We are very proud of our latest website for landscape design company Paul Massad Landscaping. The site has some of the best graphics we’ve ever gotten a chance to use, their work is amazing, and that helps a lot. The homepage features a large image slider featuring some of the their finest works. There is also a rotating quote widget thanks to the Flexi Quote rotator plugin for WordPress.

For the first time ever we worked heavily with the Google Maps API to create a custom project map. While retaining all the functionality of your standard Google Map, we add job indicators in the form of a tiny shovel to create ‘hotspots’. When you move the cursor over these hotspots you get a job preview with a picture and a link (to come).

This type of integration can be custom tailored to any number of different applications. If you would like to see what we can do for your website contact us here.

• Not everyone in the world is on Facebook, so you could be instantly removing a demographic from your potential client base.
• The simplicity and open nature of Facebook makes it much easier for questionable businesses to present themselves as legitimate establishments without the hassle of actually being a legitimate business that gets indexed and properly ranked by major search engines.
• Friends can be bought and sold (not literally) on Facebook, making for unrealistic friend counts and resulting in businesses that look much more established than they actually are.
• Brand identity is something that you will severely lack if you don’t happen to utilize the same blue as Facebook. The styling options for businesses on Facebook, be it pages or personal are basically non-existent.
• Websites came first, Facebook is just a website that provides limited option websites to anyone with the ability to complete a reCaptcha field. You have no corporate identity, no identifying marks, and no real presence.

With that said, I praise Facebook, for giving the slight ability of making a ‘personal’ page to anyone with the ability to stumble into the local library. For the average social enthusiast its perfect, but for an entrepreneur or business owner its substitution for a website is the equivalent of posting your brochure on a billboard. Facebook should be the catalyst for promoting your website, the amount of plugins available is practically overwhelming. If your idea of farming on Facebook is more about finding potential clients as opposed to rooting carrots or lentils or whatever it is, then start plugging for yourself. If you are a legitimate specialist in your field then people want to read what you have to say. You are at the forefront of woodstove technology? People want to know your pellet prowess, preach it, post it, blog it, f’ing ink it on the bottom of your shoe and go for a walk.

Facebook is a tool, but i consider it like a crescent wrench that is stuck wide open. It only works for minimal amount of nuts, and if you could adjust it, it would work alot better.

How I saved $495 and a trip to the Genius Bar®…

In an effort to have the best gear at the lowest prices sometimes you need to be creative. I recently purchased an ‘as-is’ style 30″ Apple® Cinema Display via eBay™ at a significant discount. When it arrived I quickly assessed the damage; perfect, distorted, and flickering seemed to be the 3 modes of operation. While perfect mode was pretty good it only lasted for short spans, would require constant powering down, or the occasional insult.

At this point I was convinced I needed a new LCD screen which are few and far between…-or an expensive trip to the Genius Bar®. I decided to keep ‘using’ it which quickly became frustrating. They say the more screen real estate you have the more productive you are but this is certainly not the case with a malfunctioning monitor. After exhausting all patience and powering off and on again not really fixing the distortion I started tilting it up and down and noticed a trend. The monitor would work perfect when it was at either extreme. This led me to believe this problem was connection related a.k.a. easier on the wallet.

After some online digging and a call to the local Apple store I found out I was back to square one, looking at a $500 repair. Yup $500 bucks to replace a cable. Being the type to usually give up at this point I stood up and declared “No! Apple you’re not ruining my credit anymore!” So I started looking for the cable online and of course it turns out they are basically unicorns for the 30″ models. And no, the other sizes are not compatible. At this point the only option was to crack it open and see what I was working with. I got my courage up but first my tools…

WARNING THIS WILL VOID ANY WARRANTY AND IF YOU FOLLOW ALL THE STEPS THE BACK OF YOUR MONITOR WILL NOT BE AS PRETTY

Required Tools

• Towel
• Knife, sharp
• Pliers, assorted
• Paint Scrappy thing, this is crucial
• 3.5mm + driver
• Wide painters tape
• Electrical tape
• Tons of small zip ties
• Voided warranty acceptance

Step 1 | Open it Up

This really isn’t as bad as you might think, you just need to be patient (i’m not even close to but still pulled it off. so i guess it’s optional.) First things first clear a large working area and cover it with a towel. Make sure you get a thin-blade paint scrapper, the official Elite Web Scraper is 1.25″ or 90 pixels wide (if you scratch your monitor attempting to measure your paint scraper you should quit now). Start at the top on the left side (facing you, do the left side first i’ll explain why later) and wiggle your scraper under the top of plastic end cap until you can pry up. There is a sticky-as-all-hell strip of super foam holding the cap on and you just need to work it free. A heat gun / hairdryer may help but is not necessary. When you get that off do the same on the right side BEING EXTREMELY CAREFUL AT THE BOTTOM THAT YOU DON’T RIP THE SOCKET OUT OF THE POWER PANEL. Use your pliers to hold the base of the socket on the power panel and pull the wire and plug free. You should now be looking at this:

Using your phillips head screw driver take out the 4 screws on the left and the 4 on the right. Put those somewhere safe like a magnet. You can now remove the brackets on the end that keep the bezel tight, pry them with the scraper if needed. Now all you have to do is pull the slide locks on either end.

Now pull the cable thru the hole in the stand if you haven’t already. At this point lay the monitor down on its back, you can remove the stand but i don’t suggest it because you will end up putting more stress on your already stressed cable; the stand acts as a buffer keeping the cable from getting bent too much. So with the bottom of the stand facing you gently lift the bezel from both ends, then stick the roll of tape or whatever fits in there to hold it up. Disconnect the led as clearly illustrated in this crappy after photo:

Now I seriously advise that you tape the top bezel where it clam shells together or you risk scratching up your screen. Push from the white button in the back and the lcd will come free. Then you need to feed the cord thru the back while you slide the lcd out the bottom. It’s awkward for sure…

Step 2 | Assess the mess

So you’ve now got a plethora of cables staring at you, do a thorough check of all connections, looking for any fraying or obvious signs of trouble. You can power test with the monitor in this state, just keep it on a towel to be safe and I plugged the power switch back in, but you might not need to…If you don’t see anything obvious there’s a couple things you can try. This is a picture of my initial ‘lockdown’ technique:

It worked well for a day or two for me, I just clamped down everything with some longer screws and big washers. I’ve since realized that when the whole unit is buttoned up this mod is pointless because there’s already pressure on the connection from the whole thing being sandwiched together so tight. It’s potentially worth a shot because the next step is removing them for good.

Step 3 | Strip it

The reason why you get a bad signal is because there is a tiny break in your cable somewhere. I found that slack helps complete the circuit more effectively. Remove the 3 main connection screws from the previous image. Remove the lower two screws that tie down the secondary sheathed cables.

Since I had no clue where the damaged part was (and after several attempts to adjust, wiggle etc) I knew the ring needed to go because it was going to put pressure on the cable as long as it was there. Using cutters remove the connector, plastic ring cap and I did a half inch of the insulation as well:

Step 4 | Wrap it up

There’s nothing complicated here, shrink wrap would be awesome but would be all but impossible to get it over the cables so just start wrapping them as tight as you can with electrical tape being careful not to further stress the cables. Next go to town with the zip ties, the more the better in my book. The best technique for tight zip ties is to get them started then pull them quickly, it gets them super tight:

You should also wrap the newly exposed hole in the case

Step 5 | Test!

Put it all back together, plug it all back in and give it a shot! If all goes well you should be good to go until something else breaks!

The Ugly Backend

The Pretty Frontend

Working perfectly for: 591 days 19 hours 57 minutes 20 seconds

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