Armando Montelongo, So-called Real Estate Guru Has A Local Radio Ad – Be Wary!

Many of you may have heard a commercial on the radio recently by a guy named Armando Montelongo.  He is selling his instructional real estate materials.  He mentions that he appears on the A&E television show Flip This House. Well you should know that he is not all he is cracked up to be.  As they say, Buyer Beware!  He has been indicted right here in Travis County for Fraud and has had his own share of foreclosure troubles.

Here are a few mentions of him around the web:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_This_House_(TV_series)#Season_Three_2

Flip This Lawsuit is a site containing a lot of information regarding the Montelongos and their relationship with the show and its former cast.  This post in particular is very interesting.

Here is an article from the SA Express reagarding his indictment.

Awesome new PDF Plugin for Firefox

I used to use the PDF Browser Plugin from http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/ but it does not work on Intel Macs.  And since I have been on Intel Macs for a couple of years now, I have been very frustratetd with this situation.  Safari now has buil-in PDF viewing capabililty but Firefox has been lacking.  It is extremely annoying to view PDFs in Firefox.  You click on the llink to the PDF and then you have to save it.  Then you have to find the file and open it only to realize it is not what you needed.  So then you have to go and delete the file so your computer doesn’t get littered with stray PDFs.  Well, finally, there is an answer. Someone has released a new PDF plugin for Firefox that is completely open-source.  It allows you to quickly and easily view a PDF right in your browser window.

Passenger, Memory and mod_rewrite

Well, as I stated in my previous post, I enabled Passenger for my Austin Real Estate site.  Well, everything seemed fine for the first few days.  But then I noticed that my memory usage was steadily creeping up.  I killed my ruby processes and that helped but then it just started creeping up again.  After working with Dreamhost, they discovered there was a bug in that version of Passenger and they upgraded it for me and now my memory usage is much lower and holding steady.  However, I have another problem.  Apparently Passenger disables mod_rewrite.  This is fine since Passenger doeesn’t need it to run your Rails app.  However, I also had a wordpress instance on my domain.  I used a mod_rewrite to redirect users to the blog instead of Rails trying to interpret the url.  This no longer works and now my blog is dead.  I have several options to fix this.  After much deliberating, I have decided to move my Rails app to a subdomain, search.braxtonbeyer.com.  I will keep the blog on the main domain as it has most of the content. So, all in all, I am still satisfied with Passenger, but it does pay to do a little research before making major changes to your site.

Spam can be funny

I got into the office a little late this morning.  I was feeling a little down since I was hungover and was out later than I should have been last night.  I was thinking to myself, “I feel like crap right now,” and then I go to check my email and this is what i get.

I don’t understand how this stuff gets out.  There is no link in it, no image.  How does someone benefit from sending this stuff out?  Anyway, I have got to get back to work so I can improve my life.

Home featured on KVUE News

One of my client’s home was shown on KVUE last night.  I represented him when buying the house.  Patrick Easter, who you will see in the clip is the developer who built my client’s home and is placing another one next to it.

The story covers manufactured homes and the benefits they can provide.  One of the biggest misconceptions about manufactured homes is that they are all mobile homes and cheap.  This is simply not true.  Homes manufactured in a warehouse can be more efficient, built faster, and built better than many other homes since they are constructed in a controlled environment.  Many people are realizing this and that is why manufactured homes are growing in popularity.  Watch the story for more info.

Optimizing Rails Server Performance on Dreamhost

Lately, I have been working on some SEO for my Austin Real Estate site.  Slowly but surely my traffic has been increasing so I figured it was time for me to solve some long standing issues before my site gets too busy.  It is hosted on Dreamhost and has been pretty slow.  I built the site in Rails and it was my first production site built using Rails so I figured my ignorance with developing in Rails was causing the problem.  I did a lot of reading and optimized my code and environment as much as possible and it really didn’t seem to help much.

So I came to the conclusion that it was my host.  Dreamhost has been very open about how they feel about hosting Rails on a shared server.  DHH obviously disagrees.  But recently Dreamhost started offering a solution.  They now offer dedicated virtual hosting plans.  I decided to try it.  Mine was finally set up a couple of days ago.  Well my site immediately crashed.  Awesome.  My memory usage was constantly running too high.  I bumped up my memory allowance and the site became stable again and actually ran a bit faster.  However, I still wasn’t satisfied.  So then I tried setting up a Mongrel server which Dreamhost started offering along with the virtual servers.  I wasn’t too impressed.  So what was next?  Well Dreamhost also recently started offering Passenger as a Rails hostiing option.  I disabled the Mongrel and turned on Passenger.  The memory usage immediately dropped and the site had a noticeable speed increase.  I think I finally found my answer.  This was all a very unscientific series of tests by a complete novice sysadmin but I think the site is much better off.  Time will tell.

Waller Creek Survey

I attended the City’s Waller Creek Workshop recently and was very impressed with the ideas they had as well as changes they had implemented due to citizen feedback.  They are continuing to take feedback through their online survey until the end of this month.  I urge each of you to give your input.  The Waller Creek development can be a major attraction for our city.  Let’s make sure we get it right.

More on the City Council Point-of-Sale Ordinance

I submitted an email to the Mayor recently through ABOR’s Take Action website.  I received a form-letter response back.  It points out a few directions that the city council gave to the task force that will be formulating the recommendations regarding the ordinance.  If these directions are followed, then the ordinance could actually be very helpful and less damaging as many of us feared.  Here is the full email: Continue reading More on the City Council Point-of-Sale Ordinance

Villa Muse Project is Cancelled

Villa Muse, the large entertainment project, announced that it will look to build elsewhere instead of in East Austin.  They had been in discussions with the city to be removed from Austin’s ETJ but Austin ultimately decided against doing this.  Being out of the ETJ would have prevented Austin from annexing the land in the future. According to Mayor Wynn, the project could have moved only a few thousand feet and been out of the ETJ but ultimately they decided against this.  Hopefully, the project can be salvaged as I think it would be a great boon for the city.

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