well, on june 20th, 2008 i was laid off from my e-commerce position with hitchfinder.com.

my family has been wonderful and supportive. i have not been depressed at all due to the upbeat attitude of my lovely wife.

i have no regrets. it was a very good learning experience and i took a lot of knowledge away from the job, plus a really cool 24" iMac computer and the adobe creative suite cs3!

what have i been doing since june 20th you might ask.

Click image for larger view.

well, i have finished my freelance web site gushindesigns.com and am almost finished with my new business card. i have designed and opened a brand new web site called appleproductsdepot.com, which combines web design, affilliate marketing and eBay.

there is also a second one of these eBay affiliate marketing web sites that i am currently building that is centered around old and new cameras, both film and digital. i am still into photography and i want this one to be a bit more interactive and it will probably concentrate more on vintage camera gear than newer stuff.

and i have been going to a number of meetup.com meetings on subjects like joomla (a content management system for web sites), wordpress, eBay and various internet entrepreneur groups.

i have also been more active selling products on eBay than i have in the past, with 30 current auctions running. i am trying to liquidate a comic book collection i bought many year ago for a good price and have already made my original investment back so the rest is gravy as far as the comic books go.

there are a few opportunities i am checking into for web design work full time as well, but more about those if anything happens with them.

ok, went to another meetup at another cafe brazil. guess what? no wifi again.

this time it was a wordpress meetup, so the whole meeting was crippled due to the lack of the wifi connection and the ability of people to open up their laptop, say "hey, take a look at this" and have someone help them figure a problem out.

they had no explanation, just no wifi!

so, anyone in the dallas area needing wifi connections while out and about - avoid cafe brazil in dallas like the plague.

i went to a meetup.com meeting last for a group i am a member of called "joomla user group - dallas / ft. worth".

if you have not checked out meetup.com, it's a very good way to meet people with similar interests.

we met at a local restaurant called cafe brazil.

picture this...12-15 internet joomla users sitting at a group of bunched up tables with laptops (80% of us brought them) and NO wireless connection!

this is the 3rd time i have attended a meetup at this restaurant and each time they claim the free wifi is fixed and nobody can connect!

it is the plano location at 190 and coit rd. the service is also horrible there too. avoid it at all costs.

i will say that i have never had a bad experience at the other locations of this restaurant, but this location is just unnerving and yucky to go to. no wifi (after they tell you "it's working" and you try and connect and no signal) and the wait staff if so inattentive it's really bad. one night there i had to scream to find an employee to take my money to pay. there were no employees in the front at all for over 10 minutes.

gotta find a new place to meet. that's it.

i am back selling on eBay again.

i started going to these meetup groups and at one i met this guy that was doing a lot of eBay and he urged me to go to his eBay meetup group.

so i started listing a few things again for sale and last night went to the meetup. it was huge. there were 100 people there and even someone i used to work with from my last job that i had not seen for a few years and had lost touch with. she was even sitting at my table.

they had gotten 6 people from eBay to come in for a Q & A session and it was really very cool. i met a number of different sellers and had a good time.

i will go again.

i have also been going to a number of different meetup groups about marketing ideas for the internet as well. it seems to be a good way to network at the same time as learning from others. if you have never heard of meetup groups, just visit www.meetup.com and there are tons of groups.