to court

By Stephanie Linning for MailOnline

Published: 14:34 EST, 6 January 2015 | Updated: 20:40 EST, 6 January 2015

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A pensioner has lost a bitter legal battle with a multi-millionaire Tory peer over a patch of land next to his recycling yard that he has used for more than 17 years.

Tom McAllister, 68, said he decided to clear the disused plot, which was used as a dumping ground, after he was unable to find the legal owner in government records.

But lawyers insisted the land in Rigside, Lanarkshire, belonged to the estate of David Douglas-Home, son of ex-Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, and took legal action against Mr McAllister.

Tom McAllister, right, said he decided to clear the disused plot, which was used as a dumping ground, after he was unable to find the legal owner in government records. Lawyers said it belonged to Lord Home (left)

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Rigside pensioner loses legal battle with millionaire Lord Home

Sims 3 - Let #39;s Play : Worst Ever Interior Designer ... [7]
Next Episode Coming Soon. Welcome to my Sims 3 Let #39;s Play! I will be playing Sims 3 and having loads of fun, I hope you enjoy watching. Twitter: @Sqaishey Facebook: ...

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Sims 3 - Let's Play : Worst Ever Interior Designer ... [7] - Video

Full Review on Home Decoration with Interior Designer Arun - Real Estate - 6 TV
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Full Review on Home Decoration with Interior Designer Arun - Real Estate - 6 TV - Video

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Home Improvement Interior Design Interior Design, Interior Design Ideas, home design ideas, house interior design, home interior design, home design, room interior design, interior designer,...

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TOP modern home design, home designer suite 2015, home design ideas, owner need property insurance - Video