back from disneyville

Back yesterday from Anaheim and the fall meetings of the state association. Anaheim is a strange experience. Nothing is human scale--the hotels, the parking lots the sidewalks the streets are all designed for hoards of people in their quest for escape from reality with the mouse and company. I stayed in a vintage motel about a half mile from convention center--got to see the homeless on my morning runs. I made at least two walking trips a day from motel to hotel. Got a nice tan.

Meetings were pretty typical for fall. A few landmarks were notable. The new state regional (whatever that means) MLS was top of the list. There was a sorta farewell to the old statewide committee and chair. The baton is being passed to the mergee's leadership from the mega regional in LA area, although there is a new board of directors, but there was also an old board (with many of the same people) allegedly supervising the old statewide MLS as it twisted and turned in the wind----while running up over $4 million in debt (that's not including the intelligent agent fiasco--another million). With luck the Board will not be involved with actual project supervision this time. The mega regional has a good track record of achievement and the state association has amply demonstrated that the politically astute ladder climbers are not necessarily well equipped to run a tech corporation.

The real question is whether the application entity that evolved from the old statewide will survive the need to achieve sufficient user base to survive. The application is still not fully complete and I expect that most new accounts will opt for the mergee's existing vendor.

Personally I'd like to see attention turned in the direction of making MLS system reach more of their potential, enough of their potential to compete with the 3rd party aggregator sites that now attract much of the public's interest with their entertainment value, despite having data of much lower quality than MLS public portals.

Next post will delve into the real estate political arena. The politics of the state association were showing in the discussions of ballot propositions and other matters. The real estate "party" attempts to create a strange world that could easily become the basis for a theme ride at Disneyville.

I'll end with an image only possible in LA---I saw a late model 5 series BMW--with a Domino's Pizza sign on the top --- out making deliveries--OMG!

Also went to the OC Car Show Friday night--that produced some other classic images of LA.