Paul J. Lagassey
Links Page
Last Updated – August 23, 2008
Disclaimer:
This links page includes websites that I really like or find useful, but this not an endorsement. Check it out and make your own decision.
If a link is broken, email me at paul@lagssey.com
If you really like any of these sites I encourage you to let the owner(s) (and me) know, and if you have a website add your own link to them. A pat on the back makes everyone feel good :), and cross linking helps everyone’s ranking in the search engines.
Paul
Favorite Places in Vero Beach
Bodega Blue – Located in historic downtown Vero Beach. Hundred’s of different kinds of beer, good food, lots of cheeses and live music on Friday nights.
Scampi Grill – One of my favorite Italian restaurants in town; run by my friend Mimo & his son Alex. His brother-in-law, Enzo, did all the painting and decoration in the restaurant. When I first moved to Vero, I hired Enzo to do much of the renovations and painting in my house. Mimo is one of the local artists, and he displays some of his works in his restaurant (see below)
Chelsea’s on Cardinal – A great shop to get food & wine.
Vero Beach has some great local musicians. Check out Ernie Southern, Ben Prestage and Jeremy Baker who are regulars at Bodega Blue. When I was doing real estate deal in New England in the late 1980’s, Jeremy was doing stand-up at the InProv in Providence, RI.. A few more of my favorites, Steven (a/k/a 24 Steven), The River Rats, The Possums, and Stoney and The House Rockers (my friend Brian Coke is their drummer) who play at Waldo’s on Wednesday nights.
Drink (New)
My goddaughter Jessica makes some great hand-crafted herbal teas. I really like them, and you will too!
Food
Real Life Recipes – Share and preserve your family recipes and traditions on-line. Visitors can contribute their own recipes and write about the family traditions behind those recipes. You can even upload short videos or pictures with your recipes. Read something special from the site on Italian Heritage that was contributed by my friend George Costonis.
Pressure Cooker Recipes – I like cooking Middle Eastern dishes in the pressure cooker. This is the Yahoo pressure cooker user group – you need to have a Yahoo ID to sign in.
Products and Services
HatLight – Everybody needs a HatLight. I can’t help but like it – it’s a great product and one of my companies.
Bireley’s Electric – I’ve found a great electrician. Jim Wilcox is reliable, professional and reasonably priced.
Vitamin Connection – I started buying from them on trips through Burlington Vermont many years ago. I get all my vitamins from them on-line. Great selection, prices and service.
Current Events, History and Art
ElenaFilatova.com – Elena Filatova, a young lady from the Ukraine has ridden her Kawasaki Ninja through Chernobyl several times and done several documentaries, lest we forget. Some eye-opening pictures and video clips. Also some works on historic digs of WWII battle sites between the German and Russian armies, political prisoners and the “Orange Revolution.” If you like her work, I encourage you to contribute. I’m a regular contributor.
R. Michelson Gallery – I stopped here in the summer of 2007 to see the Leonard Nimoy exhibit that I had read about in the New York Times. Located in Northampton, Massachusetts, this is just a great gallery. They also have on display some of “The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss” (Theodore Geisel)
Mimo – You can see my friend Mimo’s art here, or visit Scampi Grill, his restaurant where he displays some of his works.
Space and Science
NASA – A great site about our space program. Lots of good pictures.
Kennedy Space Center – Learn about upcoming rocket launches. This is where I find out when a rocket launch is going to take place so I can go down to the beach our up to Coco Beach to watch it.
Spaceflight Now - Another great website about space exploration, covers launches and space exploration world-wide. This is where I go after a launch to see how the mission is doing.
Search Engines and Iternet
Google, Ask Jeeves, Google Maps and MapQuest are also really useful. Although I’m usually too busy to bother with these, sites like YouTube, FaceBook and MySpace are popular with many of my friends.
Weather
Forget the Weather Channel - these two sites are the best. Check out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the unclassified weather data pages from the US Navy Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center. Everything you could possibly want to know about the weather. I use these to get the weather when I’m out sailing. If you’re sailing in the Western Atlantic, the following links from NOAA are the ones I prefer, because they contain only the most relevant data.
Latest Radio Fax Charts – Boston – Use this when on a slow connection like a Globalstar phone. You can select only the charts you want.
Northwest Atlantic Briefing – Use this from land or with a high-speed connection. It gives you all the important charts in one page (typically under 1.5mb).
U.S. Offshore Marine Text Forecasts by Zone – Covers the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Tropical Atlantic and Pacific. Good for low bandwidth connections. (typically under 250kb)
NOAA Storm Watch – This page covers the entire USA
NOAA Hurricane Sectors – A must for late summer early fall sailing on the east coast and the Caribbean.
GEOS Satellite – Provides Visible, Water Vapor and Infrared views for East and West Coasts, the Caribbean, Alaska and Hawaii. The graphics are large and the page is not practical on a slow or unreliable connection.
Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Danger Area – View and track any Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms.
National Hurricane Center – An indispensible resource if you live along the coast of the southeast US.
Go here and here for my personal weather chart pages on www.Lagassey.com.
News
New York Times online – sometimes a little too liberal, but the home page presents a good, concise summary of the news.
Sometimes, I browse FoxNews - less biased and more in tune with my conservative tastes.
Web Development, Hosting and Graphics
MontrealSoft – Website development and hosting and software development. Developed and hosts the CoolSoftLLC.com website, CoolSoft’s FlyingHouse, EmailBlaster and BugTracking software. Contact Luc Gagnon, .asp programmer and website developer extraordinaire.
Legal Services
All of these firms and attorneys have done a great job for me!
Intellectual Property Law – Milde & Hoffberg, LLC – Contact Steven M. Hoffberg, Esq.
General Counsel – Levy & Droney, PC – Contact Dane Kostin, Esq.
General Counsel – Moses & Singer, LLP – Contact Philippe Zimmerman, Esq.
Franchise Law & Litigation – Zarco, Einhorn & Salkowski, PA – Contact Robert Einhorn, Esq.
Litigation – Blank Rome, LLP – Contact Larry Reich, Esq.
Government
The Florida Statutes – This is a handy reference for doing business in Florida. So is SunBiz.
Patent sites include the USPTO, the European Patent Office and EPOnline.
Accounting and Financial Services
Freidman, Kannenberg & Company – I’ve been working with Alan Freidman, CAP since I first got involved in real estate in the mid 1980’s. Over the past ten years, Alan’s interest in music has blossomed into the firm becoming a nationally recognized specialist in accounting for the music industry.
Rick K. Shapiro, CPA – Rick’s helped me figure out and close some really complicated transactions.
Vitale, Miller, CPA - My current accountant. Lenny Miller does a great job, fast and at reasonable rates. He work for several of my real estate partners, and that’s how I met Lenny.
Sports
Gotta throw one in for the Boston Red Sox, and the Washington Nationals. I like both teams. My dad was a Red Sox fan all his life. My close friend George Costonis’s son-in-law is the pitching coach for the Nationals. George and I go to lots of spring training games each March.
Politics
Although I’m somewhat liberal socially and don’t agree with all my party’s positions, fiscally I’m definitely conservative. So I identify with and am affiliated with the Republican Party, and I support John McCain for President.
Religion
I was raised Roman Catholic, although lately I’ve identified more with Tibetan Buddhism. Here are websites for the Vatican and the Daili Lama. I’m also a student of Reiki. In my opinion, this is the best resource on Reiki is William Lee Rand and his website, reiki.org.
Software and Computers
The makers of SpeakToText Speech Recognition, Speak-to-Mail Speech Recognition, CoolInfo Voice Recognition, SpamMonster Anti Spam Filter, FlyingHouse Webcam Software and much more. CoolSoft has achieved excellence as a Microsoft Certified Partner. A favorite because its one of my companies of course.
Mozilla Sea Monkey – In my opinion, the greatest integrated Internet suite, with browser and emal combined into one application. I like how the email client keeps separate files for different mail boxes, book marks, and contact lists. In my opinion, much better than lumping everything into one .pst file as in Outlook and Outlook Express. This format is much easier to use, backup, copy and port between computers. I highly recommend it – especially if you are not satisfied with Outlook/Outlook Express.
KeepVid.com – Keep a copy of your favorite videos on YouTube and other video sites. Just drop the link for your video on this page. Within seconds, the page returns a download link for flash video (.flv) copy. You need a flash video player to play the videos, or a converter to copy them into another format. I recommend the Replay products below. A couple of my favorite videos that I’ve saved using this page are Funny Cats and Chris Bliss Juggling.
BONIC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) – I learned about this when SETI@Home merged with BOINC. BINCC is a program of the University of California at Berkeley. In summary, it is a distributed computing system and software that enables researchers to tap into the unused processing power of people’s home and office computers. The average person typically uses a very small percentage of the capability of their computers processing power. BOINC lets researchers tap into this unused processing power by breaking projects into small work units which are processed by many computers, and the results are reassembled into a complete project. Unlike the original SETI software which was restricted to the SETI@Home project, BOINC can run a wide variety of research projects (including SETI), and you can choose to participate in one or more projects in science, space or medical research. I highly recommend downloading, installing and running BOINC on all your computers. In six years of running SETI@Home, between all my computers I completed over 35,000 work units and contributed over 51,000 hours of processing time which would have otherwise been unused and wasted. As I write this, BOINC is processing two work units for SETI@Home and a climate predictin project, all with no impact on the performance of my PC. I currently have eight computers running BOINC on five different projects. It even utilizes the multiple core capabilities of two of my computers (a Core Duo and a Quad Core), and cranks out work units like lightning on these two machines.
Connected Software – The makers of Address Magic, the best software in the industry for address book management with email clients. The SpeakToMail and SpamMonster programs developed by CoolSoft use the Address Magic SDK.
ThumbsPlus – This is the software I use to create webpages for my pictures. Developed by Cerious Software, it’s great!
Dell – You can’t beat Dell computers for quality and reliability, although lately I’ve taken to building my own computers and they’re just as good for less money. Still, I’m delighted with my Dell notebooks. Dell support is excellent, but better than that, their machines are reliable and rarely break. Better to have a computer that doesn’t break, than one that breaks and gets fixed quickly. Dell rocks!
ACT Computers – These guys are local, and always helpful when I need something repaired.
LavaSoft Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search & Destroy – I use both these programs to keep myself free of Adware and Spyware. I think these two programs catch everything. At least I’m batting 1000 with them.
Soft Byte Labs – Makers of two other programs I find really useful - NameWiz for managing file names, and BlackWidow, a great site ripper.
PolderbitS Software – They make a great sound recorder/editor.
Dillobits Software – Makers of YATS – Yet Another Time Synchronizer – I use it to keep my computer clocks current.
Replay Products Suite – By Applian Technologies. This suite of products lets you record all kinds of media from the Internet. I like Replay Screen Cast the best. It lets me record concerts and other video that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to capture.
The Ultimate Trouble Shooter – from Answers That Work. This is an indispensible tool for tweaking your PC and keeping it running smoothly. I use it on all my computers and run it regularly.
Instant Demo Pro – Great for doing my own flash software demos and how-to presentations. Just start it, do your demo and it records the screen along with audio. Lots of editing options too. For me, its another indispensible piece of software.
Rose City Software – This company has lots of great titles. I use their synchronization software to backup my server and local files.