There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Flourishing (page 31 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

Hectoring Rian from the iPhone 3G 3.0

Yesterday I upgraded my iPhone to version 3.0 of the operating system software. So far, a pretty big yawn. Typing is plausibly easier, though still not easy. Cut and paste were not on my list of must-haves. Zillow upgraded its app to allow push notification, so your phone can tell you if one of your saved searches has popped up a new candidate. Okay…

I wasn’t unhappy with the iPhone before — quite the contrary! — but I don’t think I have any new reasons to be happier from this upgrade. Safari 4, by contrast, is totally killer, and I could not be more pleased with suddenly-faster-everything on my iMac.

One thing I played with right away on the iPhone was the new voice recording app. Not that impressive. It records losslessly at 44khz, which means the saved files are huge. They can be transferred only by email or hard-wired sync — no BlueTooth, no WiFi — and almost everything is too big to move by email. This is the kind of dumb, useless software I expect from Microsoft, not Apple, so one may hope it will get better in future versions.

Anyway, as a test, this morning I made a short little audio greeting card for Rian Lussier, who is about to undergo surgery. The file is a monstrous 25 megabytes, and it took over an hour to sync to my iMac (no hope of emailing a file that large).

Even so, the recording quality is not awful (there’s a buzz in places from me speaking too loudly), and the sentiments are what they are.

Godspeed you well, Rian.

This Post Has Nothing To Do With Real Estate

Not long ago I listened to an inspirational speaker discuss ways to make our lives less stressful and more enjoyable.  At one point he told this story:

In the wild, a big lion sprints toward an antelope who’s quietly feeding.  After a short chase – if the antelope hasn’t been caught – the lion slows down and eventually stops to rest.  Interestingly enough, the antelope often stops only a short distance away and begins to feed again.  The lion doesn’t bore his friends with excuses or puff his chest out and tell the antelope to “wait till next time;”  nor does the antelope, flush with righteous indignation, cry out: “What’s your problem, you (censored)!”  They both live in the present and by doing so find great peace.

I get the “message” in the story and maybe it’s just me; but I’ve never felt all that comfortable with animal metaphors.  Here’s another story; this one’s about stress and enjoyment too, but without the potential of being eaten:

Last Saturday I attended two Little League play-off games on the same day: one for each of my sons.  During the first game, I watched my older son’s team from the stands.  The other team was employing a delaying tactic and one of the fathers from our side made a condescending remark.  A coach from the other team heard the remark and replied in a less than congenial way.  The dad followed that up with an unmistakable insult to the opposing coach and before long we had ‘tough guy’ looks going back and forth.  (I swear, you can’t make this stuff up!)  The dad in our stands (mis)spent the next two hours of the game talking about what he was going to say next and what he should have said already and telling anyone who would listen what he thought of this coach.  He simply could not let go.

Later that same day I’m coaching my younger son’s team.  When you’re in the dugout with the boys you get a chance to listen in on their conversations and they can be quite mean.  It’s not uncommon to hear a Read more

Don’t Look At The Explosion, Just Focus On Your Mission.

One of my favorite Hollywood staples is the bad ass hero that blows something up and doesn’t need to look back.  He’s already won the battle, and he’s done his damage, and he’s walking away towards the next thing on his todo list.  Jerry Bruckheimer seems to use this 3 times a minute in his flicks.    I think of Jack Bauer and not caring, the explosion happened, so what, moooooving along now.

The only thing that matters is the mission. The explosion is in the past. Cool guys never look.  What you do next to accomplish your mission is the now. So many times I’ve either:

  1. Admired my past successes.  (Hey, pin a trophy on me, I sold a house)
  2. Looked at the things I screwed up. (I lost a customer today)
  3. Been distracted with red flashy nonsense.  (Oooh, what will Inman do next)

All of it’s rubbish.  Our job is simply to lead by example.  Move more product.  Get them to sign on the line that is dotted.   Do it honestly.  Do it to the best of our ability and know that that will always improve.  Know that the job we do today isn’t gonna be as good as the job we can to tomorrow.  Do better.  Don’t sweat the screw ups, and don’t laud the victories.

Don’t look at explosions.

I see politics as an explosion.  Yes.  Obama wants our money.  SHOCKER.  So did Bush, who was all to eager to fire up the bailoutmobile.  The government is a parasite.  TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW.   We can pour energy and tears into politics.  Or, we can look at the landscape, get into an OODA pattern, and figure out…what to do next.  We cannot moan ineffectually about the loss of our freedoms, blaming Obama on our faulures.  I mean, we CAN, but dude, setting a good example amidst the chaos.

Learning the laws first isn’t whining about them.  Creating a business that can survive HVCC or whatever BS the power drunk Ivy Leaguers can do…and not whining that we’re not surviving.   THATS the play of the day.

Sure things changed, and more obstacles were thrown Read more

Unchained Melody at Heaven’s Gate

I’m spending time in a hospital as the mother of a patient, but this is not about transparency. You can send a good thought or well-wish in our direction, and I will truly appreciate it, but I’m not here to petition for sympathy or prayers, and I’m not here to share my personal life.

So much of my life includes a musical soundtrack of some sort or another and I’m always selfishly sharing them here mostly because I often struggle with words- music can say what I cannot, so I’m posting a remarkable clip from a movie that is about property rights, but also about independence and passion for life- it’s very appropriate for this real estate blog. Bloodhounds know about living life with passion: Purposeful life as defined only by our independent selves, and I find that life in a children’s hospital is very similar: Raw, painful, staggeringly beautiful, and always remarkable.

Today is Sunday, a day of the week that might have you contemplating higher thoughts, or the meaning of life, or might have you preparing to conduct serious business. Today, for four minutes, a break from real estate, a respite from the hard times in life, to give yourself over to an unbridled celebratory lust for life.

Why I read Ibsen

[I grew up in a grimy little industrial town called Danville, Illinois. It wasn’t until I was four years old that I stumbled onto an atlas and discovered why I had felt so much out of place from the day of my birth. I graduated from Danville High School two years early — and left town the very next morning. My sister was in that same graduating class, but she has never felt herself to be anything but comfortably at home. She got as far away as the University of Illinois in Urbana, forty miles west, then came back to teach Shakespeare to the college-bound minority of Danville High School. She throws in one Ibsen play a year, and I wrote this essay as a hand-out for her classes. This is madly off-topic, of course, but it’s in keeping with what’s wrong with American education. Plus which, it’s been a while since we’ve had some refinements around this joint, and I’m hearing from clients that they like the deeper-reading bits. So: For the wandering professor, Don Reedy, and for my homebody sister, let’s go for a dip in the fjords. –GSS]

 
The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of amazing progress for the West. Average life-expectancy doubled. Infant mortality was halved. The fruits of science and industry were spreading to even the poorest of the poor — hygiene, sanitation, bountiful harvests, rail and sea travel, the telegraph and the telephone, abundant cheap fabrics from the much-maligned mills of England and America. The simple innovation of gaslight, precursor to Edison’s bulb, effectively extended human life by half. The year of 1848 was the year of triumph for the Enlightenment, and monarchies fell all across Europe. The ideals of Voltaire and Jefferson were everywhere ascendant and humanity emerged, dazed and wan, from the prison of tyranny, seeming to dance in the clean, sweet air of liberty.

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of joy and beauty and purpose in life and in art, and this is one of the best kept secrets in the history of the West. Read more

Can a REALTOR Truly be a Consumer Advocate?

My query is sincere.  But first, I want to make a distinction between a REALTOR and a licensed real estate agent.  NAR tells consumers to seek the counsel of REALTOR – in fact, make sure they are working with a REALTOR, leading consumers to believe that a licensed real estate agent and REALTOR are synonymous.  They are not.

A REALTOR is a licensed real estate agent who is also a  member of the National Association of REALTORs, who’s mission is:

The core purpose of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® is to help its members become more profitable and successful.

Clearly absent from the mission is any reference to the consumer.

The vision of the National Association of REALTORS is equally insightful:

The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® strives to be the collective force influencing and shaping the real estate industry. It seeks to be the leading advocate of the right to own, use, and transfer real property; the acknowledged leader in developing standards for efficient, effective, and ethical real estate business practices; and valued by highly skilled real estate professionals and viewed by them as crucial to their success.

Working on behalf of America’s property owners, the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® provides a facility for professional development, research and exchange of information among its members and to the public and government for the purpose of preserving the free enterprise system, and the right to own, use, and transfer real property.

I find NARs Vision statement to be interesting. While the concept of advocacy is referenced – It seeks to be the leading advocate of the right to own, use, and transfer real property – NARs advocacy serves first and foremost its members.  Again, distinctly absent from the vision statement is a direct reference to the consumer – ultimately the guy or gal who parts with their money to own, use, and transfer real property.

As licensed real estate agents, our behavior is bound and regulated by our state laws, written in the interest of protecting the public from unscrupulous professionals.  Licensing is the state’s way to insure that a minimum standard of knowledge and behavior is achieved prior Read more

Happiness is a green status board…

That’s the SplendorQuest server a moment ago. The numbers come and go, but it’s a rare thing for the server load to go over 5% right now. During the worst of our recent attacks, we were redlined at well over 90%, an enormous amount of computing power.

We still have a lingering problem with the MySQL server, but this is much abated by having rid ourselves of these battalions of termites. We’ll get that taken care of shortly, too.

Thanks for your indulgence during our recent troubles.

When a Bloodhound loses the scent, uptime can be a dawg’s life

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that we’ve had availability problems lately. In fact, we’ve had four problems, and three of them may be fully addressed.

First we had memory issues, which I didn’t understand at first. Y’all would have seen them as memory errors or lengthy timeouts when submitting comments. The solution turned out to be pretty simple, and that issue is by now long since dead.

But: That solution would have been masked, to the untrained eye, by problem number two. The account all of the Splendorquest.com domains live on had been set to 25GB, max, back when we lived on semi-dedicated server. This wasn’t changed when we moved, with the result that we’ve been thrashing for disk space for a couple of months. Again, an easy solution once the problem was discovered.

I said nothing about these two because I still haven’t solved problem number four — which used to be problem number three — a significant overcommitment of our MySQL server.

But, in the meantime, we got hit with problem number three, a three-day denial-of-service-like attack. The villain was probably an itinerant spammer, but the effect, from your point of view, was just like a DOS action: No action on your end.

Meanwhile, problem number four persists, but in a seemingly calmer state of exigency. We’re serving a lot of folks when the sun is up over North America, and we’re shipping 200GB of data every month. Put this all under the category of growing pains, but it remains that our growth has put us in this kind of trouble four times a year, at least, for three years running.

And even with all of that, comes today a note from Mark Madsen congratulating BloodhoundBlog for making it back up to a PR6. We’ve been there before, so this may just be temporary, but it’s doubly amazing given our late semi-compromised state.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for the thought and effort — and the links — you bring to BloodhoundBlog.

Some listings are extra FUN!

Sometimes, out here in more rural America, we have properties to sell that you can’t just drive up to in the Lexus and click off the security system to show.  I usually have a property or two a year that are a bit more challenging and immensely more fun to work with and show.

Saturday, I took a several hours to view a new listing.  In that time, I only saw bits of it.  This particular property is pretty big,  1 mile by ½ mile for 346 acres.  It has 16 individual tax parcels and is mostly undeveloped.  It is surrounded by forest and has over 2000 feet of elevation change across it.  It does have power, a well and amenities.  Access to part of it is via a dirt road.  Other parts also have dirt roads that go near or into the property.  While this property is spectacular wilderness, it only takes 20 minutes to get to the edge of it from town or my own home.  This is a fun property!

I was reminded of a conversation at Unchained one evening about good real estate agent cars.  While I can often use a sedan, maneuvering around boulders on a narrow road cut into the side of a cliff just isn’t what a Lexus is made for!  Things are a bit less civilized on a listing like this!  I’ve used SUVs, pickups,  jeeps, ORVs and even snowmobiles to show my most fun listings.  No worries though, I’ve never seen nor heard dueling banjos at any of these remote properties.

joe-creek-northwest-from-top-of-parcel-p

Part of the fun in selling one of these ranch or acreage types of properties is to figure out the best way to show it to clients and explain how to show it to other agents.  I also like to be able to talk to clients before a showing and make sure they have an expectation on what we’ll be doing.  If they have height concerns, I might avoid a narrow path cut into a cliff and just show that part from the bottom of the hill.  If we’re hiking, I try to make Read more

Kipling on the land we live on and the land we love

I am reputed by Macleans magazine to be well-versed in verse, so, in concert with my soul’s sister, Teri, I will lend my ear to the muses in the celebration of glorious land:

Sussex

by Rudyard Kipling

God gave all men all earth to love,
    But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
    Beloved over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
    So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
    And see that it is good.

So one shall Baltic pines content,
    As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
    Before Levuka’s Trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
    The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
    Yea, Sussex by the sea!

No tender-hearted garden crowns,
    No bosomed woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
    But gnarled and writhen thorn—
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
    And, through the gaps revealed,
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim,
    Blue goodness of the Weald.

Clean of officious fence or hedge,
    Half-wild and wholly tame,
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff edge
    As when the Romans came.
What sign of those that fought and died
    At shift of sword and sword?
The barrow and the camp abide,
    The sunlight and the sward.

Here leaps ashore the full Sou’west
    All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
    The Channel’s leaden line;
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
    And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring
    Along the hidden beach.

We have no waters to delight
    Our broad and brookless vales—
Only the dewpond on the height
    Unfed, that never fails—
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
    Which way the season flies—
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
    Like dawn in Paradise.

Here through the strong and shadeless days
    The tinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
    The Lord who made the hills:
But here the Old Gods guard their round,
    And, in her secret heart,
The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found
    Dreams, as she dwells, apart. Read more

Under all is the land: Celebrating property rights wherever you live

I think about this every now and then. Under all is the land- real estate not as business, but as a sort of philosophy, a big idea. Greg wrote an incredible piece about this in his usual big thinker style. I can’t take this on from the place Greg’s at, but I can see this from the street level- from where I’m working.

My transactions with first time buyers and with HUD owned homes are teaching me a few things. You may not deal in that market. It’s very gritty. Not everyone wants to get their hands that dirty, or do that much work for a couple hundred dollars, and believe me when I tell you that there are times I understand that completely. But le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas, so against the best advice of some of the best brains in the business, I’m working with the people who do not take home ownership for granted, they didn’t grow up assuming they will ever own a home. And in spite of all this collective intelligence pointing me elsewhere, I love working with people who are excited about owning property. Do you know what I mean when I say that?

Think about how incredible that statement is: Owning property. Land. Something that can’t get moved, can’t be taken away. I know eminent domain exists. Forget that for just a moment and think about the history of man. Property ownership equals freedom. The right to own property? That’s extraordinary! So while I understand I could make more money with less work if I worked at real estate differently, I get a huge kick out of helping people who see what I see when they buy a home.

These are people who may have grown up under circumstances that would not have precluded home ownership. They may have grown up in parts of the country that have become too exclusive for the average person and they have been shut out of a life they literally helped build. Perhaps they are not children of privilege but children of other circumstances. They Read more

The Secret to Success (part 372)

Want to know the secret to becoming a wildly successful, top producing, charismatic, healthy and attractive real estate agent?  Want to feel ten pounds lighter and ten years younger?  Want the whole thing in one easy to swallow pill?  Me too.

I know all of us want to make money – some more than others.  But our ultimate goals: security for our family, a peaceful sense of happiness, a worry free future – they are much more than just money, aren’t they?

Earlier this week I was driving my two boys to school.  The older one piped up and asked what day it was.  “Wednesday” I replied.  He was ecstatic with that answer; bouncing on the back seat and just as excited as a nine year old can be on his way to school.  I asked him what made Wednesdays so special.  “On Wednesday we have PE,” he explained.  “That’s like an extra recess!  And on some days we play ‘anything-goes.’  Those are the best days ever!”

I started wondering: when was the last time any of us scheduled an extra recess?  Hell, when was the last time any of us scheduled a regular recess?  Can you remember the last time you found yourself enjoying a game of ‘anything-goes?’  May I suggest that when you finish reading this article you go directly to your calendar and schedule yourself an extra recess.  I’m not talking about some quiet time where you can get caught up on your paperwork!  I’m talking about a long lunch or a long walk.  Maybe going down to the beach or the park and bringing a picnic.  How about meeting your husband or wife at a hotel near their work for a romantic afternoon?

Schedule yourself an extra recess; preferably involving a little ‘anything-goes.’  I guarantee it will do wonders for your business.  You might even have “the best day ever.

News from the right side of the number line: Graphene, a possible replacement for silicon in computer chips, and a DVD-sized storage device that can hold more than a thousand DVDs

One of the paths to the singularity, and the one that is mostly readily plausible given the current state of physics, is nanotechnology. Here are two new nano-entities ready to break out of the laboratory.

First, how would you like to store your entire movie collection on one DVD-sized disc?

A DVD that can store up to 2,000 films could usher in an age of three-dimensional TV and ultra-high definition viewing, scientists say.

The ultra-DVD is the same size and thickness as a conventional disc, but uses nano-technology to store vast amounts of information.

Scientists believe it could be on sale in five years and say it will revolutionise the way we store films, music and data. 

One disc could back up the memory of a computer or record thousands of hours of film.

The breakthrough comes from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, where scientists created a prototype using ‘nano rods’ – tiny particles of gold too small to see – and polarised light, in which the light waves only flow in one direction.

Professor Min Gu, whose findings appear in the journal Nature, said: ‘We were able to show how nano-structured material can be incorporated on to a disc to increase data capacity without increasing the size of the disc.’

A DVD can hold up to 8.5 gigabytes of information, enough for a movie, several special features and an alternative soundtrack.

Blu-ray discs, which were designed to replace them, can store 50GB, enough for a film and extra features in high definition.

But ultra-DVDs will be able to store ten terabytes – or 10,000GB.

Of much greater moment, consider Graphene, a perfect carbon structure one atom thick.

Eight MIT researchers, along with colleagues at Harvard and Boston University, have just received a major U.S. Department of Defense grant for graphene research. With this five-year grant, Palacios says, MIT and its collaborators “would become one of the strongest multidisciplinary teams working on graphene in the world.”

Its unique electrical characteristics could make graphene the successor to silicon in a whole new generation of microchips, surmounting basic physical constraints limiting the further development of ever-smaller, ever-faster silicon Read more

No more free lunch! Understanding the National Association of Realtors — all the way down to your bones…

Michael DiMella wrote the remarks quoted below in a comment, but I’ve extracted them and my responses to him into a separate post.

The meta issue is this: Is the NAR a criminal conspiracy against consumers, and, whether or not it is, is there nothing else good about it?

Michael DiMella: > you seem to have a thorough unwillingness to learn what NAR actually is and does.

That’s astoundingly false. I have written more about the NAR’s criminality than anyone, ever. You may not want to focus on that, but criminality is NAR’s sole reason for being. Everything else it might do is window dressing devised to fool the public — and gullible patsies within the NAR.

> That doesn’t make you a bad guy, but I, for one, would appreciate a modicum of respect.

Good grief. I will offer you and the NAR the oath of respect Fiorello LaGuardia paid to a similar criminal mob when he was inaugurated as Mayor of New York: “E finita la cuccagna!” (“No more free lunch!”)

> To [eliminate mortgage interest deductibility without comprehensively revising the tax code] would be careless and have a major negative impact on a majority of Americans.

False. The deductibility of mortgage interest is a handout to the rich. I’m opposed to all taxation, but it is absurd to argue that the wealthiest Americans cannot afford to bear their own economic weight. In any case, as is discussed below, using tax policy to favor one group over another, thus artificially to churn the markets, is vicious and wrong no matter who is hurt or helped.

The next argument would be that, in a condition of pressure-group warfare, to lay down arms is suicidal. That’s as may be, but, in order to make this argument, you must first argue that there can be circumstances in which you feel yourself justified in expropriating other people’s property — stealing, that is — for your own benefit. Are you an advocate of theft? Did I hear you say something about wanting respect?

> I would say NAR’s support of the MID is well intentioned to protect consumers

The sole purpose of the mostly Read more

Earth to NAR: Drop dead — and try not to stink up the place while you’re doing it

I haven’t paid any attention to this MIBOR business, and I’m grateful to John Rowles for keeping us up to date. Anyone who is dismayed at the way things worked out should be sure to sit at my table when we have a BloodhoundBlog poker tournament: You’re my kind of sucker.

The fact that the NAR is composed of clueless morons should come as a surprise to no one. The fact that they think they can buy off their intellectual superiors by kissing their asses should astonish no one who reads here: I’ve been telling you for years that the dinosaurs pretend to take you seriously in the hopes of compromising you in their corruption. Of course, no one will learn a thing from this experience, which suggests that the dinosaur strategy might well be sound, even though it is absurd on its face. They reason that a grand pageant of being lied to and pandered to makes people feel important, and the evidence suggests they’ve got a good bead on their designated spokesmannequins.

But none of this has anything to do with anything. Whatever combination of cluelessness and collusion motivated this MIBOR clusterfrolick, it’s just a side effect. The NAR is a criminal cartel. Its purpose is to deploy legislation at the federal, state and local levels in behalf of real estate brokers and to the detriment of consumers (and, secondarily, real estate sales people). If you despise the NAR because it is technologically inept, you’re hating it for the wrong reasons. The right reason to detest the NAR, and to seek its extinction, is because it makes war upon the free market in order to expropriate unearned wealth for brokers.

Who pays for the tax deductibility of mortgages? The 70% or more of us who don’t qualify for the deduction. Who will pay for the $8,000 first-time home buyer’s tax credit? Your grandchildren — and it will cost them quite a bit more than $8,000 in interest costs. Thus do the vampires in the NAR make make vampires of us all.

If you want to grouse or joke about how stupid the NAR Read more