October 31, 2016
This fall season has been pretty busy for us here at MacVaugh&Co. We have successfully leased a variety of our properties in the past two months! Including: A spacious production studio in South Pasadena, a newly remodeled mechanic shop in North Pasadena, and a beautiful office suite in the Pasadena Playhouse district.
But! Fear not! We still have plenty of properties to choose from, including one of our new listings at 601 E Green st.
The former interior design shop offers a spacious floor plan for an assortment of uses, whether it be a new retail shop for your clothing line, an art gallery featuring your work, or a quiet office space for your new startup company.
September 2, 2015
Who would think that a website like www.macvaugh.com would receive any attention from hackers. Well we have – and not just a little attention, but a lot. We keep no information on credit card numbers, social security numbers or anything of immediate monetary value. Our website does generate a fair amount of traffic for searchers looking for office retail or industrial space to rent or purchase – for example type in “office space for lease pasadena ca” in Google and we come up on the first page. Type in “retail space for lease pasadena ca” and we dominate the 2nd page. All we potentially provide to a hacker is traffic.
The above table shows the hacking attacks on www.macvaugh.com ….IN THE LAST 2 DAYS!
Our tech guru offers the following advice. If you have a website with WordPress, please be really careful recently. Here are several very basic tips that should help:
- DO NOT EVER set your username as “administrative”, “admin” or your company name! If your name is John Smith, “jsmith” would be a too-easy-to-be-cracked username as well. You can set your username as something you love to eat, such as “rockymountainoysters.” If hackers get your correct username, they would have more leverage to hack into your website from there!
- Set up the most complicated password that you can memorize with the combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols! This is common sense among all human beings on this planet earth. I don’t need to explain more about this.
- Get the plugin “Wordfence”! It has a lot of automatic blocking settings which are really helpful!
- Block the comment option. Unfortunately WordPress currently has some loopholes associated with comment function. I have heard quite some websites got hacked because of this. Please block this function until there’s better patch coming up.
- Back up your website constantly. Use some automatic backup plugin such as “BackWpup” and this will become really handy once you realize you have finally successfully been hacked! Don’t try to get rid of the hacker’s codes, because it would be pain in the neck to clean the codes completely and it takes forever. Just restore the whole website to a backup point that you are pretty sure the website is not hacked yet. Afterwards, most importantly, change all the usernames and passwords! Disable some unnecessary plugins to clean your system as well!
Hope these tips really help.
January 28, 2015
Reposted with permission from Eric Maurer | emaurer@ortc.com | Old Republic Title
Everyone has a will or plan, whether created or by default. Even if you have not made out a will or a trust, you still have a plan – a plan dictated by the laws of the state where you reside upon your death. Making a will is not a way to avoid “probate”, the court procedure that changes the legal ownership of your property after your death. Probate makes sure it is your last valid will, appoints the executor named in your will and supervises the executor’s work. You can do several things now that can help your executor and family later, hopefully much later on.
Probate-Some Basics I am in possession of a will that distributes the decedent’s estate to me, isn’t this all I need? No. The will must be admitted to probate and the estate of the decedent must be “probated.”
What does “probate” actually mean? Generally, probate is a court proceeding that administers the estate of an individual.
What is the purpose of “estate administration”? Generally, there are five purposes, many of which have subsets to them:
1. To determine that the decedent is in fact dead,
2. To establish the validity of the will,
3. To identify the heirs and devisees of the dece- dent,
4. To settle any claims that creditors may have against the estate of the decedent, and
5. To distribute the property