Janice Gonnella LOVES Berolina Bakery

Berolina Bakery on Ocean View Boulevard in Glendale

Janice Gonnella Loves Good Danish

Andersen's Danish Restaurant and Bakery

I took a few members of our team to Andersen's Danish Restaurant and Bakery last week after a meeting in Santa Barbara for a delightful afternoon coffee and pastry treat with a surprising European flair.

As Amada and Bob said, "Janice Gonnella sure knows her pastry!"

Also, Andersen's is known for their fabulous breakfasts.  Maybe the next time we're in town for a meeting, we'll come in the AM!

Janice Gonnella Hearts Coffee Cat

Found myself in Santa Barbara over the weekend, and discovered this cool place for a cup of coffee.

It's got a hip vibe.  The staff is super friendly.  The coffee and pastry are just fine.  But, best of all,  you can hang out here all day with your favorite web-connecting device.

I found myself sneaking out of our hotel for two days running (while hubby and kids slumbered on) just to have a few moments to myself along with the paper, a croissant, and a cappuccino.  I'd say it's my new favorite hangout in SB.  Enjoy!  (It's at 1201 Anacapa Street.)

Janice Gonnella Drinks Mystic Monk

Janice Gonnella Recommends Mystic Monk

I just love Mystic Monk coffee.  My favorite is Breakfast Blend.  I get it shipped direct to my home.  I also bought their monk press travel mug for the perfect cup of press-brewed coffee on the road.  I've become such a coffee gourmand that I now store the beans in the Monk's airtight, stainless steel coffee vault storage.  Who knew...it stays much fresher...and the coffee is much tastier!

The following is from their website.  The monks roast their beans in small batches...which apparently makes all the difference.

Brother Java is the master coffee roaster.  His philosophy is that each small batch coffee roast must be not only the labor of his hands, but a master roast of the highest quality.  Brother Java is passionate about obtaining the perfect roasts for you.  He carefully roasts only the finest gourmet coffee beans under conditions that will make each coffee roast consistent and smooth with a taste that will make your taste buds tingle.  With experience and perfection, Mystic Monk Coffee is a coffee to savor and enjoy--with or without cream.  You will love having the monks as your small batch coffee roaster.

I've got a monthly subscription for Mystic Monk...so I never find myself home alone without coffee!

Visit their website at www.mysticmonkcoffee.com.

I know this sounds like I'm being paid to say all this.  I'm not.  Their coffee is just incredible, and I love drinking coffee with a good backstory.

Oahu, Sunset, & Dinner...Compliments of Janice Gonnella

Janice Gonnella et al at the Beach in Oahu

Here's a picture of me, Janice Gonnella, Fran Smith, Glenn Saunders, Steve Richards, Jeannine Tesco, and the rest of my team.  It's hard to tell who we are from the back, but I thought the shot captured a lovely sunset on the beach in Oahu.  As Fran said to me, "Janice Gonnella throws the most fabulous dinner parties, even in the sand!"  Thanks for the compliment, Fran.  As I always say, if you have to work hard...you might as well do it in style!  Hope you all had as much fun at the conference as I did.  I think it was a game changer for us.  Now, on to Los Angeles!"

MBA Lectures Delivered Through a Facebook Application

We've seen plenty of free, online education initiatives in recent years — University of the People is just one example — but it wasn't until recently that we came across a degree program run entirely through Facebook. Yes, that's right, the London School of Business and Finance now offers a free MBA program that's conducted through a Facebook application. Launched in late October, the LSBF Global MBA offers free access to lectures and panel discussion groups online through Facebook. Three studios in the LSBF's London campus continuously record and constantly update study material for students to stay abreast of business events, while a team of advisors is available online. Students must still have a BSc/BA or five years of professional experience in order to earn an accredited LSBF Global MBA, and they must also pay if they want accreditation. Nevertheless, hundreds of hours of free study are available to all users, including 80 hours of high-definition video content. Developed by former Google employees, the LSBF Global MBA app delivers an MBA awarded by the University of Wales. “Historically there are real barriers for people to take the time to do an MBA,” explains LSBF founder Aaron Etingen. “Our new product uses the Facebook platform. We expect to get over 500,000 users in the first year, but that is a conservative estimate.” If an MBA program can be delivered via a Facebook app, just think how many other educational offerings could be as well. One to be inspired by! (Related: Platform lets anyone create and monetize an online school — Free Ivy League courses for high schoolers.) Source:  http://www.springwise.com/education/lsbffacebook/

Unhappy Hipsters Parody Website is a Hit

An anonymously written site with real Dwell magazine photos and not-so-real captions pokes fun at owners of neo-modern digs.

February 06, 2010 | By Christopher Hawthorne | Architecture Critic

So what if the name, for all its alliterative bounce, seems not quite right? And who cares, really, if the quality has ebbed ever so slightly in the last few days?

The website Unhappy Hipsters, www.unhappyhipsters.com, is the most welcome addition to the often self-serious world of architecture and design in recent memory, not to mention a pocket of satirical warmth in the middle of a soggy, recessionary, earthquake-wracked, Martha Coakley winter.  Produced anonymously on a simple Tumblr blogging platform, it adds brief, deadpan captions to photographs from Dwell magazine (and a few other publications), most showing couples looking miserable or lonely in their spare, neo-modern houses. Quite a few of the pictures feature some version of the same basic tableau: a woman sits inside, often on the sofa, while a man stands nearby gazing out the window, silently ruing his life or plotting his escape -- or both.

Unhappy Hipsters entered the world quietly near the end of January, doling out a couple of entries per day, and soon began generating serious Web buzz. Its best captions have a pared-down rhythm to match the architecture on display, along with a forlornly superior air -- Colbert meets Sartre meets "This Is Why You're Fat."

Below an image of a man sitting on the edge of an all-white prefab house by Rocio Romero, turning his back on a woman inside and looking out over a pebbled, carefully raked driveway, are these words: "And so the evenings stretched out before him: still, gray, and gravel-strewn."

Beneath a photograph of a man and woman in bed together -- he reading Bill Buford's "Heat" in paperback, she with her eyes half-closed, a blue rotary phone on his bedside table and a pink one on hers: "There are some things that can't be learned from a book."

And under a picture of a man sitting at a dining table, looking pleadingly at the camera, while behind him another male figure can be seen -- through a latticed wooden screen -- walking up a flight of stairs: "Everyone always leaves."

A few designers and design writers have pointed out that the word "hipsters" in the title strikes the wrong note, and I can't say I disagree: How many hipsters, as the term is generally thrown around, can afford to commission a house from Marmol Radziner or Jeanne Gang, whose work the site features? Meanwhile, they are also busy taking bets -- via Twitter (where @unhappyhipsters now has more than 5,000 followers), Facebook and e-mail -- on the identity of Unhappy Hipsters' creators.

Some fans have read every little change to the stripped-down format like a bunch of tea leaves. Did it mean something when the site began to include photographs from magazines other than Dwell, including one from (of all places) Portland Monthly?

And what about the decision to start adding photo credits alongside the captions? I'm sure Dwell photographers, or their lawyers, fired off some threatening correspondence. But doesn't the whole DIY, guerrilla-satire thing lose a little punch when you start worrying about doing the right thing?

When I e-mailed the address listed on the site, asking whether the authors wanted to reveal themselves, I got this reply:  "We'd like to stay anonymous. But we can tell you this: Unhappy Hipsters is a place to finally say what we've all been thinking: 'Oh, miserable modernist -- you picked the concrete floors and the gravel yard; at least pretend you like it.' "

Fair enough. I have my guesses, but I'll keep them to myself.

The site's sudden popularity suggests that image-based satire is a form particularly well-suited for the Web -- Unhappy Hipsters would work beautifully on the iPad -- and that Twitter, with its unbending 140-character limit, may be sharpening our collective caption-writing skills.

It can also be seen as a sign of the speed with which the Web's viral phenomena wax and wane these days. It somehow seems entirely reasonable to speak nostalgically of the site's early period, all of a week ago, when it was sending its best work out into a relative void.

Once the seal was broken on the Unhappy Hipsters vacuum -- once the world noticed -- it was only a matter of time before its crisp satire started to droop a little, as it has in the last few days. The focus has also begun to drift away from residential architecture, with the addition this week of a picture showing an academic building at Caltech by Frederick Fisher & Partners.

That seems odd: a kind of claustrophobia unique to domestic settings is what gives Unhappy Hipsters much of its kick. In the site's world, the transparency that modern architecture is known for turns every living room into a fishbowl. Emotionally speaking, the open plan is an open wound.

Source:  http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/feb/06/home/la-hm-hipsters6-2010feb06

The Sketchpad: Personal Finance on a Napkin

In a continuing series of back-of-the-napkin drawings and posts on the Bucks blog, Carl Richards, a financial planner, has been explaining the basics of money through simple graphs and diagrams. Here, The New York Times bring them to you all in one place for easier browsing.

Source:  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/your-money/carl-richards-gallery.html#/all/

Ignore Generic Financial Advice (Except This Post)

 

By Carl Richards

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner and the founder of Prasada Capital.

It is dangerous to mix investing with entertainment.  The classic example is thinking that Jim Cramer is your investment adviser rather than some sort of circus clown.  But what can be even more dangerous is taking what’s meant to be general financial information and acting on it, without first taking the time to figure out if it applies to your particular situation.

Making important decisions about how to invest your life savings seems to be getting more and more complex as the amount of information continues to grow.  Take this article, “A Market Forecast That Says ‘Take Cover,’” that appeared in the The New York Times this weekend.  It offers up advice from a market watcher who suggests that individual investors “move completely out of the market and hold cash and cash equivalents, like Treasury bills, for years to come.”

The article has been among the most e-mailed articles for several days, so it’s clearly getting a lot of attention.  But the question is what you’re supposed to do with information (general advice) like this.  Should you follow this advice to “take cover,” regardless of your age, unique goals and family situation?

What about the wisdom handed down by the more popular personal finance gurus like Suze Orman?   Does the generic advice she gives apply to you?  I can’t tell you how many times I have seen people make mistakes because Ms. Orman said to do something that did not apply to their situation.  She may be a genius.  She may even provide some good, general advice.  But she is not your financial planner.

The financial press, personal finance bloggers and best-selling authors are all sources of information.  But don’t confuse information with the real work of figuring out how it applies to your very unique situation.  I know many of the best personal finance bloggers.  As good as many of them are at providing a filter for information, and even providing general rules of thumb, you are the only one who can figure out how it applies to your life.

The reason is simple: planning for your financial future is personal.  It has to be.  A good plan will be unique to your situation, and what is right for your situation may be a disaster for your neighbor.  So read as much as you want, but then make sure you spend the time to figure out how it applies to you before you make important decisions about your life savings.

Source:  http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/ignore-generic-financial-advice-except-this-post/

Rent Payments Now Appear on Experian Credit Reports

By Blake Ellis

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- For those of you without credit cards or mortgages, there's a new way to build your credit: Pay your rent on time.  In January, credit reporting agency Experian started including residential rental payment data on its credit reports. Previously, only mortgage payments were recorded because banks report monthly to the credit bureau.

This change will not, however, affect every consumer's credit because most landlords still do not report payments to Experian. But the company does expect the number of people impacted to be in the "low millions."

"For many, rent was their biggest monthly expenditure, and they never got the credit they deserved for making those payments," said Brannan Johnston, vice president and managing director of Experian's RentBureau. "Historically only negative information showed up for renters through collections or evictions."

So far, Experian has collected histories from more than 45 property managers across the country through its RentBureau division, which it said covers more than 8 million residents nationwide.  But Experian doesn't provide a list of participating properties. If you want to know if your credit will be impacted, you have to ask your management company or order a credit report from Experian.

Renting with bad credit

Through the addition of rental data, one in three consumers falling in the lowest rung of Experian's VantageScore credit scoring model (receiving a letter grade of an F and scoring between 501 and 600) will move up to at least the next level (with a D-grade and a score between 601 and 700), the agency said.

And not only will including rental data help many consumers improve their credit, it has led Experian to open new files for a third of consumers with rental data in its system--including college students and anyone without a bank account or credit history.

0:00 /1:32How to establish your credit score

For those of you who aren't as responsible with your monthly payments, you're safe--for now. Only positive accounts are currently being included on Experian reports. But the agency hopes to begin adding negative accounts to its reports next year.

While credit card issuers typically consider a payment late after 30 days, you're usually considered late after only 5 days with rental properties, said Johnston.  So instead of including negative data for consumers who have been late paying their rent from time to time, Johnson said Experian is likely only to include negative data if someone moved out of an apartment while still owing money, for example.

Experian is currently the only credit reporting agency to include rental payment data, so your FICO score and credit scores or reports from TransUnion and Equifax won't reflect how good--or bad--a renter you are.

Source:  http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/15/pf/saving/experian_credit_report_rent/