Designer Screen Shades - Save Energy & Your View

Remember the old roller shades your Grandmother had in her home? Today it would be hard to find ones like them because there are so many wonderful new roller shade products on the market. Hunter Douglas' Designer Screen Shades are an example of up-to-date style, texture, color and style. Please look at the attached reference library video to see how these great shades would look today in your home or office.

Reference Library - Hunter Douglas Window Fashions and check on Designer Screen Shades to see the video.

If you want to control the sun's harmful UV rays and heat, yet keep your view, try one of the open weave sunscreen style shades. They come in many colors and textures to go with almost any decor. These energy saving shades will help save your floors, furniture and wall hangings from premature fading. Add a solar film on the window itself and you create a double energy savings guaranteed to save you energy costs. Give us a call, we'd be happy to help you.

Searching for Furniture on The Internet Can be Time Consuming

Shopping for home furnishings can be a daunting task - driving from store to store trying to find the perfect piece of furniture to fit into our home's decor. So, most of us now sit down in front of our computers and begin looking for information about the furniture pieces we wish to add before we actually go shopping. Recent studies found that 57% of internet researchers spend three or more hours online to research furniture and two out of five consumers, who recently bought furniture, logged on first before buying.

Unfortunately, there is so much information on the internet you can literally receive millions of links that range from blogs and encyclopedia entries, retailers very far away from your location and retailers trying to sell overstocked items on the internet. In other words, an over load of information awaits the casual information seeker.

Furniture Style magazine, a publication for furniture retailers, has created a new guide for consumers to direct them in their search for information about furniture and home furnishings. A new industry-focused search engine has been developed to deliver results to viewers who want to skip the clutter . In addition to directing consumers to furniture retail web sites and online sources of inspiration for the home, www.furniturestylesearch.com is for industry professionals too. Save this site in your favorites or you can download a FurnitureStyleSearch.com toolbar for your web browser. then you'll have it when you need it. This tool will save a lot of time when you're looking to buy or replace a furniture piece.

ATA Airline's Bankruptcy - Or, Marooned on a Tropical Island

This is one of our favorite places to just kick back and enjoy a little R&R - the Marriott's Maui Ocean Beach Club on the beach at Ka'anapali in Maui, Hawaii.

We scheduled a week's vacation and took off from the Oakland CA airport on the ATA Airlines on Sunday March 30th and flew without problems directly to Maui. The tickets had been purchased and paid for some time ago.

The day after we arrived in Maui Aloha Airlines announced they were closing but they had made some arrangements with other airlines to handle the return of their passengers to the main land. We smirked with self-satisfaction that we would be OK; until early on Wednesday morning when the Marriott's personnel notified us that the ATA Airline had also filed bankruptcy sometime in the night and had already stopped flying. Luckily we had brought a laptop computer with us and my hubby immediately got on it and his cell phone to try and get us two seats back home later in the week. Were we ever surprised - ATA had made no efforts to help their stranded passengers throughout their entire flight area. Our tickets home were worthless!

The helpful customer service rep for United Airlines finally found us two tickets to get home by a circuitous route, but three days later than we had planned to go home. The one-way tickets for two people cost nearly $1,600. We then contacted the hotel's desk - and luckily for us - they had another room in the resort that we could stay but only for the two extra nights that we would be forced to stay in Maui. Adding the cost of additional nights at the resort, additional days of a car rental and food to the expensive ticket home you can imagine what these few days cost.

The route home was a very long one; Maui to Molokai, Molokai to Honolulu, Honolulu to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to San Francisco - then a $100 taxi cab ride from the San Francisco airport to the Oakland airport to pick-up our car for the drive home. We were thankful to get home because many people were still stuck in Hawaii when we left and wish to thank United Airlines for their courtesy and help in getting us to the main land.

Why do large corporations have the ability to cheat so many people? You could not convince anyone that ATA Airlines hadn't know about their financial problems far in advance of the closure date; especially since they had all the paperwork together to file bankruptcy during the night and close up immediately. Yet, they kept taking client's money selling tickets until the last minute with no plans to perform as promised. If a small company continued to sell and collect money from clients for products or services that they didn't intend to provide, the local law enforcement people would be in hot pursuit of these business owners to put them in jail for defrauding their clients. Why does corporate America have the ability to defraud people with no regret and no reprecussions?

Maybe it's time to once again regulate the airline industry - they don't seem to be able to do it for themselves. What do you think?