This is my favorite cookie recipe ever. Plain and simple. Cookies rock and this one is exceptional:
http://latimes.upickem.net/engine/Details.aspx?p=A&c=21592&s=5622586&i=1
This recipe happens to belong to my Godmother and she entered it into this contest with the LA Times, so please vote for it!
Well, try it too, but after you vote for it!
Monday, November 8, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
San Diego Commercial Office Space - Old Town Plaza Commuting Options
In the last few weeks, I have had a number of inquiries about various options for commuting to Old Town Plaza. This is great news because we do have so many options for commuting here it's really amazing.
1. COASTER/San Diego Trolley - arguably the best option for getting to Old Town Plaza if you live along the Coast/I-5 Corridor anywhere south of Oceanside. Personally, I live in Carmel Valley and take the COASTER frequently from the Sorrento Valley Station. The total commute time for me, door-to-door is about 31 minutes - 21 of those minutes are used on the actual train ride itself.
As for the San Diego Trolley, this is an excellent option if you live in Downtown, Mission Valley, East County or Santee.
Both the San Diego Trolley and the COASTER stop at the Old Town Transit Center.
View Larger Map
2. Bicycle - another fantastic option. Personally, I use this option once a week or so. When riding a bike, you have the option of riding it to a COASTER train or San Diego Trolley and then riding your bike from Old Town Transit Center to Old Town Plaza. For our resident hard-chargers, you can always ride all the way in! We have a bike rack secured behind the gates of the P1 Parking Garage near the Building A elevator landing.
3. Scooter - arguably the best option for those customers of ours who live in any of the great urban neighborhoods located close to Old Town Plaza. North Park, South Park, Mission Hills, Hillcrest, Banker's Hill, Little Italy, Downtown, Mission Valley and Pt. Loma. Matt bought a Vespa for his commute to Mission Hills. Between the fuel economy (85 mpg), acquisition cost ($4500 MSRP) and ease of storage/parking, the scooter has no rival in terms of utility and efficiency.
4. Ride Share/Carpool - traditionally a fantastic option if you live near other co-workers in your office who have similar schedules. However, we all know how likely that is...
5. Car - well, this doesn't really need an explanation.
1. COASTER/San Diego Trolley - arguably the best option for getting to Old Town Plaza if you live along the Coast/I-5 Corridor anywhere south of Oceanside. Personally, I live in Carmel Valley and take the COASTER frequently from the Sorrento Valley Station. The total commute time for me, door-to-door is about 31 minutes - 21 of those minutes are used on the actual train ride itself.
As for the San Diego Trolley, this is an excellent option if you live in Downtown, Mission Valley, East County or Santee.
Both the San Diego Trolley and the COASTER stop at the Old Town Transit Center.
View Larger Map
2. Bicycle - another fantastic option. Personally, I use this option once a week or so. When riding a bike, you have the option of riding it to a COASTER train or San Diego Trolley and then riding your bike from Old Town Transit Center to Old Town Plaza. For our resident hard-chargers, you can always ride all the way in! We have a bike rack secured behind the gates of the P1 Parking Garage near the Building A elevator landing.
3. Scooter - arguably the best option for those customers of ours who live in any of the great urban neighborhoods located close to Old Town Plaza. North Park, South Park, Mission Hills, Hillcrest, Banker's Hill, Little Italy, Downtown, Mission Valley and Pt. Loma. Matt bought a Vespa for his commute to Mission Hills. Between the fuel economy (85 mpg), acquisition cost ($4500 MSRP) and ease of storage/parking, the scooter has no rival in terms of utility and efficiency.
4. Ride Share/Carpool - traditionally a fantastic option if you live near other co-workers in your office who have similar schedules. However, we all know how likely that is...
5. Car - well, this doesn't really need an explanation.
San Diego Office Space - Improve ROI Using Life Cycle Extension
If you were to glance at the Old Town Plaza blog and see posts like "Disposable Plastics" or "The Plague of Bottled Water," you might think that Intermarket Investment Group is just some crazy environmental group who found a company and platform to carry their message.
This could not be farther from the truth.
In addition to a variety of other reasons, Intermarket's environmentally responsible change in mission came from one simple business metric: by increasing the life cycle of all the components required to run a company that owns and operates commercial office space, you can directly cut expenses and thereby increase profitability. As any good businessman knows, reducing expenses is actually far more potent than simply increasing sales.
In the case of running Intermarket, we have found that reducing expenses is actually far more valuable than increasing sales because in the commercial real estate business, where inventory is predefined (we cannot just increase the number of shifts or outsource additional production to another factory to increase output like a consumer products company can), increasing sales is sometimes not even an option. When our portfolio is fully leased, we cannot simply build another building in a month or two to increase inventory and subsequently increase sales. Increasing inventory in commercial real estate takes years (or sometimes just a few quarters if you go the acquisition route - but that assumes you can even find a quality asset in which you can invest).
Old Town's Greenest Office Space - Old Town Plaza
That leaves us with reducing expenses. By reducing expenses, we are directly increasing the free cash flow and subsequent profitability of a given property. In turn, this also helps us to deliver more competitive rates either by lowering our rates while maintaining our product offering, keeping our existing rates and improving our product offering or increasing our rates slightly to deliver game-changing improvements to our buildings. In theory, if our competitors have not reduced expenses at the same time and all of us are impacted by the same economic factors in the sub-market (Old Town/5th Avenue in San Diego), then this disparity will give us a competitive advantage in our space. No matter what option we choose, reductions in expenses directly benefit our customers every time, all the time.
One good example of life cycle enhancement and augmentation is Solar Reflective Window Film. We could replace all of our windows here at Old Town Plaza with the latest, most advanced dual-pane, Argon-gas, low-e windows on the market. However, that would not only be cost-prohibitive, but it would also generate an inordinate amount of landfill waste prematurely because the existing windows have plenty of usable service life in them. Instead, we chose to augment the existing windows with Solar Reflective Window Film with great results. The film reflects more than 70% of the incoming solar radiation from the sun away from the building. In turn, this reduces the heat load on the building and the subsequent HVAC cooling requirements which lowers our electricity consumption. Keeping power consumption to a minimum reduces costs for our end-users.
While not a direct life cycle analysis project, our most recent water feature improvement (conversion of the courtyard fountain to a planter featuring plants native to the San Diego region), completed earlier this year, provides us another good example of how environmentally responsible investment can lead to improved profitability and better product offerings.
Fountain replaced by native plants
The conversion project reduced our water consumption 40% per month, on average. Simultaneously, the City of San Diego is in the middle of a series of 20% annual rate hikes which started a few years ago. Had we opted to do nothing, Old Town Plaza would have used the same amount of water running the fountain, but we would have been paying 20% more for the water each year (same level of consumption). Instead, by investing in an environmentally responsible feature like native planters, we significantly reduced the impact of the unavoidable 20% rate hike that we were facing from the City of San Diego by greatly reducing consumption. This netted our tenants direct insulation (not 100%) from cost increases in utilities.
In short, we are not "environmentalists" or anything close to it. We are a small business that has found new meaning in the old adage that "less is more." Intermarket does more with less - it is our trademark.
These are just a couple of ways that Old Town Plaza continues to set itself apart from the competition in the Old Town/5th Avenue commercial real estate sub-market of San Diego. Located just one block off of the Interstate 5 Freeway, Old Town Plaza is the premier location for companies looking for superior value, unrivaled location to I-5 and I-8, close proximity to San Diego International Airport and walking distance to SPAWAR - all wrapped in an environmentally responsible and efficient package. Click here to take a Video Tour of Old Town Plaza right now, check out our Video Tour on our website or contact our office today for a personal tour of our property.
To view our available listings, click here:
http://www.leaseoldtown.com/leasing.html
This could not be farther from the truth.
In addition to a variety of other reasons, Intermarket's environmentally responsible change in mission came from one simple business metric: by increasing the life cycle of all the components required to run a company that owns and operates commercial office space, you can directly cut expenses and thereby increase profitability. As any good businessman knows, reducing expenses is actually far more potent than simply increasing sales.
In the case of running Intermarket, we have found that reducing expenses is actually far more valuable than increasing sales because in the commercial real estate business, where inventory is predefined (we cannot just increase the number of shifts or outsource additional production to another factory to increase output like a consumer products company can), increasing sales is sometimes not even an option. When our portfolio is fully leased, we cannot simply build another building in a month or two to increase inventory and subsequently increase sales. Increasing inventory in commercial real estate takes years (or sometimes just a few quarters if you go the acquisition route - but that assumes you can even find a quality asset in which you can invest).
Old Town's Greenest Office Space - Old Town Plaza
That leaves us with reducing expenses. By reducing expenses, we are directly increasing the free cash flow and subsequent profitability of a given property. In turn, this also helps us to deliver more competitive rates either by lowering our rates while maintaining our product offering, keeping our existing rates and improving our product offering or increasing our rates slightly to deliver game-changing improvements to our buildings. In theory, if our competitors have not reduced expenses at the same time and all of us are impacted by the same economic factors in the sub-market (Old Town/5th Avenue in San Diego), then this disparity will give us a competitive advantage in our space. No matter what option we choose, reductions in expenses directly benefit our customers every time, all the time.
One good example of life cycle enhancement and augmentation is Solar Reflective Window Film. We could replace all of our windows here at Old Town Plaza with the latest, most advanced dual-pane, Argon-gas, low-e windows on the market. However, that would not only be cost-prohibitive, but it would also generate an inordinate amount of landfill waste prematurely because the existing windows have plenty of usable service life in them. Instead, we chose to augment the existing windows with Solar Reflective Window Film with great results. The film reflects more than 70% of the incoming solar radiation from the sun away from the building. In turn, this reduces the heat load on the building and the subsequent HVAC cooling requirements which lowers our electricity consumption. Keeping power consumption to a minimum reduces costs for our end-users.
While not a direct life cycle analysis project, our most recent water feature improvement (conversion of the courtyard fountain to a planter featuring plants native to the San Diego region), completed earlier this year, provides us another good example of how environmentally responsible investment can lead to improved profitability and better product offerings.
Fountain replaced by native plants
The conversion project reduced our water consumption 40% per month, on average. Simultaneously, the City of San Diego is in the middle of a series of 20% annual rate hikes which started a few years ago. Had we opted to do nothing, Old Town Plaza would have used the same amount of water running the fountain, but we would have been paying 20% more for the water each year (same level of consumption). Instead, by investing in an environmentally responsible feature like native planters, we significantly reduced the impact of the unavoidable 20% rate hike that we were facing from the City of San Diego by greatly reducing consumption. This netted our tenants direct insulation (not 100%) from cost increases in utilities.
In short, we are not "environmentalists" or anything close to it. We are a small business that has found new meaning in the old adage that "less is more." Intermarket does more with less - it is our trademark.
These are just a couple of ways that Old Town Plaza continues to set itself apart from the competition in the Old Town/5th Avenue commercial real estate sub-market of San Diego. Located just one block off of the Interstate 5 Freeway, Old Town Plaza is the premier location for companies looking for superior value, unrivaled location to I-5 and I-8, close proximity to San Diego International Airport and walking distance to SPAWAR - all wrapped in an environmentally responsible and efficient package. Click here to take a Video Tour of Old Town Plaza right now, check out our Video Tour on our website or contact our office today for a personal tour of our property.
To view our available listings, click here:
http://www.leaseoldtown.com/leasing.html
Save Money on Your Monthly Water Bill with a $5 Bucket
Water is a big problem for us today - not only here in sunny San Diego, CA, but the world at large. The dwindling stock of fresh water supplies is no secret to anyone who has picked up a Wall Street Journal within the last three years. We have discussed water at length here given that the City of San Diego approved major annual rates hikes for water supplies for the next few years.
To that end, here is another little step each of us can do to save more water than we probably thought: recover and save the excess water running from your shower while you wait for the water to get hot. You will be absolutely amazed at how much water is wasted while we wait for our water to get hot - even if you do have a hot water pump in your house or an instant hot water heater.
This savings is created by the fact that there is actually quite a bit of water just sitting in your pipes in between your shower head and the water source. Doesn't sound like much water, right? That is what I thought too.
Five gallon bucket = BIG $$$ savings on water bill
I started running this experiment in my own home a few months ago. I bought a simple five gallon bucket from Ace Hardware and put it under my shower head where it collected excess water while I waited for the shower to heat up. It is worth noting that all of my showers are fitted with SDG&E supplied Energy Saver (low-flow) Shower heads, so wasted water is already kept to a minimum. The shower I used for this experiment is also located just ten feet from the water heater. I was trying to use the most efficient setup possible to see what a minimum savings/efficiency threshold would look like.
After just one week I found that I was saving five gallons every two days taking just one shower a day from the shower just ten feet from the water heater and outfitted with a high-efficiency shower head. Wow. I had so much excess water that I began to dump my excess shower water into a large spare trash can. I filled the large trash can in a little under three weeks. I now use this water to irrigate my yard. I have completely shutdown my backyard irrigation system and gone to just using a simple backpack-style hand pump sprayer (similar to one you would use for insecticide).
My water bill was cut in half. That's right - a 50% reduction in water consumption and no adverse consequences to show for it. If anything, I found my yard was getting TOO MUCH water using just the shower excess (my backyard is well shaded) and I have now started to use the water in the front yard too, but there is not enough water savings to completely replace irrigation in the front yard, unfortunately.
Is this a particularly big deal in the scheme of things? No, not at all. But you might be able to save yourself 50% per month on your water bill - especially if you have a family or a large house. Now I would say that is something worth noting.
These same types of practices are applied everyday here at Old Town Plaza - Old Town's Greenest Commercial Office Building. To find out more about what we are doing at Old Town Plaza to reduce our environmental impact or about how you can get into the premier commercial office space in Old Town, check out our website at www.LeaseOldTown.com or call our office to schedule a tour. Our available listings can be found here: http://www.leaseoldtown.com/leasing.html
Space is limited and going fast, so call today!
To that end, here is another little step each of us can do to save more water than we probably thought: recover and save the excess water running from your shower while you wait for the water to get hot. You will be absolutely amazed at how much water is wasted while we wait for our water to get hot - even if you do have a hot water pump in your house or an instant hot water heater.
This savings is created by the fact that there is actually quite a bit of water just sitting in your pipes in between your shower head and the water source. Doesn't sound like much water, right? That is what I thought too.
Five gallon bucket = BIG $$$ savings on water bill
I started running this experiment in my own home a few months ago. I bought a simple five gallon bucket from Ace Hardware and put it under my shower head where it collected excess water while I waited for the shower to heat up. It is worth noting that all of my showers are fitted with SDG&E supplied Energy Saver (low-flow) Shower heads, so wasted water is already kept to a minimum. The shower I used for this experiment is also located just ten feet from the water heater. I was trying to use the most efficient setup possible to see what a minimum savings/efficiency threshold would look like.
After just one week I found that I was saving five gallons every two days taking just one shower a day from the shower just ten feet from the water heater and outfitted with a high-efficiency shower head. Wow. I had so much excess water that I began to dump my excess shower water into a large spare trash can. I filled the large trash can in a little under three weeks. I now use this water to irrigate my yard. I have completely shutdown my backyard irrigation system and gone to just using a simple backpack-style hand pump sprayer (similar to one you would use for insecticide).
My water bill was cut in half. That's right - a 50% reduction in water consumption and no adverse consequences to show for it. If anything, I found my yard was getting TOO MUCH water using just the shower excess (my backyard is well shaded) and I have now started to use the water in the front yard too, but there is not enough water savings to completely replace irrigation in the front yard, unfortunately.
Is this a particularly big deal in the scheme of things? No, not at all. But you might be able to save yourself 50% per month on your water bill - especially if you have a family or a large house. Now I would say that is something worth noting.
These same types of practices are applied everyday here at Old Town Plaza - Old Town's Greenest Commercial Office Building. To find out more about what we are doing at Old Town Plaza to reduce our environmental impact or about how you can get into the premier commercial office space in Old Town, check out our website at www.LeaseOldTown.com or call our office to schedule a tour. Our available listings can be found here: http://www.leaseoldtown.com/leasing.html
Space is limited and going fast, so call today!
Old Town Plaza Customer Testimonial - Doug Dickerson, KW Advisors
We recently did a deal with Doug Dickerson from KW Advisors and it was quite possibly the smoothest, most professional deal Matt and I have ever done. This was due in no small part to Doug Dickerson of KW Advisors. His client, Traffic Geyser, LLC, took delivery of a commercial office suite here at Old Town Plaza this past weekend. Here is what Mr. Dickerson had to say about his experience here at Old Town Plaza. We believe the note speaks for itself (published here at OTP's LeaseOldTown.net with permission from Mr. Dickerson):
Matt & Justin,
I hope things are going well over at OTP as you near full occupancy.
In addition, I would like to say that this was one of the more enjoyable deals that I have worked on. The response times, good will, and professionalism were all top notch.
Thanks,
Doug Dickerson | Associate Director
KW Commercial | Corporate Advisory Services
12265 El Camino Real, Suite 180 | San Diego, CA 92130
858.243.2608 - Cell | 858.436.8303 - Office
Lic. #01824183
Matt & Justin,
I hope things are going well over at OTP as you near full occupancy.
In addition, I would like to say that this was one of the more enjoyable deals that I have worked on. The response times, good will, and professionalism were all top notch.
Thanks,
Doug Dickerson | Associate Director
KW Commercial | Corporate Advisory Services
12265 El Camino Real, Suite 180 | San Diego, CA 92130
858.243.2608 - Cell | 858.436.8303 - Office
Lic. #01824183
San Diego Office Space For Lease - Old Town Plaza is 98.7% LEASED!
At the beginning of August 2010, Old Town Plaza was 83% leased, but today we are pleased to announce that Old Town Plaza is now 98% leased! About two months ago, we decided to make some changes to our commercial real estate leasing strategy and we have been quite pleased with the results.
San Diego Commercial Office Space - LeaseOldTown.com
This is great news for all of our valued commercial office customers here at Old Town Plaza. With nearly maximum occupancy and strong leasing velocity in support, we will be able to continue our significant improvement programs and try to make our customer experience here at Old Town Plaza better than ever for out fantastic customers!
We would like to take this opportunity to strongly encourage our existing customers to renew/expand early so we can make sure we get the best possible arrangements in place which suit the needs of your business.
Thank you to all of our special customers who have made this possible - we couldn't do it without you all!
San Diego Commercial Office Space - LeaseOldTown.com
This is great news for all of our valued commercial office customers here at Old Town Plaza. With nearly maximum occupancy and strong leasing velocity in support, we will be able to continue our significant improvement programs and try to make our customer experience here at Old Town Plaza better than ever for out fantastic customers!
We would like to take this opportunity to strongly encourage our existing customers to renew/expand early so we can make sure we get the best possible arrangements in place which suit the needs of your business.
Thank you to all of our special customers who have made this possible - we couldn't do it without you all!
San Diego Small Business Success Story - Xterra Wetsuits
This afternoon I took a short respite from our normal business running commercial office space in San Diego here at Old Town Plaza and visited with Brian and Glynn from Xterra Wetsuits right here in sunny San Diego. Xterra is the world leader in high-performance Triathalon wetsuits and has been a runaway success story over the last few years. They are a rare bright spot in this otherwise brutal recession. I visit with Brian and Glynn as they take us through how they got started with their small business, what makes them a successful small business, how they differentiate themselves and all that goes into making a high performance Triathalon Wetsuit.
Stay tuned to LeaseOldTown.net for more great profiles on Small Business Success Stories in San Diego.
Stay tuned to LeaseOldTown.net for more great profiles on Small Business Success Stories in San Diego.
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