Some Rants (and Raves!)

CPA and a BIG Surprise
Due to some personal issues over the weekend, my wife and I were unable to talk about the CPA at all. I am about 99% in favor of using the CPA's services, but I want to make sure this is a mutual decision with my wife also. It turns out on Monday, I had to take the day off from work so that I could join my wife for a doctor's appointment. We already knew she was pregnant, and now we found out they are twins - both boys, too! This was definately unexpected news, however, both of us are overcome with joy. I called the CPA yesterday to apologize for not getting back sooner, and to tell her that we probably won't have a decision until later this week.

Goals and the Need for a Plan
I am probably the worst when it comes to writing things down and 'practicing what I preach'. I am a big proponent of having goals and writing down a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly plan, yet I myself cannot even seem to find the time to sit down, think of an action plan, and write the details down. I truely believe this is the reason my business is stuck in nuetral at the moment. The only marketing I've done lately is putting my "We Buy Houses" magentic signs on the car when I go to/from work. I did do some research on the internet for properties, but it's really become hard to find anything these days. Usually any property on the MLS that is even halfway decent is snatched up. Besides, I doubt I could get conventional financing on anything over $75k right now. So my plan right now is to whip myself into making a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly plan. ;-)

Realtor.com Automated Feeds
Instead of using my spare time to write my plan(s), I used that time over the weekend to write a Java program that queries Realtor.com and parses out the details of properties in the selection. It still has some issues, but works pretty good. I managed to write it so the output it generates can be extended by the user. Therefore, the user can do whatever they want with the data: list it, print it, store it in a DB, or whatever. Once I finish dealing with a few kinks in the program, I'll post it on my FTP site or create a SourceForge project. My next goal will be to integrate it into my county's tax assessor's web site so that I can grab homeowner and tax information at the same time. This will really cut down on a lot of the "manual" steps I normally do. I realize Realtor.com isn't the most up-to-date place for properties, but I want to gather information for historical trend reasons.

Word Verification Posting
Like Shaun, I went ahead and set up comment posting with word verification. I haven't been hit with spam on my blog (yet), but I thought I'd take the proactive stance rather than get infected later and have to deal with it.