We had dinner with the Irish board in Herbesaint, one of the best restaurants of New Orleans (or is it the ONLY restaurant in New Orleans were you can get decent food...?) We were later joined by the guys from ziprealty, were my buddy Richard is now CEO. He is having a hard time getting used to the role of being the head of a big public company. In the US that means a lot of regulations to e followed to the letter (and beyond).
In ice cold hotels meeting rooms we have lots of meetings with people we hope who can gave us more insight of the trends here in the US real estate business.
We speak with the representatives of Texas, California and the NAR. Because of the recent congress elections we notice that the NAR and its associations are the biggest contributors in political sponsoring. Nationwide most of the money is split 50/50 between the parties, but in Texas they even produced a voting guide to endorse the Republican candidates...
The common vision is that ALL information will be available on the internet sooner then we think and that it is important as realtors to try to keep control over this information (in the sense that you try to interpret the information for the consumers).
We also have meetings with the NVM and ICREA.
In the whole of New Orleans you can still see and feel the results of The Storm. Abandoned stores (e.g. Abercrombie) houses being renovated and rebuild. In this drawing of Valencia you can see that even the children are still drawing houses surrounded by water.
Marijn and I flew to New Orleans today. Because there are no direct flights out of Schiphol we flew via Frankfurt and Washington. The service of Lufthansa was excellent. Unfortunately the transfer time in Washington was to tight for our Suitcases to make it in time to New Orleans. We are now still walking around in our tracksuit.
Ingo gave us this picture last week of our house in the 1960's. As you can see when the famous Dutch Painter Otto de Kat still lived here, it was not much of a decent house yet.
Just as this lunatic Haggard is exposed I was visiting the Dutch Resistance Museum where they have a very interesting exhibition about the persecution of gays in the second world war. In some countries it seems, not a lot has changed since the last SIXTY years...
"There is part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life." (Ted Haggard)
What could that be Ted? Your wife? :-)
After we bought a bread machine last week I have quiet got the hang of it and so I was baking bread yesterday. Unfortunately this was rye bread and it was extra crispy. So when it fell from the cupboard on my head, I got (yet an other) cut in my head...
Yesterday Dennis and Therissa got married in Bloemendaal (The Tides) It was a nice ceremony and we saw a lot of (almost) forgotten old friends.
Gayle, the wife of Ted said lately in an interview about the relationship she had with her husband:
God met me, spoke to me, and helped me as I sought Him. I learned to lean on Him and He so satisfied me that I felt increasingly free to love my husband and to participate with him in ministry and the life and calling God has given to us. I believe God delights in this type of relationship.
Yowza! No wonder Ted had to seek the pleasures of a male hooker from Denver! But wait a minute: This Mike Jones is 49? How does he look like when he is costing a whooping $200 per hour???
Trough the photo service of good old Albert Heijn I am trying to arrange cards to wish our friends and family a happy New Year. I am using this picture of Eddie and Me at Disney World, Magical Kingdom. I am anxious to see what they can make out of it....
Explosive growth is fine, but the downside is that preparing the budget for the coming year is getting more and more work. The company now consists of about 10 entities and the operations and cost structure has become quite complex. I am crunching numbers for days now and try to keep the focus in the plan.
Time for my yearly Flu Shot. I hope that as always this menace will pass my door.
We were at the Concertgebouw on invitation of Gerard to listen to the Concertgebouworkest conducted by Bernard Haitink. The program consisted of Weber, songs of Strauss and Symphony number IV of Mahler. This is one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed. especially the last movement a song for soprano, and takes its text from the poem Das himmlische Leben (The Heavenly Life) is outstanding. Luckily the performance was outstanding as well.
Today Ingo celebrated his birthday. He did not mentioned how many birthdays he already celebrated... we had dinner with Noelle and Eddie at restaurant Blauw aan de wal (Blue on the Quay - a reference of course to the Red light district which is surrounding this restaurant).
We were happy to notice that the food was not blue... :-)
From the Washington Post:
"Teen Web sensation MySpace became so big so fast, News Corp. spent $580 million last year to buy it. But now Jackie Birnbaum and her fellow English classmates at Falls Church High School say they're over MySpace. "I think it's definitely going down -- a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now," said Birnbaum."
read more
New websites that are hip are: snapvine (a voice message social network), PLyrics (collection of punk lyrics) and PicGames. (java games for blogs or my space pages)
Funny thing is that most of this new websites are tools for MySpace so I guess they will go down rapidly as well...
In ice cold hotels meeting rooms we have lots of meetings with people we hope who can gave us more insight of the trends here in the US real estate business.
In the whole of New Orleans you can still see and feel the results of The Storm. Abandoned stores (e.g. Abercrombie) houses being renovated and rebuild. In this drawing of Valencia you can see that even the children are still drawing houses surrounded by water.
Marijn and I flew to New Orleans today. Because there are no direct flights out of Schiphol we flew via Frankfurt and Washington. The service of Lufthansa was excellent. Unfortunately the transfer time in Washington was to tight for our Suitcases to make it in time to New Orleans. We are now still walking around in our tracksuit.
Ingo gave us this picture last week of our house in the 1960's. As you can see when the famous Dutch Painter Otto de Kat still lived here, it was not much of a decent house yet.
Just as this lunatic Haggard is exposed I was visiting the Dutch Resistance Museum where they have a very interesting exhibition about the persecution of gays in the second world war. In some countries it seems, not a lot has changed since the last SIXTY years...
"There is part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life." (Ted Haggard)
After we bought a bread machine last week I have quiet got the hang of it and so I was baking bread yesterday. Unfortunately this was rye bread and it was extra crispy. So when it fell from the cupboard on my head, I got (yet an other) cut in my head...
Yesterday Dennis and Therissa got married in Bloemendaal (The Tides) It was a nice ceremony and we saw a lot of (almost) forgotten old friends.
Mike Jones, photographed in downtown Denver on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006.
Gayle, the wife of Ted said lately in an interview about the relationship she had with her husband:
Trough the photo service of good old Albert Heijn I am trying to arrange cards to wish our friends and family a happy New Year. I am using this picture of Eddie and Me at Disney World, Magical Kingdom. I am anxious to see what they can make out of it....
Explosive growth is fine, but the downside is that preparing the budget for the coming year is getting more and more work. The company now consists of about 10 entities and the operations and cost structure has become quite complex. I am crunching numbers for days now and try to keep the focus in the plan.
We were at the Concertgebouw on invitation of Gerard to listen to the Concertgebouworkest conducted by Bernard Haitink. The program consisted of Weber, songs of Strauss and Symphony number IV of Mahler. This is one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed. especially the last movement a song for soprano, and takes its text from the poem Das himmlische Leben (The Heavenly Life) is outstanding. Luckily the performance was outstanding as well.
Today Ingo celebrated his birthday. He did not mentioned how many birthdays he already celebrated... we had dinner with Noelle and Eddie at restaurant Blauw aan de wal (Blue on the Quay - a reference of course to the Red light district which is surrounding this restaurant).
