Greetings, true believers! And hello from a rather sticky August day here in Chicago, where I am finally putting the finishing touches on getting disentangled from The Recent Unpleasantness in my life (aka my last day job -- click here for the details, if you don't know them already). And what exactly have I been doing in the ten days since I quit my last job, you may be asking? Well, for starters, those first four or five days I simply gave myself a mini-vacation; not a trip exactly to a particular destination, but rather a break from doing any kind of work that needs to get done. Because let's face it, I ended up putting in just a tremendous amount of work hours at this job I was doing this summer -- 420 hours in six weeks, in fact (or: 100 hours apiece, weeks 1 and 2; 80 hours, week 3; 60 hours, week 4; and 40 hours apiece, weeks 5 and 6). And not only that, but with work-related meetings that would literally span from 6 in the morning until 2 the next morning, because of half the staff being in India; seven days a week, with not a single break, not a single day in six weeks where I had a full 24 hours off.

Such a schedule is nerve-wracking, as anyone who's put in several 80-hour work weeks in a row can tell you; it was enough for me, anyway, to feel in the middle of it like I was heading for a legitimate nervous breakdown. So anyway, that's what I did for the first four or five days after quitting -- gave myself a break, to be specific, where the only responsibilities I had in my life were to get high, read enormously thick novels at outdoor cafes for hours at a time, and watch the season premiere of Prison Break. (Fuck! William Fichtner! How happy am I that the producers took the riskier route this season, and introduced a brilliant FBI agent who's as smart as our hero? How cool that after only 24 hours on the job, this guy figured out that the whole escape plan is buried in the tattoos of the main escapee? Ooh man, I'm really looking forward to the rest of this season, if it's as good as the premiere was.)

And so then, with the other half of those ten days, I decided to just slowly get myself back into my post-MetroProper work schedule; re-arranging my GTD lists, having a series of meetings with Nikki Patin about the arts center, getting back to the dozens of emails that ended up piling up in my inbox this summer. And that was nice, admittedly, to have a chance to gently ease all that back into a workable shape, instead of having to sit down and cram it all in during a harried 24 hours; but it's all finished now, and ready for me to start actively working on again, which means that I'm going to. And so here's how it basically boils down, as far as what I'll be spending my time doing this autumn and early winter, and with a special emphasis on the most public things I'll be doing, which might be of most interest to you as a reader.

--First, like I said in my last entry, I've gone back to daily work on my new arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. Which, let's not forget, had originally been the plan all along this year, to simply get ready for a September opening of CCLaP; my six weeks with Proper this summer can be seen really as a hiccup to that, a monumentally time-stealing diversion that I had been doing to help out a personal friend. (And yeah, that sure ended up paying dividends, didn't it?) And I know there's a certain amount of you who are very happy to hear that, because you're the ones who have been incessantly writing to me over the last two months, asking "When are you going to work on CCLaP again? When are you going to work on CCLaP again?" Okay, so I'm working on CCLaP again! Sheesh!

And the good news, of course, is that I have lots of news to announce concerning CCLaP, stuff that's been regularly happening over the last eight weeks, but that I simply didn't have time to deal with as long as I was pulling down those 80-hour work weeks at my last job. And so starting tomorrow, that's exactly what I'll be doing -- getting back on the CCLaP website each day again, and starting to announce all these new Fellows and Members and news about upcoming events. And now that we're building a larger pool of creative work, because of the increased amount of Fellows each day right now, we're going to be able to start publishing a creative piece a day there now too, not to mention all the blog entries about other interesting things in the arts, which is what I had been mainly concentrating on as long as we didn't have a lot of original creative content of our own to post. So anyway, I'm hoping that will lead to a very interesting website, one that people will enjoy visiting each day -- one that combines "BoingBoing-style" notices about interesting things, plus a little original creative work on a daily basis, plus all the latest news concerning the center itself. And I'm hoping that will lead to a stronger and stronger daily audience there, which will hopefully lead to bigger physical audiences when our live-event schedule finally kicks in, starting three weeks from now.

Oh, and did I mention that, by the way? Our live-event schedule kicks in starting three weeks from now! Yikes! Basically it boils down like this -- that our first CCLaP Session (featuring Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn) is on Friday, September 15th; then our first CCLaP Showcase on Thursday, September 21st; and then our first CCLaP Slam (and open mic) on Monday, September 25th, with all of them then becoming either weekly or monthly, going on regularly from then until Christmas. And there's a complication involved with this, frankly, that I wasn't expecting; namely, that we still have about a thousand bucks' worth of tech equipment to buy (speakers, mics, mic cords, etc) before our first show can happen. And that was going to be bought with the money I had made at my last day job; but then my former boss ended up screwing me out of most of the money I was owed, which means no more thousand bucks to pay for this stuff. And with me not exactly sure how I'm going to raise a thousand bucks in the next three weeks either.

So that's a little tickle of worry in the back of my mind these days, that I'm sure will become more and more of a Klaxon blare, the closer to September 15th we get. So, you know, not to be too naked about it; but if you've been giving any thought at all this year about becoming a paying Member of CCLaP, or your business possibly becoming a corporate sponsor, NOW WOULD BE A GOOD GODDAMN TIME TO DO SO. In fact, I'm making a special deal right now for any interested businesses out there; that for US$2,500, we will name one of our monthly shows after you for a year. We'll do it tastefully, of course -- something like "The CCLaP Showcases, underwritten by Your Company Here" -- but nonetheless, your name will automatically appear for a year, anytime the show itself is mentioned publicly, whether that's the website or advertisements or our podcast or the shows themselves or newspaper articles or whatever.

I won't be offering this deal for very long -- only until I have $2,500 raised, which would be a nice decent chunk to do all the rest of the things I need to do for CCLaP to be "official" (including filing our incorporation paperwork with the state of Illinois, getting our tax ID, printing off our first round of t-shirts, etc etc etc). Anyway, if your business is interested, definitely get ahold of me at ilikejason [at] gmail.com before any of your competitors do. And of course, $50 Memberships are welcome at any time too! Just 20 of those, for example, would let us buy all the tech equipment we need without a corporate sponsor at all. And of course, at the very least, I really appreciate you mentioning CCLaP at your own website or blog, if you have a minute to do so; considering that almost our entire marketing plan is being based around word-of-mouth, your blog entries can and do make a real, quantifiable difference in CCLaP's success. I cannot emphasize this enough; that even if your personal blog only has 10 or 20 readers a day, it's the cumulative effect (rising higher and higher in Google and Technorati searches) that's the real benefit to us of your mention. Go, you crazy blogger cats, go!!!

--Okay, and speaking of social online activities, here's something else that apparently some of you are going to be very happy to hear -- that I've gone back to my daily social bookmarking again, or in other words am now updating my del.icio.us account every day again. For those who don't already know, this is basically a "mini-blog" that I've been maintaining off and on for the last couple of years: where like BoingBoing and others, I mostly do nothing but point people to other interesting stuff I've recently come across online; but unlike a full blog, all I provide is a headline and a few sentences about the link in question. I like it, because it's much faster for me than maintaining a full link blog; others like it, apparently, because it still gives them pointers to just the crazy fucking random shit I'm always coming across, while in the process of reading the 2,000 RSS feed entries I now do every day. (Yeah, seriously, 2,000 items a day now, although admittedly a lot of is repeated information, and a lot else stuff I don't want to read in detail.) I'm not sure how much of an interest there is in my bookmarking, frankly; but I do know it's enough to have several people list me at del.icio.us as one of their favorite bookmarkers, and to receive a couple of panicked emails earlier this summer when time constraints forced me to stop maintaining it. (Yes, Mars, you magnificent twit, I'm looking at you.) And like I said, I actually like having this easy fast way to share such bookmarks, so I'm glad to finally have the chance to start maintaining it again.

Ah, but it gets cooler -- not only am I maintaining these bookmarks at del.icio.us like normal, but am now duplicating them at both my Digg account and my new Netscape account. And that, frankly, is because of a new Firefox bookmarklet I found called MultiSubmit, which seriously has to be one of the coolest bookmarklets in the entire history of web browsers. You know, for example, how some bookmarklets will open a "submit" page to a site for you, and automatically fill in some of the fields based on what page you were originally on? MultiSubmit does this, but for up to 15 social networks at once if you want. And even better, it lets you customize which of the 15 you want in your bookmarklet, before you actually download the bookmarklet; and so mine, for example, only opens submit pages for Digg, Netscape and del.icio.us, while others' might open pages for Furl, Newsvine, Google, ma.gnolia, Squidoo and more. And it's as simple as can be, too; just a single-page process, with a MultiSubmit interface on the left side, letting you open each of the social networks on the right side one at a time, in each case with the link and headline already filled in for you.

See, this is what I love seeing, people -- greater and greater integration between these disparate services, done in a smart and intuitive way, so that additional programming isn't required. In effect, if every poster to these services used a tool like MultiSubmit, they'd all contain the exact same full and rich set of data; and then each service could concentrate on the unique ways they filter and present this information, which is where the competition between these services should be in the first place. It benefits all of us when more and more customer-generated data is on the web, both the companies and the customers themselves; I'm all for things like MultiSubmit, which make this process easier without adding too many extra steps to your own routine.

So why Digg and Netscape for me, you might be asking, instead of (say) Squidoo (Seth Godin's little experiment) and Rojo (which a lot of my readers use)? Eh, well, in Digg's case, because all the cool kids are on Digg, and so I want to as well; and now that they've finally expanded their categories beyond just tech, I actually have a reason to be submitting articles there too. And Netscape? Pretty simple; Jason Calacanis, the guy in charge of it all, is randomly selecting top posters and paying them. And not only that, but it's apparently working wonders too, which means they're most likely going to continue it, and maybe even expand it. And hey, one of the top posters there is only posting 15 links a day; and that's how much I post on a good day too. (Today was an average day, for example; I posted eight links.) So there's no doubt in my mind that if I just keep it up regularly, as I'm doing just for personal fun anyway, I'll quickly become one of the top posters myself at Netscape, and do so while posting strange unique articles from the various odd little RSS feeds I have snaking in to my Bloglines account these days. And then shit, maybe I'll get something out of it too, just for doing something I was doing for fun anyway; maybe some money, or maybe some comps to some fun tech conventions, or maybe even just some notice for the things I'm doing, among some cool muckety-mucks in the Silicon Valley tech industry.

I mean, let's face it, that's why I can't get too upset over what happened at my last job; because another thing to come out of it was to actually start meeting some of these people, actually start becoming friends with them, and to have some of them actually be impressed with what I had done. I know, for example, that this new friend of mine named Wendell comes by the site fairly often now; and he's a veteran of five very successful internet startups now, a legitimately big muckety-muck in Silicon Valley, who's even been made fun of in Valleywag and everything. I know as well that staff members of FeedBurner now come by the site every so often; and several very impressive venture capitalists who shall remain unnamed; and several journalists in the tech industry. None of this exactly hurts, when it comes to things like my arts center, my future plans, my corporate freelance business and the like; and if I can come to the attention of someone like Jason Calacanis as well, even if I don't get picked to be a paid linker there, that would still do nothing but help as well. And like I said, especially while doing something I had just been doing for fun anyway, and that I would continue to do whether or not I ever got paid for it. And I have the inventor(s?) of MultiSubmit to thank for that, for making it so easy to cross-post to competing social-bookmarking services; so thanks, MultiSubmit!

Whew, and so much more to tell you too, about the various things I'll be trying to accomplish this fall and early winter; but I'm sick of writing today, and I'm sure you're sick of reading this drivel too by now, so I guess I'll save the rest for another time. Oh, but maybe I'll leave you with this tantalizing little bit, for all of you who have confessed in the past that you love it when I go off on completely random little nutjob subjects here; I've recently started reading Nietzsche for the first time. And yes, as always, because of a strange random reason -- because of finally seeing the 1990 Rob Lowe/James Spader cable-TV standard Bad Influence, which turned out to just be such a more amazing and chilling movie than I ever expected it to be. And needless to say, I have a whole hell of a lot to say about Nietzsche, his theories, how it is that they got so badly misinterpreted by the Nazis, and what this all has to do with Rob Lowe beating a party girl to death with a golf club on videotape; so all you fellow nerdy intellectuals can look forward to a journal entry here soon just on that subject.

Auf Wiedersehen, meine kleine Haeschen!