ebo area and sweeping views of Choctawhatchee Bay, the marina and Grand Sandestin hotel.
Across the causeway from Fort Myers on Florida’s Southwest Gulf Coast, lie the barrier islands Sanibel and Captiva, which beautifully capture the easygoing tropical island ambience of old Florida at its natural best. Sanibel and sister island Captiva are renowned for their shelling beaches (15 miles of them) where 250 different types of seashells are waiting to be found. For attendees who could use a little more laidback and lot less stress, here are a few great options.
South Seas Island Resort occupies 330 acres on the northern tip of Captiva Island, boasting an exclusive 2.5 miles of white sand beaches. Offering a variety of spacious accommodations, including 471 guest rooms, condominiums and waterfront private homes, the resort functions equally well for group meetings, incentive getaways or executive retreats. More than 45,000 sf of meeting space includes multiple meeting and breakout rooms, many of which feature Gulf or harbor views; and outdoor settings from beach to bay offer event space for receptions and networking.
The lure of watersports is everywhere at the resort, which has a full-service yacht harbor and marina where planners can charter Captiva Cruises for private group outings. Home to the Colgate Offshore Sailing School, South Seas also offers competitive regatta corporate teambuilding programs. For attendees on their free time, there are rental boats, paddleboards, waverunners, kayaks, fishing charters, dolphin and wildlife adventure excursions, parasailing…the watersports list goes on. For golfers in the group, even the nine-hole, par 27 executive Captiva Course is beachfront along the Gulf of Mexico. Also onsite is The Blackwood Tennis Academy and Kay Casperson Spa. South Seas Island Resort offers numerous dining outlets as well as a sustainable seafood program for catering services with personalized menus featuring locally caught seafood and fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs sourced from the executive chef’s onsite garden. Within walking distance of the resort is a shopping village and “downtown” Captiva, home of the famously quirky and delightful Bubble Room, a restaurant with a playful mix of décor in five dining rooms on three floors. Private group options, even for large groups, are available.
Located on Sanibel Island is the re-designed Sundial Beach Resort & Spa. The resort recently invested more than $6 million in refreshed amenities and offers unique outdoor event space with water views. The new Resort Centre, which is the largest meeting venue on Sanibel Island, boasts 12,000 sf of flexible space that accommodates up to 300 guests.
Just as laidback and authentically old Florida is the community of Crystal River, 75 miles north of Tampa on the Gulf Coast. Crystal River is the winter home of endangered Florida manatees, the ubiquitous, slow-moving residents of the area’s namesake river. Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge is the only refuge created specifically to protect these gentle giants and offers visitors a chance to observe them from above and below the water.
Tammy Alverson, controller for Atex Distributing/AccuAir Inc., arranged the company’s quarterly employee outing in November for 35 participants. The event is usually a dinner; however, this year the company wanted to make it special by arranging a weekend retreat set at Plantation on Crystal River.
All in all, the weekend was a success and Alverson recommends it to others. “Our rooms were all close together, nothing was too far of a walk, moving about the grounds was very easy,” she says. The group also took part in all of the activities available except golf, making the resort an excellent choice.
Let’s start with a series of questions frequently asked by people searching for tips to bring back some sanity in their daily life.
What is the definition of tidiness?
The dictionary says that it’s “the state or quality of being arranged neatly and in order.” Neatness is a synonym of tidiness. Something spotlessly clean and neat can be described as spick-and-span.
What is the antonym of tidiness?
The answer is simple: untidiness or its synonym, messiness.
It might not be the sign of anything bad. Maybe you simply don’t have the time to tidy things up. Or maybe you have young kids who don’t care about a tidy environment. It’s easier to maintain a minimalist interior if you’re single or a couple with no kids.
What are the best tips to keep your home tidy?
Choose the best storage furniture. It is key to guarantee the tidiness of your home. If you fill an open shelf with rows of boxes, try to use a standardised format. Don’t stack all sorts of different containers. It’s usually ineffective and most of the time quite ugly. Chaos isn’t tidy.
Don’t hesitate to give or sell what you rarely or barely use. There’s no reason to feel over-attached to random stuff.
Do not wait to take care of dirty dishes. Wash them just after your meals. The same applies to anything dirty around your house. Wipe up messes on the spot. Waiting for a stain to vanish by itself has never been proven to be effective.
If possible, once in a while, do a full inventory of all your belongings. You will undoubtedly find plenty of dusty old things which are no longer necessary and can be given away (take a souvenir picture if you feel sentimental about them). What’s not useful for you can be very helpful for someone else!
Find the most cluttered spaces in your home and focus on these spots for a while. Their neatness will soon radiate to your full home, in circles.
Never make piles of stuff. It’s the start of endless clutter.
This might sound very obvious but your efforts have to start somewhere. If you want to address the issue in a single session, you’re doomed to fail. Make sure that each room you’ve cleaned up stays neat for a few days before moving to the next room. Tidying up is a gradual process.
We’re strong believers in the effectiveness of owning the right tools for the right job. This will make your life so much easier.
Smart appliances like food processors or simple accessories like clothes hangers are a must to achieve a tidy lifestyle.Modern business applications require flexibility, enabled by a hybrid cloud that delivers consistent infrastructure and operations. Customers view hybrid clouds as a way to gain flexibility and speed to respond to changing business needs, accelerate innovation, and align costs to business requirements by managing upfront expenses, operational support, and TCO. However, if an organization wants to seamlessly harness the power of the hybrid cloud in an integrated manner, there are several requirements that need to be met. Some of these challenges include: operational inconsistencies, different skillsets & tools, disparate management tools and security controls, inconsistent application SLAs, and incompatible machine formats.
Sonali Desai, Product Marketing Manager from VMware, Ken Smith Sr., Product Marketing Manager from VMware and Kenon Ewing, Systems Engineer for Data Protection from Dell EMC, recently presented about moving to the cloud and maximizing customers’ VMware investment with Dell EMC Data Protection.
As two powerhouses and leaders in private and public cloud, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) jointly deliver a truly differentiated and compelling engineered solution to customers – the VMware Cloud™ on AWS. Delivered, sold, and supported by VMware and its partners as an on-demand service, VMware Cloud™ on AWS integrates VMware’s entire enterprise-class software-defined data center (SDDC) and optimizes it to run on dedicated elastic Amazon EC2 bare-metal infrastructure that is fully integrated as part of the AWS Cloud. VMware Cloud™ on AWS enables organizations to take advantage of a rich set of benefits with rapid time to value including: consistency and familiarity of VMware technologies, easy workload portability, seamless access to native AWS services, and container and VM support. With the same architecture and operational experience on-premises and in the cloud, IT teams can now accelerate their cloud migration in the simplest, fastest, and lowest risk way with compelling TCO from use of the AWS and VMware hybrid cloud experience.
However, there are certain obstacles preventing companies from going to the cloud, requiring companies to maintain their on-premises infrastructure. Data sovereignty issues, including regulatory and privacy requirements, sensitive data located on-premises, custom security standards, and need to prove compliance to auditors prevent organizations from moving to the cloud. Additionally, workload and data proximity issues such as low data latency requirements, workloads with local data processing, and data center workloads that are tightly integrated with backend systems require data to remain on-premises. Even some customers who have moved some of their data into the cloud feel that they do not have the same transparency and control over their data and struggle to keep control over their critical workloads, leverage existing IT environments, and maximize the value of existing talent and processes.
To combat these challenges, Dell EMC and VMware co-engineered and delivered the VMware Cloud™ on Dell EMC: cloud infrastructure delivered as a service on-premises, fully managed by VMware. VMware Cloud™ on Dell EMC is built on Dell EMC VxRail infrastructure, and runs on the VMware’s SDDC to handle compute, storage and networking processing. This all-inclusive service also offers a hybrid control plane to provision and monitor resources as well as a monthly subscription-based pricing model. VMware Cloud™ on Dell EMC offers customers support for multiple use cases