Closing on 2007 means closing a major turning point in my life.  In one short year, I've had another son, built a house, left one great job for another, gotten remarried, made new friendships, lost old ones, deepened my involvement with RETS, and set about building the best MLS in the country.  It truly has been a pivotal time in my personal history.

RETS, RETS, RETS

A good portion of my brainpower this past year has been focused on improving RETS, the Real Estate Transaction Standard(s).  It's simply fantastic to be involved in such a high-profile standard with so many great Real Estate technology professionals.  My thanks particularly go to the rest of the "core" Schema team: Paul Stusiak, Gina Accawi, Peter Spicer, Michael Wurzer, Gregg Petch, Eric Petersen, Sergio Del Rio, Chris McKeever, Joshua Vosper, and Jaison Freed.

It's also easy to overlook the wizard behind the curtain, but a great debt is due to Mark Lesswing.  In a single year, he's transformed a motley crew of interested participants into a gen-u-ine organization.  Beyond this, his grasp of the technology proposition to Real Estate is virtually unparalleled.  Regardless of his other accomplishments, it's hard not to consider him one of the great RE technology luminaries of this decade.

On a related note, Michael Wurzer (RESO Chairman and President & CEO of FBS) posted an open letter to the mass listing aggregators of the world.  Proving the value of the Web 2.0 world, enough responded that some sort of open discussion will take place at Inman's Connect NYC.  Mike's certainly shaping up to be a luminary himself.

<technical>
My consequential involvement with RETS is the Query language, dubbed RQLX (although it's a bit of a grandfathered name that lacks significant meaning).  Through numerous posts between myself and Sergio Del Rio on the RETS-DEV mailing list, I countered the necessity of a number of staid data archetypes (dictionaries and vocabulary) in RETS 2 that existed largely to resolve the problem of unique particle attribution in RETS 1.x.  The reality is that the RETS 2 Schema have evolved into a fairly monolithic namespace, which makes UPA a distinct reality without needing alternate representations of the data set.  My only wish is that I could learn ANTLR well enough to (quickly) write a functioning, provable grammar... but I'm getting there.
</technical>

How to Build a Great MLS in 10 Easy Steps

As if.  As much as my background may have prepared me for this effort, building the new, ground-up version a large-scale MLS is no small feat.  Amidst the travails of the past two months, moving 1200 miles and traveling nearly 20000 more for various professional and family events, I've also had to re-align and rebuild a development team for MLSPIN's next great release in 2008.  I have two open development positions if anyone's interested (or if you know someone) with ASP.NET and heavy MSSQL skills.

Thanks to Microsoft's [un]timely releases of VS.NET 2008 and, more significantly, LINQ, I also have about two weeks to decide whether we write against the (proven) ASP.NET 2.0 platform or the far more streamlined ASP.NET 3.5 platform.  Any insight or feedback is also welcome.

On the corporate side, I can't understate enough how valuable it is to have faith from your leadership: with Kathy Condon (my CEO) and Tony Mastroianni (my CTO) providing such solid backing, I'm confident we're going to release a monumental MLS system and make significant strides in raising the MLS bar.  To that end, I also owe a bit of thanks to Michael Wurzer (FlexMLS) and Colby Ackerfield (RealGo), both of whose candor and guidance is deeply appreciated.

Family Notes

Lucas is nearing his first birthday, growing into a character of his own by the day:  He's such a great baby.  Ben just started Montessori school and continues to amaze us with his intelligence and compassion.  Kerry is continuing to acclimate to the geography (New England's a far cry from the Southwest) and a new station in life as a stay-at-home mom.  I probably don't tell her enough, but she's held up wonderfully.  I couldn't ask for better kids or family, period.  Almost all of our Illinois houses are sold and that will be a great relief as we look to buy a house next Spring.  It's all coming together, finally!

As most of you know, I've been at the core of an ASP -- PMPVOWs.com -- for the past five years of my life. Originally a marketing ploy and one-time contract, the service quickly blossomed into a "real" business and a full-time career. Over this time, my participation in this great Real Estate web community has flourished to the extent that I'm now chairing a committee as part of the National standard (RQLX). All this time, my employer's greatest fear was that I'd leave for greener pastures -- a notion I'd mocked on several occasions because I loved who I worked for and what I was doing. However, the one genuine "threat" that I'd always given credit was the opportunity to return "home" to New England: Let's face it, no matter where you've been transplanted, there's no place like home. Well, a little over a month ago, random chance became destiny: through a series of events that can only be described as Shakespearean in dramatic and comedic value I've accepted a position with MLSPIN, the largest MLS in New England, as Software Development Manager. In early November, my family and I will make the trek back to my seemingly long-lost homeland. I've entrusted my baby in the capable hands of Magenic, an outside development firm with whom I've had some previous experience and that has solid history taking over in-house apps. Beset by poison monkeys... So, last Wednesday night, amidst the comings and goings of consultants and trying to dump over four years of hands-on experience with tens of thousands of lines of code, I fell ill. At 1am, I woke with fever ripping through my body and a headache that trumped some of the best hangovers I've ever earned. I took a couple of Tylenol and forced myself back to bed. By 5am, feeling worse, I took a couple of Advil and, again, forced myself back to bed, knowing that work wouldn't be in my future that day. By 9am, I was calling Kerry to bring me to the ER. The good folks at Edward Hospital wasted no time... within two minutes of interviewing with an admittance nurse, I was rushed by wheelchair to an emergency room. The conclusion was reached fairly quickly: Spinal meningitis. The rest of the day is a blur -- I remember a CT scan, lots of drugs, a needle in my spine, lots more drugs, and being "isolated" to the point that everyone had to wear masks. Fortunately (?), it turned out that I had the simple form of "viral" meningitis, which can be just about any virus that decides to attack the meninges (protective lining of the central nervous system). I was taken off isolation on Friday, went down for an MRI to be sure that my brain wasn't still being attacked (particularly by the Herpes variant, which can leave you stupid), and became really good friends with Dilaudid, a remarkably strong pain killer that takes all of about 60 seconds to kick in. I was also infused with a half-dozen of the strongest antibiotics and antiviral agents available to man, and by Sunday was well-enough to be released. A word of advice: no matter how good you think you feel, take them up on all of the take-home drugs they offer. I was offered vicodin and zofran for pain and nausea, and turned them both down ("I'm feeling much better!")... only to spend the next 22 hours in bed because every twinge made me want to hurl. So, I'm alive. Beaten down, but alive. Thank goodness for medicine, all the good people who sent sympathy my way, and a strong family support network who made my untimely hiatus less painful to those I love. Also a big thanks to Barton Pitts, President of my current company, who was about as concerned as my own mother and more understanding than any lame duck's boss should be.