Marilyn PokorneySince the late 1800's Asbestos has been mined and used commercially. The use of Asbestos dramatically increased during World War II and since the early 1940's millions of Americans have been exposed to asbestos dust working within industries where initally the risks were not known. There has been widespread exposure to Asbestos by workers within shipyards, mines and mills,

by: Warren MatthewsWhat do you think about this? * Overall cancer risk reduced by 37% * Overall reduction in cancer mortality rates by 50% * 30% reduction of colorectal cancer.Sounds like the sort of claims someone standing on a soapbox trying to sell snake oil would make... but SURPRISE... these statements are coming from the mainstream... and the results are from simple natural

400,000 New Yorkers Breathed the most Toxic Pollutant. Asbestos Poisoning Symptoms. Are you at Risk?by: Tadas TalaikisRecent study of U.S. government provides the latest evidence of a systematic cover-up of the health toll from pollution after the 9/11 disaster, which doctors fear will cause more deaths than the attacks themselves.Belfast Telegraph says, The Bush administration suppressed

Like the facilitator, the online student possesses unique qualities. The online students of today consist primarily of working people who are trying to better their opportunities. This however is changing, as more and more young and older people become aware...

Dropped the payout check for the land into the conveyancer. Other than having a car accident on the way it all went smoothly.

Much walking around of display homes today. Before I get into the houses we've looked at I'll just quickly discuss the market that we see our home targetting and the requirements we believe these segments have.

1. Two mid level income couples with no children or 1-2 very young children.
2. Couples looking to downsize with no children at home

With these two segments in mind we see the primary requirements of the house as being:

1. High street appeal, a front elevation that is fashionable and attractive. But nothing too 'leading edge' that may look dated too quickly.
2. Internal fixtures that give an impression of quality without going too over the top. The suburb where we are building will not support a house that is fitted out with the best of everything, but certainly some improvements will be looked for by younger couples looking for some 'wow' factor. These improvments will largely be confined to the kitchen and bathrooms, as these allow for the greatest amount of individualization.
3. An internal layout supporting either a young family, or a couple with diverse interests. To us this translates to a 3 bedroom or 2 bedroom + study configuration. It also means that a separate master bedroom bathroom (en-suite) and living area are vital.
4. 2700mm (9ft) ceilings for a feeling of extra space.
5. Covered outdoor entertaining area.
6. Low maintenance modern garden.

Based on these requirements, and the size of the land we found ourselves looking at the villa homes (suitable for a 8.5-10m (28' to 33') frontage) and courtyard (suitable for 38' to 43'frontages) homes. The width of our land (11m, 33') means we are restricted to single garage versions of the courtyard homes which are almost universally double garage designs. We are happy to settle on an existing design of a contract builder as we believe this will lead to the house being completed faster and will lower the overall cost of building.

The two designs we saw today were the:

Heathcote 180 - AV Jennings

This is a nice design, a courtyard home and with a single garage pretty well suited to the size of the block. I particularly like the way the bedrooms/bathroom are separated from the living area. The only real downside to design of the house is the width, the courtyard down the side of the house would be quite small. The other major downside is the price, the base price is $105,000, which is a lot more than what we wanted to spend. It does, however, include a lot of things as standard that other builders charge extra for.

Hamilton - Fairmont

This design is the real minimum of what we wanted to build. It meets all of our requirements but the front lounge feels small and we did not like the bedroom doors coming off the main hallway. However, the price is right, just $89,000 for the base price.

No need to make a decision yet. We're still waiting for a lot of design brochures to arrive from different builders, I'm sure we'l find what we want.

Huzzah! We received the 'bank pack', contract, and final drawings. It took 83 days and $1500 from signing the contract to get to this point. We can now take the documents to our bank and get final loan approval. We can also take the drawings to various contractors to get quotes to submit to the bank along with the documents from the builder.

Here's a couple of pictures of the house plans for those of you interested (click on them for bigger images).

The to-do-list for this week is:

1. Make appointment with kitchen sub contractor for kitchen fit out selection
2. Make appointment with interior supply company for selection of interior fitout of bathrooms/laundry/appliances etc.
3. Send out floorplan to carpet/tile suppliers for preliminary quote on carpeting and tiling
4. Send out site layout to landscape companies for quote on paving the rear and front driveway installation
5. Send out site layout to earthmoving companies for quote on installation of retaining walls and storm water.

My wife made appointments with the Kitchen and Interior supply companies today for final selections. The Interior fitout selection is due for 2:00pm on August 17 and the kitchen fitout selection is due for 2:00pm on August 18.

I know my wife has some pretty strong ideas about the interior of the house so she's pretty much in charge of this side of things. She's leaning toward a color scheme including browns, but not going for a full brown/brown fitout, just some touches here and there. This will hopefully make the interior look relatively modern but it shouldn't age too badly when the brown color scheme thing goes out of fashion.

Tom Kaye, the former president of one of the oldest and and respected names in paintball, Air Gun Designs, officially announced his retirement from the sport of paintball and his ownership of AGD...

Kingman unveils their new marker which should hit stores in mid-May. The Spyder Electra has a new grip frame that features a middle pivoted trigger frame to obtain higher BPS rates. We have heard that thing can rip.It also has Delrin ACS Bolt to minimize ball breakage...

WGP has just released their newest marker, the WGP Black Magic 2005. WGP has completely done away with the back block, in this marker, and the cocking rod connects directly to the bolt. This should help lower the cycling mass quite a bit, which should reduce the marker's kick.

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AkzoNobel (AKZA; AKZOY) announced that Marya Salim has joined the company as Regional Marketing Director for its North America Automotive & Specialty Coatings (ASC) business unit, reporting to John Griffin, North America Regional Director, and Commercial Director of ASC. In her new role, Marya is responsible for all marketing activities for AkzoNobel’s Vehicle Refinish, Commercial […]

The post Marya Salim Named Head of Marketing for AkzoNobel Automotive & Specialty Coatings North America appeared first on CollisionWeek.

LKQ Corporation (NASDAQ: LKQ) announced that Keystone Automotive Operations, a subsidiary of LKQ’s Specialty segment, received the Channel Partner of the Year Award at the 2024 Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Show in Las Vegas that brings together manufacturers and buyers within the automotive specialty equipment industry. In addition, Warn Industries, a segment of Keystone […]

The post LKQ Subsidiary Keystone Automotive Operations Named 2024 Channel Partner of the Year by SEMA appeared first on CollisionWeek.

Submissions for the awards are open through January 5. The Women’s Industry Network (WIN) announced that nominations for its Most Influential Women (MIW) awards have officially opened. Considered one of the collision repair industry’s highest honors, nominations will be accepted through January 5, 2025. The nomination form is available online. The Class of 2025 MIW […]

The post Women’s Industry Network Opens 2025 Most Influential Women Nominations appeared first on CollisionWeek.

Jerry’s Abra Auto Body and Glass, owned by the Kottschade family, has been partnering with the Mankato Moondogs, a summer collegiate baseball team, has partnered with Jerry’s Abra Auto Body and Glass each season since 2017, with the business donating $100 to the Alzheimer’s Association for every home run the team hits. With 38 home […]

The post Jerry’s Abra Auto Body and Glass of Mankato Donates $3,800 to Alzheimer’s Association appeared first on CollisionWeek.

LKQ Corporation’s Refinish Division announced its new private-label line, FinishMaster by LKQ, that brings together the strengths of Keystone Platinum Refinish and FinishMaster Smart products. FinishMaster by LKQ merges the best features from both lines into a new private label brand with over 650 SKUs to the over 40,000 customers within North America that LKQ […]

The post LKQ Corporation Refinish Division Announced FinishMaster by LKQ Private-Label Line appeared first on CollisionWeek.

The markets in the towns and villages of Languedoc are one of the great pleasures of our region.
From bric a brac and old car wheels through to fresh fish and heavenly cheeses.

- Languedoc Market Days

On the heels of the revelations that authors JT Leroy and James Frey are frauds, the LA Times has published a very detailed report calling into question the identity of celebrated "Native" author Nasdijj , whose book The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams was a New York Times Notable Book and received a Salon book award. In a nutshell, Nasdijj is not who he claims to be in his memoirs. Rather he [PARTIAL POST: VISIT THE SITE TO READ THE REST AND SEE PICTURES]

Posted by Frank On 01/25/06 At 12:14 PM

Not only did Page Six print the news today of Clay Aiken hooking up for gay sex with a horny ex-soldier, but there is more bad news for the American Idol star. Incriminating nude photos of his military tryst have surfaced today on the Internet, and you can only find them here. Uncensored photo after the jump [NSFW] [PARTIAL POST: VISIT THE SITE TO READ THE REST AND SEE PICTURES]

Posted by Frank On 01/27/06 At 11:43 AM

Not everyone had to get around on skis during the blizzard. During a Feb. 12 walk in Central Park with snow falling all around, I discovered where all the ducks and other birds were spending the snowy day: in the water and the trees [PARTIAL POST: VISIT THE SITE TO READ THE REST AND SEE PICTURES]

Posted by Frank On 03/01/06 At 12:04 PM

James McMackin is the roommate of a friend of mine. He once helped my friend Kristen and I get the #1 score in Erotic Photohunt at the Albatross Bar in Astoria, NY. James and I were also both standing around in Union Sq. on Election Day 2004 trying to get on a bus to go petition for John Kerry in Pennsylvania. He went missing this past Monday night in New York City. Please if you [PARTIAL POST: VISIT THE SITE TO READ THE REST AND SEE PICTURES]

Posted by Frank On 03/01/06 At 04:57 PM

Stocks to watch for Friday September 16, 2005

A very interesting post on how cross cultural differences between makers of airplanes Boeing and Airbus (located in small power distance countries) and pilots from South Korea (large power distance country) caused series of dangerous situations and accidents in the late 90’s. Planes produced by Airbus and Boeing are supposed to be flown by 2 …

Continue reading "How cross cultural differences caused Korean Airlines problems"

Dr. Hyman Minsky's explanation of boom and boost in a capitalist economy is based on structure (or rather change of) of financial relationships. It is highly relevant today as it describes what is happening with the housing sector. The practice...

I stumbled onto Haskell around 2 months back while searching for resources on spreadsheet programming. I wanted to do Buy vs Rent calculations before deciding to buy a house. Microsoft Excel is pretty good. However, after a while it simply...

Haskell is an amazing language. One can easily embed a DSL (domain specific language) using monad. Let's take an concrete example to illustrate the power of DSL and Monads in Haskell. I was always fascinated by a very useful, and...

My earlier post on Haskell described a small DSL for calendar apps. In this post, I will show a very simple DSL (written in just 6 lines of code) to replace (a small portion of) GNU make utility. Earlier, I...

In an earlier post, partial make replacement, I developed a small Haskell based DSL to express GNU make like rules. In this post, I take the idea further to support multiple dependencies per target. testO = (return ["test.c", "test.h"]) ->>...

The Giamonster captioned this video “POV: u can’t sit right cuz your boyfriend taught u a lesson.” Looks like it will have been a memorable one! See Also:A Harsh Switching And Anal SexRiding Crop Spanked During Anal SexAnal After SpankingJoey's Anal PunishmentRosebud And Red Welts