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.

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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.

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i have been playing with my homemade fisheye lens again. the dogs were watching me and thought i was crazy in the backyard taking these shots.

i am still amazed by what this small little peephole lens can do.

the maribeth house has finally sold!!! we closed on december 28, 2007 and are out of it for good.

it was kinda odd, but the house showed over 55 times and then we got 3 bids in a few days. one was right and we took it and they wanted to close really quickly (no complaints here). so that was a real relief to both ruthie and i.

let's see, josh is about to start a course in emergency medical technician (emt), david is in israel on a trip called birthright with amy and jon has immersed himself in yet another sports activity. he is now on the wrestling team at richardson high.

i also had some fun playing around with my new "fisheye lens"...

this is a picture of our new kitchen at the glen cove house. i saw a tutorial online the other day about how you could get a cheap fisheye lens to work with a compact digital camera.

it really works!

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it was pretty simple to put together. the ingredients are 1) one of those small door viewers (you know, the type you have in an apartment door) 2) the cap from a target prescription bottle (check to make sure it fits over the camera lens) 3) a drill to drill a hole in the target cap...that's it

you just stick the whole strange looking thing over the lens and have fun. i have gotten some unusual and bizarre photos with this contraption. try it.