Mike Flacy

I’ve had a Wi-Fi iPad for nearly two months now, certainly long enough to gauge how its been integrated into my life.  It’s become my go-to email device at home and at work; primarily for quick responses, quick mass deletion or targeting the important messages for viewing later.  It’s also the first device in my hand when I wake up in the morning, a position formally held by the iPhone.  I can digest all my email, Facebook updates and daily news much quicker than shuffling over to my laptop and booting it up in the morning.  Pulse News for the iPad has streamlined my RSS consumption as well, specifically due to a slick UI and excellent speed.   (I even gave it a coveted spot on my 6-slot taskbar)

Growing up, there were very few cartoons in the newspaper that I made sure to catch on a regular basis.  The only one that seems worth the time was The Far Side (created by Gary Larson).   Its twisted sense of humor was appealing and seemed miles above the other scribblings in the paper.  Fast forward 15 years and there are tons of web-comics populating the web; many of which inspired directly from the same type of humor from the Far Side.  Here are my top 4 picks:

I’ve been living in Los Angeles for a little over a year now.  You can read a bit more about my exodus from South Carolina out here in this post, but here are 8 things that I’ve come to understand since I arrived:

As I sat in the dim room at the Cornerstone hospice watching my mother cope with the continuous stream of brutal pain from her final bout of cancer, I can’t see my mother anymore.  She’s frail, tired and wisps in and out of consciousness.  She sees us and hear us, but has lost the ability to respond to our questions due to lack of brain function.  The combination of chemotherapy and radiation treatments have destroyed her bone marrow and slowly disintegrated her resistance to the tumors growing all over the insides of her body.  Neurophy has spread from her feet upwards to make her skin ache to the touch and she moans in pain every time someone has to move her.  She’s my mother, cruelly trapped in a dying body.

So I’m in Vegas yet again in 2009, this time for PMA.  That’s the Photographer’s Marketing Association, for those that have never heard of it.  (Similar to me approximately 2 months ago.)  So far it has been much more chill than CES, an absolutely insane madhouse of electronic gadgetry.  It’s probably about a fourth of the size, if that.  I’m here because the company I work for purchased a digital camera review site and we want the transition to go smoothly.   Another two days of shaking hands and kissing babies.

Are you familiar with Ping.fm?  It’s a service that allows you to update all your social networks with one click of a mouse.  I thought this was a brilliant idea when I signed up a year ago, but it’s becoming more evident each day that my “lifestream” is molded differently for every social network I belong to.  Occasionally there’s a smidgen of overlap, but I’m typically writing to very different audiences.

Let’s see…

- Working my ass off.  I’m officially a workaholic in training.

-  Threw an insanely large Christmas party with the roommates.  We rented heat lamps, chairs, tables, the works.  Even had a bartender so we wouldn’t have to serve drinks.  Met several new people and basically hung out with some friends.

Wow, I’m incredibly lax at the updates these days.

The house I moved into last month is absolutely ridiculous.  I have a room on the first floor with my own private bathroom.  The door from the bathroom leads outside and the in-ground swimming pool is but a single leap from the door.  The bedroom has hardwood floors and was previously painted a beige color.  I’m gave it some color over the Thanksgiving holiday.  It’s now a light sea green.  I also rearranged the furniture to open up the room.  I really want to create a place to chill out rather than a office / bedroom.   I’ve been perusing www.apartmenttherapy.com over the past week for ideas.

More later, bed for now.

• 30 days ago, I was driving from South Carolina to Los Angeles without a full time job.
• 20 days ago, I was on my first interview at a social networking company in Westwood.
• 10 days ago, I was on my third callback interview with a tech company in El Segundo.
• 5 days ago, I had three different job offers in my lap.

I rarely post about politics, but something intriguing on the campaign front caught my eye today. A presidential candidate is advertising in Burnout Revenge. For those unfamiliar, Burnout Revenge is a car-racing video game owned by Electronic Arts.

It’s been about a week since I arrived in Los Angeles and I’m slowly starting to become acclimated to my new, frantic environment.  There’s a strange element of peaceful bliss about getting lost in the chaos of this city.  I’m getting a better idea of the city layout and have starting ditching the GPS just to see if I can find my way around the city.

All the grocery stores are completely different on this side of the country.  I’ve switched from the Publix, Bi-Lo, Ingles and Food Lions of the east coast to the Ralph’s, Vons, Trader Joes and Bristol Farms of the west coast.  The only constant was Whole Foods, but I’d have to sell a kidney to shop there on a regular basis.  Ralphs is the most similar to the east coast stores and there is a great one about a half mile away.  Definitely caters to the UCLA crowd.

I’ve taken some pictures that need to get up on Facebook and Flickr soon.  I’ll try to upload those this week.  I haven’t been keeping up with TV and iPhone apps lately, but I have really enjoyed the new Sunny in Philly

season.  It’s pretty incredible when a show can consistently stay hilarious season after season.  I’m also digging the new version of the Facebook app for the iPhone.  I can finally post to walls and return messages without logging into my computer.  Yay!

Digsby just keeps better and better.  They recently added LinkedIn support to the social networks.  I’m not interested in status updates so much, but it’s interesting to see the updates when people change their job.  Plus I never have to type in my log-in info anymore.

I don’t typically read Mark Cuban’s blog, but he made a great common sense post about building wealth this weekend.  There are too many people living beyond their financial means in this country.  I’d love to eat at Whole Foods and drink Starbucks everyday, but I don’t based on the same principles that he discussed.

So I moved again.  This time it’s Los Angeles.  I bought a new car (Mazda3 sedan) and started planning a trip across eight states to setup a new life in L.A.  I said my goodbyes, loaded up the new ride with my earthly possessions and started the road trip.

But before I left, I loaded up a few helpful road trip iPhone applications.  Travelocity was good for finding hotels near my GPS location.  Gasbag was excellent for finding the cheapest gas in the area.  Where was also decent for gas stations and Starbucks.  I relied on a separate GPS unit for turn-by-turn directions.  It was invaluable after stopping over in Memphis.

If you haven’t experienced Middle America before, there’s no better way to envelop yourself in the rural lifestyle than driving across the country.  It was a little disconcerting at times where driving across long, empty stretches of Texas and New Mexico, but still worth the experience.

Favorite Exit: Exit 237 in Oklahoma on Interstate 40W.  Do yourself a favor and stop at the Hungry Traveler.  The place is in a desolate part of Oklahoma, the epitome of the middle of nowhere.  I had a delicious mushroom and Swiss burger polished off with the best slice of blueberry pie that I’ve ever eaten in my life.

Favorite State: Arizona.  Perhaps it’s just the northern section, but the slow transition from rocky desert landscape to lush, green mountains is really quite breathtaking.  I stayed on Route 66 for one night after passing through Flagstaff.  It made me think of the Pixar film Cars.  (RIP Paul Newman.  He was awesome as the voice of the Doc.)  The gorgeous farmland of Oklahoma is in a close second.

Least Favorite State: North Texas.  The entire area smelled like cow manure from one end to the other.  My overnight stay in Amarillo was incredibly boring.

Favorite Overnight Stop: Memphis, TN.  I got to see some old friends and eat two delicious plates of sushi.

I made to L.A. after four days.  It didn’t rain one time during my trip.  I’m staying on Wilshire Blvd. near UCLA.  I might have lucked out with finding an excellent roommate and place to live on Craigslist.  Only time will tell.  It’s going to be interesting to see how well I can acclimate to the city.  It’s overwhelming and exhilarating all at the same time.

• I enjoyed the premiere of The Shield’s final season this week.  It was a slow start considering the pacing of the previous episode, but it laid some brilliant groundwork for future story lines.  I’m thinking Shane lives, Ronnie goes off the deep end, Vic and Acevada take down the Mexican cartel in a very bloody fashion and Dutch finally goes to jail for strangling neighborhood cats.

• Finding a new place to live on Craigslist has been disappointing to say the least.  Trying to make a long distance connection with a potential roommate is somewhat dampened by the anonymity of the Internet. Ugh…

• I had some of the worst sushi in my life today.  Japanese marinated mushrooms might sound tasty, but the ones I ate were the consistency of rubber and completely flavorless.  Yelp is going to get a mouthful of unhappy words from me this week.

• True Blood on HBO was an offbeat show.  It reminded me the feeling I got when watching Carnivale for the first time.  The oddball choice of setting in the deep south is strangely interesting.  I doubt it will make it past a couple seasons though.  Entourage was excellent as usual.  Eric looks a bit like a clone of Ari though.

• I’m really crossing my fingers for iPhone’s 2.1 firmware this week.  It’s rumored to be coming out with the new version of iTunes on the 9th.  I’d love to see turn-by-turn GPS implemented, but any other super secret iPhone powers will be welcome.

• My favorite Hulu video of the week: Taco bed!

Here’s a little blast from the past:

A couple years ago, I took a trip to NYC on my birthday to visit my sister. She moved to the city to begin a modeling career while I was in college and was working at Nobu on 57th at the time. She wanted to show me a good time and decided to take me to a place called Bungalow 8 down on 27th. I, being an oblivious kid from SC, had no idea what this place was all about. It’s fairly hideous in daylight:

It was an exclusive, ridiculously tiny, celeb-happy club that people literally had to purchase alcohol for an entire table. Her friend Matt got us right into the club and somehow we hooked up with someone that had purchased a table. We sat down and basically got to drink Grey Goose Vodka for free the entire night. I got a peek at the bill at the end of the night and it was somewhere in the $3000 to $4000 range!

So we are drinking and having a great time. The music is pumping so loud that I can barely hear my sister or Matt. Matt wants to get a picture of both of us in the club and I give him my camera. He takes a couple shots, but was rudely interrupted by a very large man telling him to stop taking pictures. I was wondering why he was being so confrontational about it.

Thankfully Matt slipped the camera back to me before anything happened to it. I asked Matt what had happened and he said that the big guy was Lindsey Lohan’s bodyguard. He didn’t want us taking pictures of her. We had no idea at the time, but I caught a glimpse of her in the photo later on. (It’s the one in my Flickr stream where I look like a complete drunken buffoon.)

The truly hilarious point in the night was when Matt screamed at me over the loud music something to the effect of “Why would we want a picture of drunken Lohan anyway?” He probably should have looked over his shoulder though. She was standing right beside us at that point and gave him a nasty look. I recall we left soon after.

I was cleaning this weekend and came across one of my old high school yearbooks.  I’m not one to reminisce about high school on a regular basis, but it’s certainly handy for Facebook friend requests.  I can’t remember half the people that supposedly knew me back then.

While flipping through the pages, I came across a wilted, previously pink flower that I had kept.  I vaguely remember that a girl gave it to me, but I have no idea who it was.  I borrowed the idea from Gary Cooper’s character in Pride of the Yankees.  (Grew up on old black and white movies)  I find it utterly hilarious that I can remember the reasoning behind putting it in the yearbook, but can’t remember the person that gave it to me.

I’ve started to look at rentals in Santa Monica again.  Something close to the bus line when I need to go downtown.  Maybe Downtown too.  Craigslist is a myriad of options, but less actual solutions.  I’d really love to go somewhat car-less, but L.A. is such a car-centric town. Arrrgh!