Welcome to Smuggle Me

My Grandma’s health hasn’t been doing to well lately and so she needs some help around the house. How sad it must be to reach the point that you can’t even take care of yourself. I hope God just takes me at that point. It’s nice to give people the opportunity to serve, but to be in pain so much is just not enjoyable.

In order to help my Grandma out, my parents and little sister are moving in with my Grandma. That means a household’s worth of stuff from about 30 years of marriage and 7 children has to go somewhere. There’s no way it’s going to my grandparents. My father suggested that a lot of it was going to be stored in the landfill, but they’re still going to need a storage unit.

In true computer nerd form, I found a nice onlince resource for my parents called Self Storage Directory - Moving.bz The site was easy enough for my parents to navigate and had a pile of storage facilities listed. It’s kind of like Progressive, but for self storage facilities. You get competitive quotes from up to 4 storage places. I was amazed they even had a number of storage sites in the little town I live in.

The site has a bunch of other features which aren’t useful for my parents, but I found quite interesting. Some of those things include: moving, packing supplies, mortgages and Real Estate related services. I personally tried out the mortgage section and liked how easy it was to navigate getting mortgage information.

AndyDoan and Aidan who I’ve gotten to know over the past week or so in IRC have created a really interesting podcast discussing some of the issues surrounding the changes being made at Cambrian House’s Idea Warz.

You can sign up for Cambrian House
and see what I’m talking about.

Here’s my best idea so far:

Spoil My Spouse

Here’s my personal favorite idea:

It’s Just Lunch for Networking

And an idea that should be doing much better than it is doing:

Desktop Dancers

Enjoy the podcast and Cambrian House. I got my first earnings and submitted my first project this week.

If you haven’t found the great website called Digg then you should go and check it out. Today I came across a an article on Digg that talks about Making Money Blogging.

The best point this article makes is: “The Consumer Generated Advertising revolution has begun and it’s time to choose sides.”

I personally side with being able to make money blogging. In fact, I’m so interested in the idea, I’ve been considering creating a blog to take care of that simple idea. I’m really just trying to decide if I should create a blog that is just called Make Money Blogging or if I should be more corporate and call it Consumer Generated Advertising.

Either way, I was really impressed that a Venture Capital blog was talking about the impact of Consumer Generated Advertising. I wonder if he might want a piece of the action. I wonder if Ted is going to let him in on PayPerPost. I wonder if Ted paid him to post that.

Ted’s got a good thing going. What I want to know is when Ted and PayPerPost are going to reach a point that they have enough advertisers signing up with PayPerPost that it is self sustaining without Ted’s company providing the advertisers. If you’re reading this, I’m letting you in on one of Ted’s dirty little secrets. Many of the PayPerPost advertisers are also clients of Ted’s from MindComet. No, I haven’t talked to Ted about this, but go to the Mind Comet website and you’ll see that many of the same clients at Mind Comet are the advertisers on PayPerPost.

Don’t misunderstand me. Ted’s a genius for seeing this opportunity. It also means that Ted truely believes in the power of PayPerPost. Otherwise, he wouldn’t risk having his clients use PayPerPost for internet marketing. So Ted, since I’m sure you’re an avid reader of my blog, how many advertisers aren’t associated with MindComet?

Either way, I think the being able to make money blogging using PayPerPost is genius. I even suggested for another blogger to use PayPerpost’s service.

A USB Powered Grill pretty much speaks for itself:

During a recent trip to see my family in Utah I went to a drive in movie with my father and sisters. It was a lot of fun to have the old drive in feel. It’s even better since I have the back of the van and a bunch of blankets and pillows to make it soft.

We ended up watching Cars, Disney’s latest animated film. I really enjoyed the show. It’s incredible what they can do with the animation these days. It’s almost lifelike. I love it.

After seeing the movie I was amazed to find out how much branding Disney has done to make more money off of their movies. Sure, they’ve always had Disneyland where they integrated the movies into the experience and sold merchandise. As I researched more I found out how well Disney has created its brand.

Let’s just take Disney Posters as an example. You can get just about any character on a Disney Poster that you’d like. A really nice website where you can purchase Disney Posters had some even more interesting history on Disney Posters:

History

The Disney Poster has been a mainstay of their merchandising since the beginning. Just like any movie studio, Disney has used posters as a means to market their films since the beginning; in fact, some of the most sought after Disney posters are the earliest vintage prints from titles like Snow White and shorts like Steamboat Willie. Disney Posters are a very popular choice for collectors, as they strike an appealing balance of availability, price, and display value.

Formats

Disney has made official Walt Disney posters and prints in a large number of formats over the years. This ranges from small actual-size cell prints to large theater posters for meant for cinema marketing display. Most Disney Posters aimed at consumers are 24″x 36″, perfect for framing and display in your home or office.

There are a number of different types of Disney Posters and Prints to consider as well. These include theatrical release posters, which typically feature large art and the title of the movie, as well as scene prints, which are usually cels from the original animation reproduced either in their original size on celluloid or blown up on paper to make a poster suitable for display. Beyond this there are more economical Disney Posters including prints meant for children, which usually feature a single character or perhaps a montage of images from the movie in question.

Why Us?

At Artopia we do everything it takes to bring you the best selection of Walt Disney posters and prints that we can. We search high and low for hard to find Disney Posters of all sizes, from original marquis posters to cel reproductions. It is our goal to bring you the best quality and selection at the best prices you can find anywhere on the Internet.

Where Can I find Walt Disney Posters and Prints?

We maintain a large inventory of Disney posters ranging from vintage prints to current releases. Whether you are looking for a gift or something to add to your own collection, you will be able to find a unique Disney poster to suit your needs. Whether you are looking for a vintage Dumbo marquis poster or just a montage print poster for your kids, you will be able to find it here.

All that history in just some posters. I think I better find one of these Disney Posters that I can use to surprise my wife. She’d love to have one in our new baby’s room. It will be interesting to see if I can keep her to just buying a couple posters for the new baby.

Disney items are one of the best things that I could possibly get for a child. I love what Dinsney has done over time with their products. Disney’s animated movies and associated products are high quality and family oriented. I’m amazed at the different animations out there that people show their kids. Why would you ever want something in your house that relates to those animations? You don’t have to worry about that with Disney. I think Disney would be happy about many of the things that he started. I just wish that it carried over to their other movies that aren’t animations. It often does, but not always.

Have you ever wanted to know if your customers have visited your competitor’s sites? Well, now there just might be a way to do this.

Here’s an excerpt of how it works:

Jeremiah Grossman came up with a really clever way of using Javascript to find what pages you’ve visited recently. It goes like this: when a link has been visited, you can use the :visited pseudo-class to style it. Using Javascript, you can walk through all of the links on your page and grab their styles; comparing a link’s style to the style given to visited links in the CSS will tell you whether or not a site has been visited. Seems innocent enough, until you realize that this can be applied to a large list of links. A site will know whether or not have been to any of the sites on their list. Combine that with a little Ajax, a database and a cookie, and you can track where your return users have been over time.

It looks like it’s been around for a while. I wouldn’t be too concerned about privacy, but it could provide some valuable information to some websites.