BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 22 of 30)

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 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 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

December 9, 2008

Marketing the praxis of a Scenius thoughtfully: How can we use dynamism and triangulation to play tunes that make the spiders dance?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier paid me a very high compliment today in email, although I’m sure that’s wasn’t her intent. I expect she was just being matter-of-fact. Here’s what she said:

You don’t do anything without a purpose.

She was asking why I phrase so many headlines in the form of a question, assuming correctly that I do so for marketing reasons. Questions are a pretty common arrow in the copywriter’s quiver. Properly constructed, they are inherently interesting and instantly involving. I’m not as good at this as I plan to be, but one of things I’m looking for in a good question is something that incites at least as much curiosity as it satisfies. I give you the headline of this post as an example.

But Teri’s off-hand remark — “You don’t do anything without a purpose” — means everything to me, because it’s a completely true statement about everything I do — and everything I’ve ever wanted to be. I can’t promise you that I always know what I’m doing, but I always know with perfect certainty what it is I intend to be doing — what objective I hope to achieve by my efforts.

So we’ve been playing this scenius game since Thanksgiving, really since Swallow Hill Road, and it’s fun to explore how much we understand of what we’re doing, and, fun, too, to understand how much there is that we’ve never thought to explore.

Both Cheryl Johnson and I have been rebuilding our “Current Listings” content as Scenius scenes. Why? Because a content management system like a weblog is the perfect way of organizing frequently-edited copy — provide that you have some way of delivering the content in a form you can stand, once you’ve edited it. This is what Scenius — the software praxis, not the social process — is all about.

Stop.

A scenius — lower case — is a metaphor for a kind of communal genius. The word comes from “scene” plus “genius”, and the best example of a scenius that I can offer is the birth of Bebop jazz. When you put smart, well-informed, passionate people together, the synergy of their Read more

December 4, 2008

Rustling up some Frontier Spirit in the old midwest

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

From The Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page: America Needs Its Frontier Spirit. Daniel Henninger spells it out. And quite nicely, I might add. An excerpt:

The greatest danger in the current economic crisis is that the United States will lose its historic appetite for risk. The mood now is that risk-taking got us into this mess. Risk, though, is the quintessential American trait that built the nation — from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the rise of the microchip. If we let risk give way to a new ethos of commercial reserve and regulatory restriction, the upward arc of the U.S. ascendancy will flatten. Maybe it already has.

By “we” I mean the policy makers in Washington who will write the new rules of finance, our stunned bankers and businessmen, and the average Joes of Main Street who with reason have lost confidence. If all lose faith at once in the American idea of risk, refinding it when the recession ends may prove difficult.

This is the moment for Americans to rediscover the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner. In a seminal paper delivered in 1893 to the American Historical Association, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner argued that the U.S. found its identity as it pushed away from the Eastern seaboard and crossed a series of frontier “fall lines”: the Allegheny Mountains, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the plains, the Rocky Mountains and California.

Every American absorbs the frontier experience from reading biographies of great Americans or from movies. Frederick Turner, however, made it clear that with this effort to transform the wilderness the Americans broke decisively with what he called, believe it or not, “old Europe.” “Here is a new product,” Turner wrote, “that is American.”

“From the conditions of frontier life,” Turner believed, “came [American] intellectual traits of profound importance . . . coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil.” 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 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 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

November 24, 2008

My BloodhoundBlog wish list as we embark on the SplendorQuest

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re going to fire up SplendorQuest.com full-bore this week. For now it’s nothing, no need to link to it. But if you’ve ever done a whois on any one of our domains, you will have seen that SplendorQuest.com lives at the top of everything.

I’ve talked about Splendor a lot at BloodhoundBlog. It’s the defining metaphor of my life. I wrote my best philosophical defense of the idea, so far, in January and February of 1988, and my best ostensive definition in 1997. I’ve promised myself for two solid decades that I would get back to this idea, thinking that it was something that I would attend to in full in my retirement. Lately, that seems to me to be a less than satisfactory resolution. For one thing, this is the perfect time to talk about Splendor, just as we are about to suffer the full consequences of a hundred centuries of the worship of Squalor. And for another, I have just lately come to the realization that I will never, ever retire.

I predict that SplendorQuest.com, whatever else it might become, will be a place of manifestoes. Even so, I think I’ve already written my own SplendorQuest manifesto. There’s a lot that I’m saying in that little extract, and you could read it every day and always find something new in it. But the essence of the thing, for me, is this: “[P]art of being who I am is a conscious refusal to hide things like this just because many people don’t want to hear them. I don’t believe that I owe anything to other people, but the best gift I can offer my fellow men is not to hide who I am.” I love my life, but, much more importantly, I refuse to affect to hold my life in contempt. That’s not Splendor, not by itself, but that’s a gift I can share with my brothermen just by being alive.

What we have planned — what I have planned, at least — is simply to be alive in public as this thing that I want to become. Just to be shamelessly alive, Read more

November 14, 2008

SplendorQuest: kiss me…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

kiss me your glory i kiss you my joy
kiss me your giggling girlishness
     i kiss you my mannish boy

kiss me your tickling i kiss you my laughter
kiss me your before your before your before
     i kiss you my ever after

kiss me your promise i kiss you my prayer
kiss me your fire i kiss you my air
kiss me your hunger i kiss you my need
kiss me your giving i kiss you my greed
kiss me your worship i kiss you my vow
kiss me your present your presence your presents
     i kiss you my endless now

kiss me your seeking i kiss you my knowing
kiss me your staying your staying your staying
     i kiss you my never going

kiss me your wisdom i kiss you my clever
kiss me your always your always your always
     i kiss you my always forever

November 13, 2008

By making war on private property rights, the National Association of Realtors is making war on everything we are as Americans

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m responding here to a comment from Dave Phillips, who is to be commended in advance for bearing up to the strain.

I will invite President Gaylord to read and possibly respond if you promise to be a good doggy and engage in polite discussion (i.e., avoid inflamed rhetoric like “Rotarian Socialism” and “inane kleptomania”). It would serve no useful purpose to just piss him off. He is a reasonable man and would appreciate your sound reasoning.

Is he a reasonable man or a daffodil? Rotarian Socialism and kleptomania are exact and perfect descriptions of the way our country is run. If the man can’t bear to look at the world as it is, he needn’t bother talking to me.

“Everything the NAR does is anti-consumer.” I respectfully disagree. Defending mortgage interest deductibility (based on the current tax establishment) is very much in my favor as a consumer. Is it also self-serving? yes.

This is the seen and the unseen, classic Bastiat. You see a tax deduction and regard it as being to your immediate pecuniary advantage. You don’t see all the other taxes that are raised to make up for that deduction.

Worse, you don’t see that the NAR is not seeking your interests but its own: The deduction causes you to value housing above other investments, contrary to market forces, which results in your buying a home when you could and probably should be making more productive use of your surplus income. The goal? Commissions for NAR members, not your interests at all.

Still worse, you don’t see that the recession we are going into was caused, fundamentally, by overvaluing housing as a market good by means of tax deductions, credits, exclusions and deferrals. In five years you could be walking around shoeless, dining out of garbage dumpsters, but at least your mortgage interest will be tax-deductible.

In other words: You are a consumer in your every economic transaction, not just when you are paying your mortgage. Past lobbying by the NAR and CRA groups will result, at a minimum, in the pillaging of your retirement accounts. How is that “very much in [your] favor as Read more

November 13, 2008

Passion play: A working plan for working our brains until they explode at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I like Teri’s idea of an exploding brain. Or maybe we can think of the brain as a kernal of popcorn — hard and seemingly inflexible until just the right application of heat makes it explode into something eight times its original size. In addition to all the other things people might call me, I am most adamantly an evangelist for expanding minds, so here is the rough game plan I worked out for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix on the flight home from Orlando:


Click on the image to open a PDF version.
(Updated to reflect the actual dates of the event.)

Here’s the way this is going to work: If you come to Unchained, we want you staying at our hotel — even if you live in Phoenix. Why? Because the scenius we plan to build is going to look an awful lot like a boot camp. If you’re with us from 5 pm on Thursday to 5 pm on Sunday, you could end up working as much as 54 of those 72 hours. Some people need more sleep than others, but the harder you work at the work we plan to set before you, the greater the benefits you will reap.

What benefits?

Recall that you’re going to be completely overhauling your marketing profile. Each one of those eight labs will be hands-on, step-by-step explorations of the course matter. You won’t be working on examples or dummy versions, you’ll be working on your own marketing materials, making them better and more effective in collaboration with your instructors and team-mates.

Moreover, you’ll be building scenius scenes at all levels of interaction. The whole conference will be a giant scenius, a chance for you to learn and to teach with some of the hardest-charging minds in modern real estate marketing. Your labs will form smaller scenes, and the work you do in ad hoc teams will be the smallest of scenius scenes — as small as two people working together by the hotel pool. This kind of intense interaction, if you dare to immerse yourself in it, will leave you drenched in new knowledge, new skills — 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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