right on bro!

I’m back in Los Angeles. Thanks to Mr. Regul for dropping me off last week and letting me in 81st Street today to pick up my keys. Plus that five minutes of Burnout 3 - that game is sweet.

Feeling jet lagged as hell right now. Woke up at about 1:45 (our time) in the morning to catch the first flight out of Islip, arrived in L.A. at about 10:30 or so. It feels like the day is already over, but it’s only 2 P.M.

I’m gonna go do…something.

Went to the Red Lion yesterday with friends/former co-workers to celebrate my newfound freedom. It is/was a tradition in that department - whenever somebody either got worked or quit, we’d always congregate there for a few rounds of hefeweizen and sausages. To those of you who read this here blog, thanks for coming - it really meant a lot to me.

More fun with RSS feeds (this one is for Toby): Are you tired of constantly surfing around deal sites on the Internet, checking for the latest deal info? Well, problem solved!

Introducing DealJam:
http://dealjam.rightonbro.com

DealJam aggregates feeds from different deal sites, all on one page. I don’t make money off of this, I just thought it would be useful to me and a couple of you. If you want to see deals from other sites, or have feedback on DealJam in general, drop me a note.

Got one more RSS project to go - I’ll jam together the 81st Street module either today or sometime next week.

Went a little crazy on the RSS feed thing today. I built a My Yahoo! style homepage just for me, that pulls in news headlines, the latest headlines from the 81st street blogs, the Cali camera, and deal headlines.

Check it out:
http://my.rightonbro.com

Okay, so I’ve got the mobile weblog up and running again. I have to come up with a better name than mobile weblog - any ideas? Moblog is such a stupid term, and camera phone weblog is too long.

So yesterday I learned how to set up RSS feeds using zfeeder. If you’ve noticed the “Deal of the Day” thing on the right side of this page - it’s coming from woot.com. I don’t make any money off of the click-throughs or anything like that, I just like their site. Their deal is - they sell one product per day at some ridiculously low price, until it’s sold out, and then they sell another one the next day. Such a simple, brilliant idea, and it’s become quite the viral hit on the ‘net. So the thing on my site basically displays whatever woot.com has on sale that day.

I’m open to putting together syndication pages if anyone wants. Off the top of my head, it could contain an aggregation of the latest updates from all of our sites, plus headlines from Yahoo! News or something like that. Let me know if there’s anything in particular you want to see.

Other than that, spent yesterday chilling. I finished translating the new layout to the rest of rightonbro.com and re-jeetered the search function to work better and display old comments in old posts. Answered a bunch more emails, and have been getting in touch with old friends. Sent off some old film rolls that I never got developed because it kept slipping my mind because I had too much crap going on at work. I’m using Snapfish for this for the first time - we’ll see how it goes. Finished disc 2 of Alias first season last night. They do a real good job of setting up cliffhangers between weekly episodes, but since I have the DVD, that tension has been cut from one week to about 30 seconds. I win, you bastards.

Traffic is as bad on Los Feliz Boulevard during the weekday as it is during the weekend, but the stores and parking lots are much less crowded.

Spent today running some errands, cooked some dinner, and then I watched six episodes of Alias. I’ve seen some episodes over the past few years, and my brother encouraged me to watch it before, but I never did it on a regular basis until now. There’s some definite plot holes and weird timeshifting going on, and there are some scenes which are supposed to take place in other countries, but you can tell it’s Los Angeles if you’ve lived here long enough. But I’m pretty hooked.

The guitar strings that I ordered yesterday from Webstrings arrived today. That was super fast. I hope the strings are just as good.

I found a new utility for publishing camera phone pics. Hopefully it’ll work out.

WTF is going on in the South with all of the hurricanes? Fools are getting worked…

So I’m officially a free man. Had my exit interview and picked up my last check yesterday, which, unfortunately, doesn’t clear until about Saturday or so. Never fully appreciated direct deposit until now. Went to La Parilla (the one in Silverlake) last night with friends to celebrate, it was pretty fun.

As my friend Chris says, time flies by fast when you’re at home. I’ve been getting a flood of emails from people asking me what’s up, and spent all morning writing responses.

So what exactly is up? I’ve got to go back to the East Coast for a minute - unfortunately, my grandmother passed away last weekend. Yesterday, I met with the producer I’ve been working for on the side, and he wants me to do some additional things for him. And of course, there’s just kicking it in general, spending some time each day combing the job listings, plus all the stuff I wrote about a couple of days ago.

A to the G, y’all. Time to get my day started…

The Next Stage of My Life started off with a good weekend. First off, Matt came over on Friday to drink beer and lend me some DVDs. It felt like the scene from the Truman Show where Truman and the other dude were driving golf balls off the end of the highway, and just kind of talking about life. Matt is a good friend indeed.

Saturday was Halo day at 81st Street. I haven’t played Halo in quite awhile, and it was really fun hanging out with the squad for a bit. There was poker later (on Toby’s cool new self-built poker table, no less), but I didn’t really feel like playing. Instead, I invited another set of friends over, and I spent the night watching one set of friends try to take money from the other.

Today was chill as well. Jammed with the band for about an hour, then we spent the next 2 hours watching the drummer grill carne asada, and then we ate tacos. Went to the grocery store, and now I’m back here doing my laundry and cooking dinner.

Over the weekend, I drew up a list of things to do. It’s really, really long, and ranges from cleaning out the junk in my apartment, to driving around the country to visit my family and old friends, to developing a couple of business ideas I’ve been thinking about busting on. Hope I can do it all.

So, the deal is….I left my job of five years yesterday. It feels really, really weird. I worked really, really hard to get where I am at the company I worked for, and now the slate’s been wiped clean. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just…weird.

So now I’m moving on to the Next Stage of My Life. Gonna spend the next few days or so tidying things up around here, taking care of some things that slipped off my radar (I need a pair of sunglasses badly), watching a pile of movies and TV shows I haven’t gotten around to watching (thanks Matt for dropping off the first season of Alias), and just chilling out with friends. I’m supposed to start work on a short-term gig sometime in the next couple of weeks, but there’s no rush, really.

I’ll probably be updating (and redesigning) this here blog a bit more often, now that I have more free time. So stay tuned…

Okay….so as it turns out, people are definitely having a hard time understanding me.

So, I think people are having a hard time understanding me lately. I’m getting a lot of “What did you say?” from multiple people. I’m starting to feel uncomfortable about it. Maybe I’m slurring my words like Benicio del Toro in Usual Suspects or something. Mental note to slow down my speech.

My friend gave me some promotional DVDs from her film company today. I think the one I’m most excited about is the first episode of Nip/Tuck. This show is supposed to be good.

Work is flying by.

Went to Blink today after work. I’m sleepy now.