Omaha metro – Dino's Storage

Winnipeg Folk Fest July 9-12

“It’s a meeting of old friends and new friends, the peaceful ambiance of the place … A community of like-minded people who enjoy having fun and being nice to each other.”

And it’s time to make your plans to be in attendance at Winnipeg’s ever-popular summer festival. Folks from across Canada and from the States will be there. You should be to.

“It introduces me to new music every year, which is why I keep coming back. What the Folk Fest means to me is world-class music, wonderful music!”

It’s the moment you walk down the forested path and see Snowberry Stage. It’s dancing with your toes in the soft grass. It’s kicking back on your tarp with your hat tipped over your eyes, listening to the music while the sun warms your cheeks. It’s running into old friends and making new ones. It’s discussing the music, in-depth and openly. It’s taking the time to enjoy each other’s company and appreciate the things that are truly important in life.

“It’s in my heart; it’s in my soul; it’s part of my life. I don’t know what I’d do without my dose of folkiness in the summertime.” ~ Jane Graham, Volunteer

Here’s the lineup of folk and fan favorites for this summer’s festival at Birds Hill Provincial Park: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Wilco, José González and Jenny Lewis will lead the new folk revival, while classic favourites including Arlo Guthrie and famed folk-rock band Steeleye Span will take their place as Folk Fest legends.

“With this lineup, we are honoring folk music by embracing the evolution of folk while staying true to the traditions of Folk Fest,” said Artistic Director Chris Frayer. “Modern folk artists are playing with the genre and pushing it in new directions and this lineup will be an exciting representation of that.”

2015 Main Stage highlights include:
Psychedelic indie-folk ensemble Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros (Los Angeles, CA) – led by Golden Globe-winner Alex Ebert – draws on a wide breadth of genres including roots and gospel.

Soulful singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis (Los Angeles, CA) will share her timeless vocals, which fans first heard during her stint in popular indie bands, Rilo Kiley and The Postal Service.

Grammy Award-winning experimental folk group Wilco (Chicago, IL), led by festival favourite Jeff Tweedy, will bring their gritty sound to the Main Stage for the first time as a full band.

Guitar virtuoso José González (Sweden), will showcase music from his first solo album in seven years, which was released in February to great fanfare.

Hot on the heels of his sold out Winnipeg show, Bahamas will be returning to the festival with his new album.

Multi award-winner Jason Isbell will play his achingly beautiful Americana music, including songs from his much-lauded album, Southeastern.

Renowned for its one-of-a-kind workshops and concerts, Folk Fest kicks it up a notch for 2015. The great Arlo Guthrie will be doing a special performance of the iconic 18-minute and 34-second monologue “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” for its 50th anniversary. Another not-to-be-missed performance will see legendary English troubadour Robyn Hitchcock join Canada’s premier roots-rock band The Sadies and other special guests to perform The Band’s Stage Fright album, in honor of the anniversary of its 1970 release.

World music will be as diverse as ever at this summer’s festival. World-music collective and activists Nahko and Medicine For The People (OR/HI), Tuareg blues masters Tamikrest (Mali), the incandescent voices of Dehli’s Barmer Boys (India), and the musical brilliance of Söndörgo (Hungary) will have audiences on their feet throughout the weekend. One of the world’s only double violinists Gingger Shankar (Los Angeles, CA), who scored the feature film Passion of the Christ and toured with the Smashing Pumpkins on their 20th anniversary tour, will bring her unique Indian electronica music to the festival stages.

The landscape of Manitoban music will also be richly represented on the nine Folk Fest stages; featuring the genre-bending Royal Canoe, the Mexican stylings of The Mariachi Ghost, one-man band The Reverend Rambler, Anishinaabe ‘rez poet’ Leonard Sumner and singer-songwriter Slow Leaves.

New Index Shows Preference for Urban Cores

A new index, seeking to measure the walkability of commercial sectors to help better determine value and potential investment opportunities, shows strong consumer preference for urban cores.

Real Capital Analytics Inc., an international data and analytics firm focused on commercial real estate investment markets, announced a new collaboration with WalkScore, a private company providing a numerical index of community walkability via websites and a mobile app. The companies called the RCA & Walk Score Commercial Property Price Indices (CPPI) “the first of its kind to quantify the price value of walkability for commercial properties.”

“Prices for commercial properties in highly walkable locations show significantly greater appreciation trends than car-dependent locations,” said RCA Founder Robert White in a release accompanying the announcement. “The findings cut across both urban and suburban locales, large and small markets and each of the office, retail and apartment sectors.”

RCA says the first-quarter results for this year will be released next month. The current release analyzes data through December 2014. RCA says the data “supports growing evidence that demographic shifts and preferences have shifted back to urban locations and more dynamic live/work/play environments.”

They found that over the past decade, prices for properties located in central business districts have risen 125 percent, while comparable properties located in car-dependent areas have risen only around 20 percent during the same time period. And properties don’t have to be located in purely urban areas to benefit; the index finds that prices for suburban properties that are also considered highly walkable are up 43 percent.

Bargain Hunting On the Web

If you enjoy bargain hunting, going to garage sales or attending live auctions, www.StorageBattles.com just might be your cup of tea. On the site you have the opportunity to bid on the contents of storage units at hundreds or self-storage facilities across the nation. The site includes photos and brief descriptions of the contents of each unit up for auction.

Dino’s Storage, which has facilities in the Omaha and Des Moines metro areas, is mong the facilities using the site for its auctions. Currently, Dino’s has more than a dozen auctions posted from its Des Moines area facilities.

You can bid with confidence on the website since all units posted on StorageBattles must have a locking ID tag which guarantees the unit has not been tampered with any time after the auction was posted. You also avoid the hassles of crowded live auctions, have plenty of time to research unit contents and avoid the crowds, traffic and bad weather conditions.

Once you regiter at www.StorageBattles.com you will receive Emails of new auctions posted, auctions ending soon and weekly auction updates. You can search the site for auctions near you and create a database of auctions you would like to keep your eye on.

When you win an auction, the buyer’s premium of 10% of the bid will be charged to your credit or debit card. There is no annual fee, or membership fee. The full amount of a winning bid will be paid directly to the facility, in cash, when you go to the facility to remove the contents of the storage unit. Winning bidders are charged a refundable cleaning deposit and any applicable taxes.

Immediately at the close of each storage auction, an Email is sent to the winning bidder. This email will contain the unit number and the final bid price, as well as the facility name, address, phone number and manager’s name. Please make initial contact with the facility as soon as soon as possible and let them know when you expect to pick up the contents of that storage unit. The winning bidder will have 72 hours to clean out the storage unit. The winning bidder is responsible for the entire contents of any storage unit won. All contents are to be removed.

Unless otherwise stated, storage auctions posted on www.StorageBattles.com are lien sales, meaning a tenant has fallen behind in their rent, and the contents of their storage unit are being auction to pay the delinquent rent. When a tenant pays their lien, the auction for their storage unit is cancelled. The tenant has up until the sale is complete to pay their lien. The legal definition of sale is the transfer of goods in exchange for money. Until the winning bidder has physically paid the full amount of the bid to the facility, the tenant can still pay the lien, even if the bidding has ended unless otherwise stated by state lien laws or storage facility policy.

Bidding times could vary from several days to several weeks. The storage facilities post their own auctions on www.StorageBattles.com and choose their end time, according to the time and date on the lien notices that are sent to tenants.

Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?

Google’s mobile search algorithm has changing to emphasize web sites that are mobile-friendly. What does this mean for your website? If your site isn’t optimized and easy to use for mobile users, it will likely get less traffic and go down in the search rankings when people use their mobile devices.

A site is mobile-friendly if it’s fast loading, features readable text without zooming, properly sizes content and photos so the user doesn’t have to scroll sideways, and has links that are easy to click.

Google warned back in February that the change “will have a significant impact in our search results.”

Mobile searches are only growing in popularity. According to ZDNet, “Google is believed to get about half its search traffic from mobile devices. One of the company’s top search execs said in 2014 that he expected the number of mobile searches to top desktop queries that year.”

Google’s new algorithm will help find relevant mobile content in two ways:

Site rank will be changed to emphasize mobile-friendliness and will affect mobile searches worldwide in all languages. Mobile users will then have access to sites that have quick loading times, readable text, and top down scrolling rather than side scrolling.

They will also use information from indexed apps in rankings for signed-in-users with the app installed. This app content will also be ranked more prominently in search. For more information on this, they offer a step-by-step-guide at https://developers.google.com.

If you want to see if your site is considered mobile-friendly, Google offers a Mobile-Friendly Test at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly.

We Don’t Coast

It takes no more than a drive around the metro area to see the vibrancy of the Omaha-Council Bluffs area.

You’ll find construction projects from apartment complexes to strip malls to a new hospital to new homes and more stretching across the landscape. You’ll find parking lots full at restaurants of all types. You’ll find bustling crowds from the Old Market to Village Pointe, from Aksarben Village to Legacy, from Shadow Lake Towne Center to Nebraska Crossing.

What’s going on here? Simply put Nebraska is sporting the nation’s lowest unemployment rate – 2.7% in February – for the first time since June 1998 when it stood at 2.5%. And Omaha is thriving. The metro area population hit 904,421 last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and is on track to top one million within the next 10 years.

The Omaha metro area includes Douglas, Sarpy, Cass, Washington and Saunders Counties in Nebraska and Pottawattamie, Mills and Harrison Counties in Iowa.

Omaha stacks up very well against any metro in the nation. Here are a few pertinent facts, according to the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce’s “We Don’t Coast” magazine:
– Median Household Income: $56,455, compared to $51,929 nationwide
– Cost of Living: 11% below the national average
– Median Home Price: $145,700, compared to $197,400 nationwide
– High School Graduates: 90% plus for adults ages 25 and older compared to 85% nationally

We at Dino’s Storage are proud to be a part of the Omaha community and, together with our Landmark Group partner, we’re proud to be involved in a variety of construction projects – new and renovations – in the metro.