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Category: Casual Friday (page 10 of 25)

March 7, 2010

Reflecting His Radiance . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Imagine yourself larger,” said His Radiance.

Stopped me in my tracks.

“Imagine yourself larger. You are everything you’ve ever hoped to be, but you’re afraid to let yourself be it. Free your mind. Imagine yourself larger.”

I imagined myself warier. Hanging around in a college town you’ll pay if you let your guard down. Things are not always what they seem, after all, and that’s the point. The bohemian enclave on the left bank of every university in America is a little Accidental Disneyland where distraction is the main attraction. So even as I approached His Radiance, I backed off mentally.

He was not a pretty man, particularly, but something inside him was beautiful and subtly seductive and, I thought, very, very dangerous. He was Hispanic, and he held himself like a king. He was wearing a radiant white linen suit in the hot summer sun, and the contrast of the bright white against his brown skin was stunning. His sleek black hair was swept straight back from his forehead and his teeth were straight and white and perfect.

In truth, he made me think that this might be what god would look like, if any god of any religion had ever managed to grow beyond the age of three. I called myself an idiot for thinking that, but I thought it anyway.

“Imagine yourself whole. Rid yourself of every drain on your energy. Purge yourself of doubt and fear. Stretch yourself to reach the completion of your life’s destiny.”

He was standing in a little cobbled alleyway between a New Age bookstore and a fern bar, and I wasn’t sure whose wares he’d been sampling.

“Imagine yourself glorious. You are an immense soaring bird, and the Earth is your toy, not your tether.”

And you can only spit so much before you hit your own shoe: I wasn’t buying a word of it, and yet I sat down on a bench to hear His Radiance out.

“We are not here to crawl. We are not here to grovel. We are not here to plead and suffer and mourn.”

“Yeah? What we here for then, stick?” The Gangster Read more

February 20, 2010

Stupid poem lands me on SlashDot

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

I occasionally blog on UVEXsports.com.

Most of my posts were links to stories about Lindsey Vonn, who uses UVEX stuff. We hope famously.

The IOC called and told UVEX to stop using any mention of Mrs Vonn on UVEXsports.com and that included my posts.

Then she won the gold, I congratulated her in thinly disguised verse, SlashDot picked it up and now other blogs are linking to it.

This is known as the Streisand Effect,  and it is one of the coolest things about these here Interwebs. If you love the players but hate the corporate game the Olympics have become, please check it out, leave a comment and send a message to the IOC.

December 31, 2009

Using the DISC system to understand the boys of Entourage

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve talked about the DISC system of personality profiling in past. I’m talking about it again, now, because I want to use it to discuss how we are going to build our ideal real estate team. For now, I just want to talk about thinking in a DISC-like way, using on-the-fly DISC analysis to evaluate and respond to the people you come into contact with.

Here are the four DISC categories:

Dominance; Influence; Steadiness; Compliance

That’s less than useful. Here’s a better way of understand what DISC is measuring:

D’s are drivers. They’re all about getting things Done. A high-D (c’est moi) can be a prick to work for (yeah), but every successful boss will have a lot of D in his personality.

I’s are all about Image, about the way other people perceive them, their accomplishments and their stuff. Many successful salespeople are strong on I traits.

S’s are strongly associated with family life and social communities generally. If your office has a Secret Santa gift exchange, it’s being run by an S.

C’s are associated with calculation, computation and a comprehensive attention to detail. If the till comes up three cents short, a D will toss in some coins to get on with business, but a C will keep counting and counting until the cause of the discrepancy is uncovered.

Here are two more axes for understanding DISC profiling:

D’s and I’s are about telling, where S’s and C’s are about asking.

And D’s and C’s are about process, where I’s and S’s are about people.

It would be terribly convenient (at least for me) if people fell neatly into one DISC quadrant or another, but of course they don’t. Some people are chameleons, with just about the same amounts of each characteristic. More commonly, people will tend to have one strong trait and another that is fairly strong, with the other two coming in less strong.

So, for example, in my own idealized self-image, I am all D and nothing else. But in the reality of day-to-day life, I am a high D with relatively high I-like tendencies — which you could guess just by reading this post. I want Read more

December 4, 2009

Embarrassing Confessions & Marketing Memory

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Two quick confessions:

I can’t throw a baseball.
I’m pretty sure I just scared a potential client away.

I used to be able to throw a baseball.  I played little league and pony league with some success.  There weren’t any pro scouts putting radar guns on me or anything, but I played right up until high school and I was regularly elected to the all-star team.  (Although looking back, it probably helped that I was much bigger than all the other kids and threatened to show them my Bruce-Lee-super-fist-of-temporary-death if they didn’t vote for me…  Nah, I’m sure it was my prowess inside the foul lines.)

Anyway, in high school I discovered my true calling: shot-put.  After that, I didn’t have occasion to pick up another baseball until my boys started playing just a year or two ago.  That’s when I discovered that I now had all the throwing grace and accuracy of a little girl.  You see, by my estimate I probably threw the shot – over the course of my competitive career – 15-20,000 times.  That pretty much wiped out any skill I ever had for throwing a baseball.  On the other hand, it created a near perfect shot-put technique that I can still demonstrate even now… as I enter my peak “mid 40s” athletic years.  (These are a lot like my peak “mid 20s” athletic years, only everything is now done while carrying around the extra weight of a small child.  It’s actually quite impressive if you think about it…)  Think about it or not, I can still summon dynamic and purposeful form because of a powerful adaptation called muscle memory.

Earlier this week, as I was parking my truck,  I noticed a car stopped in the middle of the street.  The driver was craning her neck to jot down information from an agent’s For Sale sign.  She then pulled up two houses and stopped again to take down information from another agent’s For Sale sign.  By this time I was walking down the sidewalk; I veered in toward the middle of the street and approached her on the drivers’ side.  “Hi,” I Read more

November 14, 2009

David Harsanyi: “C’mon, admit it. Twitter is useless”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is good writing, and the man takes it down in 500 words. From The Denver Post:

Twitter’s popularity and usefulness are a mystery to me. Pressed by personal, professional and cultural forces, I sporadically deploy short missives for fear of becoming one of those cantankerous technophobes who is too dense to recognize the miracle of letting “followers” know I hate raisins or that I loved the finale of “Mad Men.”

Now, not only am I expected to transmit this minutiae mere seconds after I think it, some 20-year-old in California has decreed that I must do it within the brevity of 140 characters. This need for conciseness, in fact, induces normally articulate friends of mine to write in Prince lyrics — recklessly using “2” and “4” and “U” as words.

To this point, I’ve found Twitter so aggressively worthless that I was forced to research exactly what I was missing. In the process, I stumbled across a useful New York Times tech column penned by David Pogue that clarified all. The headline read, “Twitter? It’s What You Make It.”

In summation, like your beloved pet rock, Twitter is useful only in your imagination.

Despite this, I can’t begin to add up how many times, as a member of the media, I’ve been instructed that I need to Twitter by people who have absolutely no clue what Twittering means. How Twitter helps journalism is yet to be determined.

But the deepest mystery of Twitter is why celebrities and elected officials take part. After all, we all know they can’t write their own lines.

Now, admittedly, Twitter can be entertaining on occasion, as it turns out that 140 characters offers a great chance to be misunderstood — and an even greater chance one will expose his inner troglodyte.

In these past few weeks alone, a clueless Colorado State Sen. Dave Schultheis tweeted, “Don’t for a second, think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s Roll.” NFL running back Larry Johnson took time out from his busy day of sucking at his job to ridicule his coach Read more

November 9, 2009

Youtube Embed “Dump”

by

Retechulous...

Author website

Ok… so I try to stay away from being too blatant about the self promotion here at BHB. But screw it. Here we go…

🙂

Easy Reference Youtube Embed Codes and Tweaks For Your Website

Using Youtube’s standard embeds you end up with something like this:

Notice the White “Brainstorming Domain Names” in the header? Ugly, right?

Well strip them out by adding “&showinfo=0” to the url. And you’ll end up with something like this:

Or maybe you want to make the vid bigger? Just change the dimensions in the embed code and you’ll end up with something like this:

Or, maybe you’d like to start the video at a certain point? Use “&start=(insert seconds here)”.

Or, maybe you want to “loop” the video so it keeps replaying? Just use “&loop=1” in the embed code. Trust me, this, coupled with “&autoplay=1” can come in very handy, especially if you’re trying to have some fun with a friend. I’ll spare you the demo on this one, because the Bloodhoundblog home page would end up streaming my “toilet humor” over and over again until this post gets buried in the archives by newer posts.

Or…maybe not? Which leads me to my favorite trick. Coupling all of the above with a minimized 1 x 1 pixel vid featuring some unsavory audio. (If you pull out a magnifiying glass maybe you can see the video below this line?

[Note- Little pixelated fart was just removed. I felt bad because people were starting to blame the dog. Sorry Odysseus… rh, a few days later]

Excuse Me!

Practical applications for real estate? Well, stripping the white title line could make your site look a lot cleaner and more professional? Or maybe you want to take a real long video of a home tour, then link directly to different rooms by using the “&start” thing. Or maybe you’re confident a little “silent but deadly” offer could help your conversion ratio. Example: You could embed a tiny 1×1 and say something like “pssst… give me a call, I have an opening this Saturday morning at 10.”

Freak em out a little, they’ll either love you Read more

November 4, 2009

What could be more important than television?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had a dental dilemma yesterday, and it’s left me less than useful. I’m working — I wrote a contract earlier this evening — but I’m housebound for now. It gives me time to post, for a change, and this is an important topic that I’ve wanted to take on for quite some time.

The issue?

Television.

I almost never make time for it, and then not regularly, but there are exceptions in my life (facilitated by on-line and on-demand re-runs).

Thus:

1. Glee. Incomparable harmonies. Preciously POMO, but still deliciously rude. Corollary: Baseball sucks. Cut it out.

2. Madmen. Will Donald Draper defenestrate this Sunday?

3. South Park. I have concluded that Leopold Stotch (“Butters”) is the glue that holds the show together.

I would like to have something of moment to say about Entourage, which we always enjoy when we see it, but I’m too cheap to pay for HBO.

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