BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Flourishing (page 36 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

December 24, 2008

My own little gift on Christmas Eve: I’ve discovered a way that a contributor to BloodhoundBlog can get fired…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I would ask, is this sick-making to me alone? — but I heard about it from a nauseated reader before I had seen it myself.

We don’t take any money out of this site at all, not even Amazon affiliate fees. I don’t want for anyone reading BloodhoundBlog ever to doubt our integrity.

I am repelled by advertising on real estate weblogs, but taking in-kind bribes for pimping vendors and their dubious wares is simply corrupt.

Until today, there were no rules for BloodhoundBlog contributors — if for no other reason than because it had never occurred to me that anyone could do something this disgusting, much less celebrate it. Today we inaugurate our first rule:

If you write for us and if you have taken bribes in the form of cash or merchandise from a vendor, please send me your resignation. If I find out that any BloodhoundBlog contributor has taken bribes from a vendor, I will fire you on the spot. I love having our contributors here, but we each one of us have to be above reproach, now and always. This is the way I built this place, and thus it will remain, even if I have to go back to writing alone.

The one bright spot in this, for me, is that not one of these jackals made their bribe offers to me.

Un-frolicking-believable…

I have two more posts scheduled for the day, but I’m so angry I could spit. I’m going to mix myself a drink and toast, one by one, the people I know for sure I can trust.

December 21, 2008

John Kalinowski’s custom real estate signs — and his custom-made approach to everything at his new Cleveland real estate brokerage

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Totally stunning email this morning from John Kalinowski of LiquidBlueRealty.com. John is a profile in courage, to my way of looking at things. He’s just launched a brand new brokerage. In this real estate market. In Cleveland. He’s being very sweet to the Bloodhounds in this note, but this is an amazing amount of work he has undertaken:

I finally had a minute to sit down and send you a note, to thank you for all the help you’ve provided me, even though you weren’t aware you were helping! I’ve been following your site for quite some time now, absorbing every little tidbit possible, and in the last two weeks left RE/MAX to start my own brokerage in the Cleveland Market, Liquid Blue Realty. I’m building the entire company around the custom sign idea, and so far the response has been incredible, to say the least!

I am eternally grateful to the Bloodhounds (and to Russell Shaw) for all the inspiration that has pushed me to make this move. I even built my own website, using WordPress and the Thesis template, even though I’ve never had a blog or built a site before. I probably wouldn’t know what WordPress was if I hadn’t started following your site.

Our signs are 24″x36″, just like yours, but are actually printed directly onto a sign material that is made of some sort of hard plastic with aluminum bonded to each side. Our printer owns what amounts to a giant inkjet printer that can basically print on anything that will fit inside (I’ve seen them print on a bedroom door!), and uses waterproof ink. They use the same process to print conventional signs for other agents, and the panels are about 1/8″ thick and weigh about 5 lbs, so these are serious signs.

Believe it or not, I create my sign files on a PC! I start with MS Publisher with a full-size 24×36 image, then print to a PDF using Acrobat Distiller at 300 DPI. I then jump between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to fix the CMYK values on the blue color, and to create the huge 350mb Read more

December 18, 2008

Inman “news” has always been a FUD-driven vendorslut cesspool — that’s not new — but what is it doing to the Web 2.0 ideal?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Can you read this?

It came this morning in a piece of spam from Inman “news.”

Spam — unsolicited commercial email from vendorslut central.

And: Spam with FUD, InmanStyle: “If you can afford to ignore breaking real estate news and emerging technology trends, then Unsubscribe.”

That’s creepy, sleazy, slimy and repugnant — which is to say it’s marketing as someone from Brad Inman’s epoch understands it. Like all the relics Inman “news” tries to shove down our throats, Bran Inman is a dinosaur — a giant, thrashing reptile incapable of discovering his own irrelevance. Holding someone like him to Web 2.0 standards of behavior is like expecting an actual dinosaur to regulate its own body temperature — it’s more than he can ever do.

But remember that Inman “news” is now allegedly run by people from “our” world.

Do you wish to claim that they don’t know what spam is?

Is it your contention that they don’t know what FUD is?

Evil is doing something you know in advance is wrong. Is there anyone who believes they didn’t know that issuing this treacly piece of spam was morally wrong by standards they understood perfectly well, in advance of their acting?

I’ve been telling you this for a long time, but, sadly, we could not have asked for a more telling example:

When exponents of the vendorslut cesspool — Inman, vendors, the NAR — tell us they want to be a part of our world — what they always mean is that they want to suck us into their sewer of lies.

The things we call surprises almost always result from our failure to pay attention to stone obvious manifestations of reality occurring right before our eyes.

My advice, always: Mind what goes into your mind…

December 17, 2008

Making a Scenius scene to make an impact on your target market

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lender Bob says, “Hey, I’m a lender. I want to get Realtors to notice me. Hell, I want to get in front of them so often they can’t forget me. What can I do?”

Realtor Beth chimes in with, “He’s got the right idea. I’m a Realtor. I’ve got a blog and all, but I don’t feel like I’m talking to the people in my farm. How can I get my name and my ideas in front of them ever day?”

Vendor Bill adds, “I’ve got things once worse. I need to sell marketing ideas to Beth and Bob, both, but how can I break through the clutter?”

These are problems that can be solved by Scenius scenes. With the right scene, you can aggregate content and share it with people you want to do business with.

Watch:

Lender Bob can link to financial news and stories on factors that influence interest rates. He can make this scene available to Realtors in his market, who will have Bob’s free content available to share with their own readers. Florida Lender Kevin Sandridge is getting ready to do just this in his market.

Realtor Beth can link to local news stories and then echo that content to other weblogs in her market area. I’m doing this with Phoenix Area Headlines, but Beth could do other things as well. For example, she could do a “best of local blogs” scene to spread the link love around. Or, like Chicago Realtor Thomas Hall, she could do a scene on green real estate.

Vendor Bill has the easiest job of all, if he learns to think Scenius: He doesn’t need to cut through the clutter, he needs to slice it and dice it and serve it up in his own scene. I’m playing with this idea with Switched-On Marketing.

There’s more. Eric Blackwell is using a scene as a way of getting his 100+ agents to get on-board the social media marketing train. Cheryl Johnson and I are both using Scenius scenes to manage our listings on-line — but that’s an advanced-class topic.

The point of this: If you’re in the business of self-promotion, we’ve Read more

December 16, 2008

What matters more — Attitude or Aptitude? I had always put my money on Application, but I realized the best bet is all three

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I edited 1,407 files in 1,407 folders on Friday. Not by hand, mind you. That would have been a tedious and error-prone path to an inevitable suicide for someone like me. No, I built a spider to do the job, and it took a surprisingly long time to run — almost four minutes.

But I wanted to put the Phoenix Area Headlines Scenius scene into every engenu web page we’ve built so far, and that entailed editing 1,407 files in 1,407 folders — dispersed among thousands of folders in dozens of domains all over our file server.

I didn’t really edit them, of course. Software doesn’t work that way. I sucked the files to be altered into memory, concatenated my new code on at the end, killed the original file and then wrote down my new version under the same name. I built the engenu file architecture anticipating that I might want to do things like this.

And that kind of thing makes me a hard sell on the idea of Attitude with a capital A. I definitely believe in working from a positive frame of mind toward positive goals — all based firmly in reason and logic. But it doesn’t matter how many times you say, “I can do it!” — if you don’t actually know how to edit 1,407 files in four minutes. Attitude is nothing without Aptitude.

But Aptitude is nothing without Application. We are all of us buried up to our necks in work we could be doing, and our success at digging ourselves out is entirely a function of how we apply ourselves.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” For most of my life, I’ve regarded that as being the essence of human character. But there is an interesting question about those 1,407 engenu pages: Where did they come from?

Each one of those engenu folders represents a web page, and many of them are grouped together into web sites. A single-property web site might consist of 20 or more engenu folders. An extensive home search could run to 60 or more folders — 60 or more web pages linked Read more

December 14, 2008

Hope and despair at the onset of economic recession: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.

That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.

You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to work to alleviate it. I turn to my work because that’s what I love most in my life — and my purpose in living is to love my life.

But I come up short, I think, because I’m so badly equipped to prepare for desperate times. We’re headed into an economic recession, perhaps a depression, and I truly don’t know what to think about it. I’ve lived through several of these episodes in the past, and I worked right through all of them and Read more

December 12, 2008

If the question is, “What should a Bloodhound do if awarded the Pulitzer Prize?” — the answer is, “Drool…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Fanmail from some flounder:

BloodhoundBlog: Will Pulitzer Come Calling?

The BloodhoundBlog is a phenomenon; read it and you’ll become addicted to the prose, the passion, and the gem-like jewels of news. It now has a cult following and it has achieved pinnacles of success in online media. But will Pulitzer’s new criteria open the door to the likes of the “dawg??”

More here on the Pulitzers.

It is obvious by now that the best writing in the world is being written for electronic media only. Excepting Geno, we wouldn’t qualify for any awards anyway, but it remains that the Pulitzer committee is not quite ready to tiptoe the whole way into the twenty-first century. It is stretching itself only so far as to consider prose that is being committed to pretend paper. If you can hang in cyberspace without clinging in craven desperation to atoms — even purely imaginary atoms — your talents will not be considered. The Pulitzer Prize will remain a celebration of obsolescent relics by irrelevant antiques. Sic semper tyrannosauris.

December 11, 2008

“The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Asia Times:

America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States. The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.

It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos – making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans – a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course – some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.

“Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China’s ‘piano fever’.

The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today’s world – surely not the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills – can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard, to be sure, but many of the 36 million will become much better scientists, engineers, physicians, businessmen and military officers.

More:

Any activity that requires discipline and deferred gratification benefits children, but classical music does more than sports or crafts. Playing tennis at a high level requires great concentration, but nothing like the concentration required to perform the major repertoire of classical music. Perhaps the only pursuit with comparable benefits is the study of classical languages. It is not just concentration as such, but its content that makes classical music such a formative tool. Music, contrary Read more

November 30, 2008

“Privacy is an artifact of inefficiency”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I say that just about every time I speak in public, and people always ask me to repeat it, and they inscribe it carefully into their notes.

It’s a simple enough idea: What you’ve thought of all your life as privacy has simply been a function of inefficient data processing tools. The more efficacious the means of acquiring and storing data become, the less privacy — unintentional ignorance by others of observable facts — you will have.

If you find this idea repellent — dang…

It is what it is, and it’s absurd to rebel against it. We are real, physical entities. Our purposive actions sometimes have secondary physical consequences that are potentially observable to other people — and to data acquisition devices. Your best hope of achieving privacy, going forward, is to expire. Short of that, you might try to exist in some sort of extra-physical way. And short of that, you might try doing everything you do where no one — and nothing — else can observe you. And short of all that, swallow hard and prepare to have every fact of your life known, at least potentially, by anyone or everyone else.

This does not bother me at all. I deliberately lead a hugely public life. I’m not showy, I hope, but I never want for someone to be able to say something truthful about me that I have not said first myself. I try to lead a very moral life, but no one is perfect. But what I don’t want, ever, is to give the impression that I am trying to hide my imperfections. (Disclosure: I caused a car accident earlier this evening. No one was hurt, but the front end of my car was smacked up pretty good.)

(People who send me email will have grown used to me replying with multiple names in the CC line. I’m never trying to hide facts about my life, but, I am normally trying very hard to not-hide those facts.)

Another thing I say in speeches is that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have imagined for myself. Mostly the Read more

November 28, 2008

On giving thanks: The Thanksgiving Scenius and the Thanksgiving scene and the abundance of love

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

This was a tough week for our house for a few reasons. One is that I am working through a contract, a situation in which my ability to communicate with my clients was all but shut down. This was a first for me, and painful. I understood what was happening, but not necessarily why it happened. I knew I had to keep plowing ahead though, and Wednesday we finally got back on some solid ground, something to be thankful for and grow from.

As bad as that was, the toughest thing we dealt with was a death. A teenager- a beautiful, intelligent, funny, and sweet child of 16, we had known her since she was 3, one of the few people in the world who was a friend to both of our kids, died in an automobile accident. She was a passenger on a sunny morning drive in the country, in a car with her girlfriends- cranking up the music, singing, goofing off, celebrating life with the joyous freedom that only teenage girls are capable of. I can’t help but smile when I picture a car full of girls, laughing out loud, full of life, full of hope, full of happiness… Then the driver ran a red light.

She had moved to a small neighboring community, and we didn’t see much of her any more, still, the friends of your kids hold a special place in your heart- as any Mom will tell you. The tiny community she lived in was shaken to it’s very core. The ripple effect- so many families knew everyone involved- the girls in the car as well as the couple who had the green light and hit the girls. It will take years to heal from this, and yet, and yet… The viewing was full of life. Yes, young people came to say good-bye to their dear friend, but teenagers are life itself- it oozes from them, they can’t contain it. Memories and testaments to this child and the special place she held in the hearts of so many people were everywhere you turned and this funeral was Read more

November 26, 2008

Launching SplendorQuest.com: Love among The Unfallen at every wavelength of heaven’s light

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the official launch of SplendorQuest.com, the official first post. I’m cross-posting it at BloodhoundBlog, as well.

Fair warning: This post is comprised of an extract from my novel, The Unfallen. After the “more” tag, you will be exposed to romantic fiction involving sexually playful adults engaged in actual life-like grown-up encounters. If you’re not comfortable with that kind of thing, skip ahead now. The nets are awash in content, after all, and almost none of it is about grown-ups. This post is nothing but a tiny glob of glowing phosphor on the vast oceans of information. Feel free to swim away with my blessings.

But: If you do want to catch a glimpse of actual grown-ups in action, I might have what you need. The splendor that is the grail of SplendorQuest.com is a state of mind, a state of being, a mental fugue state where being and awareness of being and worship of and delight in being all become the same thing. The fiction I write — or the best of the fiction I write — is about people who live — and who know enough to love — that splendor. The extract shown below is a snapshot of those kind of people at their best.

You may want to read things into this text, and, if you do, you will be wildly incorrect, but there’s nothing I can do about that. All I can do is be what I am, and that’s why I want to start SplendorQuest.com with this text in particular. This is a work of large ambition: I wanted to rescue romance from the Romance genre as a worthy subject of literature, and I wanted to rescue sex from smut. But more than both of those, I wanted — I want, continuously — to rescue the ideas of reverence and worship and rejoicing and adoration and exaltation from the grave, from empty pie-in-the-sky promises. I know that the ideas I treasure are real because I live them in my own life, in my very best moments. There will doubtless be many more grand statements of what splendor Read more

November 26, 2008

As an expression of gratitude to the Bloodhounds, here’s an Unchained Melody for Thanksgiving

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work. –Ayn Rand

I love this place — this life, this earth and this tiny little corner of the net. The accretion of evidence leads me to believe that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have designed for myself. Yes, we’re headed into serious economic trouble, and, yes, we’re headed that way under the leadership of a man who has never held a job in his life and who makes no secret that he knows nothing about the causes of wealth and poverty.

But: Even so: So what?

We are on the cusp of riches without limits. We are literally standing around getting soaked to the skin as soup rains down from the skies, and yet we are so much in the thrall of our treasured wounds that we can’t even see it. That much, at least, is a correctable nuisance.

The curtain goes up at eleven tonight on Act Three of my life, and I know better than anyone that I am the best beneficiary of the riches I talk about. All my life people have asked me for writing advice, and, without intending to be glib, I told them simply this: Have something to say, and have a way of saying it. I am befriended by the times, and — amazingly to me — I am by now able to ship these piles of ore I have quarried from my mind. Do you want to know how to change the world forever, for the good? You do it one mind at a time — starting with your own.

I’m grateful to the Bloodhounds — to the people who read, comment and write here — both for BloodhoundBlog and for Unchained. I’m thankful for our clients, who have been prosperous enough to keep us in business. I don’t think I ever adequately express my gratitude to Cathleen, who gives me everything that can be had from another person. There are so many others — Richard Riccelli and Brian Brady and Teri Lussier — so I hope Read more

November 24, 2008

Something new under the sun: Sim and the future of human interaction

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I saw this commercial over the weekend and it’s been making me nuts:

This is fascinating to me. This is Game Console 2.0, the participatory gaming experience. Okay, that much is not new, going back to the Dreamscape, anyway. Ubiquitous at broadband speeds since the original Xbox.

What’s cool here is that the interaction is, first, among adults, and, second, has nothing to do with the game play. This is remote schmoozing through a game console, a phone call conducted from within a sim. SecondLifeLite, as it were.

I’m wondering if Nintendo got viraled on this, if a cadre of moms figured out how to use the software this way during naptime, and Nintendo is marketing to grow a niche that erupted spontaneously.

There’s way more. Simulation is emerging as a fourth branch of science. Computing grows year by year in its accretion of power. A model is not reality, a map is not the territory, but a sim of, for example, the life cycle of a star, could teach us as much in ten minutes as we have managed to learn in the last 10,000 years.

Now combine the two. Take ordinary people with better and better user-interface devices and let them work and play together by simulation in the cloud. The two phenomena are not the same, but, even so, at this incredibly cheap end-user level, we are all avidly nurturing and cultivating precisely the intellectual capital we will need going forward.

It’s daunting to stand at the threshold of what may be a calamitous economic disaster and, yet, to recognize that we are also at the threshold of an unimaginable increase in human mental prowess.

 
Further notice: Apparently, Nintendo has pursued an Alpha Moms astroturfing strategy for the Wii since its introduction. I don’t know if this use of this software is something they have encouraged, but presumably it is. Doesn’t matter to me. Better questions: Are moms meeting through this game? Are they strangers until they discover each other in the game — much as we discover one another through weblogs? More interesting: Are the children for whom this game is actually designed meeting Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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