In general, an agent is someone who acts on your behalf, someone who is supposed to represent your interests. Because of this, in transactions where real estate agents are involved, it is crucial to understand for whom these agents work.
I’ve always said that entrepreneurs are people who have a knack at selecting and organizing patterns from an infinite set of chaotic possibilities. The greater the created patterns, the greater the skill of the entrepreneur. Related to this theory is some interesting research from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program. The lab’s research indirectly supports the possibility that human intent has a “small, but statistically significant” effect on reality.
I found PEAR after watching the movie What the Bleep do We Know!?. I think that they are performing interesting science, although it’s admittedly difficult to tell based on their website. I was happy to see a Wired magazine article discussing their research and hope that such press coverage will provide more funding both to PEAR and other research groups around the country to help them better understand humanity’s intuitive understanding that has lead to the phrase Mind Over Matter.
A financed real estate transaction has a good number of moving pieces and steps that need to happen in order to for things to work. Here’s a rough overview of the buying process.
Joel Spolsky has a great article explaining that if a company is attempting to build high quality software they have to hire the best programmers and designers.
I’ve always understood that the best programmers or designers are at least one order of magnitude better than good programmers or designers, but Joel’s explanation is better than any other I’ve heard yet. I particularly like his analogy that five average composers will never compose a work of equal quality to a musical genius like Mozart.
This artistic explanation is an easily understood comparison, so why don’t people seem to understand this phenomenon when it comes to software development? Perhaps it is because people who do not create software cannot easily appreciate the complexity or effort necessary to build a software system, let alone a great one. Whereas almost everyone can listen to a piece of music and grasp its complexity.
Not all companies are looking to build the best software, but if yours is, read his article.
I recently started using statcounter.com, an easy to use website visitor tracking system. All tracking is done on a remote server through a small bit of javascript installed on one’s web pages.
It was so easy, it took less than 15 minutes to setup and start watching statistics about my website. Best part is that they have an option that is free, the perfect cost for a bootstrapping entrepreneur.
