I have a business degree from the University of Michigan. The business school there was pretty astute in their thinking about making their graduates have some fairly significant knowledge about computers. As such, computer classes were required. I found that I had a knack for software and took most of my electives in "Comp. Sci." (I did take some music classes ... but that's the subject for another time). Actually, one of my favorite Comp. Sci.

Ageism? "Naw, there ain't no such thing", you say. Well, just wait until you're past the mid point of your career and find yourself in the job market and then tell me that. Then, we'll see....

I recently completed my projects for the National Association of REALTORS®, maintaining and enhancing some of their Real Estate Transaction Standard open source software. So, I started looking for new positions, both within the Real Estate industry and outside of it. Before I describe my experiences to date, let me take a moment to talk about my past.

OK, so I'm cannibalizing a post by the Center for Realtor® Technology's Chris McKeever. See the original if interested. The rest of this post will be about installing the Open Source Variman RETS server (also available from CRT at: http://www.crt.realtors.org/projects/rets/variman/).

Firstly, for those unaware of cURL, here's the definition from their homepage: curl is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax. It is such a versatile tool that the underlying library, libCURL is used by many network enabled tools, including libRETS, which I'll discuss at another time.