Hello from a Philadelphia newbie!

[Jeremy D]

Hi. My name's Jeremy Davidson. My background in real estate is close to none. I rent for now... am hoping to accumulate some dough so I can do some REI (picked that up from lurking here for a little while). My business goals are to wholesale a little bit, selling to investors if I can find them, but also to be an investor myself. So I guess that my plan is to put bids on properties as if I'm going to hold them to the river (i.e. make sure that they're positive cash flow after paying everybody that needs paying / generate sufficient IRRs), but to the extent that I can, I'd like to flip them for a quick profit.
Obviously, I'm not ready to commit a ton of capital, or I wouldn't lead with the word "guess". Hopefully, when I'm ready to go, I won't be guessing.
I'm a pragmatist, and realize that I'll probably have to pay tuition in the form of mistakes at some point, but I want to go in with as much information as possible. I view the RE market as a place with a lot of opportunities in the near term, and I think that the opportunities are just likely to get better as capital mkts events unfold (I saw a graph somewhere of Subprime > Alt-A / Opt. ARM resets that more/less illustrates this point). I want to dip my toes in now, maybe take some small "learning lumps", so that I can be in a position to take full advantage when "the time is right."
I have no network as of right now, but am very open to building one, so please PM me or whatever it is that people do to network. I don't have a lot to offer in terms of experience or contacts - but I'm also not trying to sell anything, so hopefully that's a plus.