Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
"Speak, Greg, Speak!"

I took my Real Estate pre-licensing classes at Phoenix College. Real college classes, with lectures, presentations, papers and exams. At the time, I didn't even know that specialized Real Estate schools existed, but I'm very glad I studied Real Estate the way I did. The professor was an MBA and retired Marine officer named Jim Lake, and he made sure we learned the material. I did well enough in the class that Jim trusted me to sell him his current home, which was the first house I ever sold.

Since then, I have spoken at the introductory class of every section of Real Estate pre-licensing Jim has taught. My topic is Real Estate in Real Life--how this business really works, and how to make it work for you. My goal is to do what I can to cut the outrageous (90+%) failure rate for new licensees. But, taking account that everything we do is about marketing, I am also taking the time to sell myself as a Realtor to students who may never work in Real Estate.

Anyway, if you're in the Phoenix area and you'd like to come hear me speak, these are the dates, times and locations:

Saturday, 8/20/05, 10 am, Room LA-141
Monday, 8/22/05, 8:30 pm, Room B-108
Tuesday, 8/23/05, 4:30 pm, Room B-216

All of these classrooms are on the main campus of Glendale Community College, 59th Avenue at Olive, Glendale, AZ.

I have an agenda, sort of, but I take a lot of questions as I go along. It's never the same show twice, but it's always a lot of fun. Cathy and Cameron come along when they're available. We'd love it if you could be there with us.
posted by Greg Swann at 6:54 AM

 
SplendorQuest: PHP

Cameron and I are playing with PHP, the open-source CGI interface that runs on Apache web servers. Clear as mud? PHP is one of those server-side engines that makes dynamic web pages--pages that change in response to use input--possible. It's hugely database-oriented, whether the database is static at the time the web page is created, like this weblog, which consists of a database of past entries, or djinned up on the fly, as with a set of search results. Our immediate goal is to learn to use PHP as a development tool. Beyond that, we have a poker game we invented a long time ago that we plan to implement. After that, we have an idea for a database-based net enterprise. And, of course, my ultimate goal is to apply all this newly-gained prowess to the real estate problem, since that's where our money is.

Because I've done a lot of real software development in my life, PHP is proving to be a challenge for me. Not to learn--as with JavaScript, it's intensely C-like. But modern computer languages are strongly-typed, rigorously error-trapped and compiled, where PHP is loosely-typed (essentially untyped), haphazardly error-trapped and interpreted. Bat our your code, FTP it to the server, run it from the browser--and get no results. If a PHP program has one error in it, nothing happens. No partial results. No error messages. Nothing. This is good for me and excellent for Cameron: Unforgiving languages engender careful programmers.

We own (lucky number) 13 domains, but for now only one of them is running on an Apache server, so that's where all our development work is going. It's a site for a house Cathy sold, but we're hiding out in our own little place underneath. To see our progress so far, go here. Yes, it's underwhelming, but what we want is a game interface that looks dynamic to the user, even though everything in the HTML world is static at the time you see it. That little bit of nothing is actually four separate files, three of which are on the screen at any given time. Watch this space for news of PHPoker, our next step.
posted by Greg Swann at 8:52 AM

SplendorQuests