Welcome to Smuggle Me

Florida Holidays have got to be some of the best holidays you can experience. I’ve blogged before about how many great places they have to visit in Florida. Just start listing the Disney empire and you have enough reason to go there (Disney World, Epcot Center, Universal Studios, etc etc etc).

However, if you really want to enjoy Florida then I’m going to let you in on a secret of how to make your Florida getaway the best there is. The secret is to find a conference in Orlando that you can attend. I’m sure you’re seeing what I’m getting at. By attending a conference in Orlando then you are able to go to the conference with work taking care of the most expensive parts (like your flight to Florida).

I’m doing the same next weekend for a conference in Dallas. Yeah, I know Dallas isn’t nearly as good as Florida, but you can’t go to Florida every year. Maybe next year I’ll find a great conference to attend in Florida. That’s what I call work!

I found a bunch of nice toilet seat humor on the internet to liven up my blogging. I hope you enjoy the good information.

1. An average person visits the toilet 2500 times a year. About 6-8 times a day.
You spend about 3 years of your life in the toilet.

2. Poor toilet condition is a worldwide problem. More than half of the world population have no proper sanitation.

3. Suppression of urination due to dirty toilets can lead to kidney and bladder diseases.
In order to avoid visting public toilets, Some people refrain from drinking and suffer dehydration.

4. Most toilets are designed incorrectly.

5. Female takes 3 times longer than male, yet both toilet sizes are often same.

6. Toilet remains as a ‘taboo’ as people are shy to discuss the subject.

7. There are toilet associations worldwide promoting toilet education and culture.

Looks like I need to start blogging on the toilet since I spend so much time there.

There have been a number of times that I’ve wanted to capture what was going through my VGA connection to my computer. I’ve never had a good tool to do it until today. It’s called VGA2USB and you can guess what it does. It takes a VGA input and outputs it through a USB connection.

Take a look at the VGA2USB Technical Specifications and you’ll see a little bit of why I think this is a pretty neat tech toy.

This would be a great tool for creating documentation on various processes that you have to do all the time. It’s also a perfect solution for connecting to a server that doesn’t have a monitor attached to it. You know we’ve all experienced that in the tech field. If I’m not wrong, you could also use this to capture the video that an ultrasound creates. Yes, I’m interested in that because my wife’s pregnant and we’ve had a number of ultrasounds.

Here’s a screenshot of the interface:

It’s pretty simple looking, but seems to have enough features that you can configure it for your needs. I also found the list of items that came with the VGA2USB quite interesting:
1. VGA2USB box
2. USB “A” Plug to USB Mini “B” Plug 5 pins cable
3. Male to male VGA adapter (gender changer)
4. VGA splitter
5. VGA cable

The VGA splitter is the best part because you could hook up this connector to one end of the splitter so you could have a normal monitor connected and then easily attach the VGA2USB on the second VGA connector. Perfect for recording something.

Today I saw a press release from a “University” that seems to be doing online education the right way. They partner with community colleges and state schools to offer 76 graduate and undergraduate specializations and 16 certificate specializations. Capella University serves 16,000 students in higher education from all 50 states and 63 countries.

Talk about growth. Capella University looks like a great option for people that aren’t able to attend regular classes. With such a wide selection of online degrees you can see why getting a degree online with Capella University sounds so good. Here’s a few examples of the types of majors they have available: graduate degree programs in business, information technology, education, human services, and psychology, and bachelor’s degree programs in business and information technology.

They don’t cover everything, but it looks like a well run business that is trying to change the way higher education is done. I can’t imagine how beneficial this will be in developing countries.

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I don’t know how many of you read TechCrunch’s initial comments about PayPerPost. I know that before I signed up with PayPerPost I read all about it on TechCrunch, Digg, Business Week and it seems like at least a few other articles on the PayPerPost idea. I didn’t want to be giving my social to PayPerPost if they weren’t legitimate. Actually, now that I think about it, the blog from Jeremiah was what gave my confidence that PayPerPost wasn’t a scam. All the other sites were just reporting it as news. Kind of interesting that seeing the blog post by Jeremiah is what infused enough confidence in the PayPerPost product. I guess that’s what makes PayPerPost such a potentially great business.

Well, after blasting PayPerPost in it’s initial post, TechCrunch has taken a higher road of journalism and finally answered to the $3 million PayPerPost has gotten from venture capitalists. They still label it as controversial, but it seems like their tone has finally changed to almost accepting it as a viable business.

I guess my take is that TechCrunch shouldn’t be the only one making money blogging. In fact, I can see some significant benefits of my blog to those who want to try blog advertising. I’m always amazed at how quickly Google can find a new blog post and display it in its search results. A post I made late last night is already indexed by google.

A few other interesting parts from the TechCrunch post and podcast are:

And Josh Stein at DFJ seems excited about the potential profitability of the company while downplaying the ethical issues raised by this and other blogs - the market will sort things out, he says.

Some back of the envelope calculations based on numbers Ted disclosed in the podcast suggest that revenues after the first few months of operations have topped $100,000.

I agree that the market will work out the ethical issues. $100,000 in revenue is pretty good growth. I hope they have a good accountant. I think it’s just cool to know that I was the 61st blogger to sign up for PayPerPost.

Yes, I was paid for this post, but I would have said the same thing on my blog regardless. Take it for what it’s worth. I’ll take the $1200 I’ve made so far.

Colleen, my fellow PayPerPoster, and a couple of her friends are participating in a 60 mile walk in 3 days in Philidelphia. They are doing all of this to support all the pink loving people that put on breast cancer awareness month. You can read more about Colleen’s walk to fame on her 3DayMom blog.

Also, Brett has offered to support Breast Cancer Awareness month also by donating to Colleen if bloggers just put a link to his Maven Mappers website. There you go Colleen and Brett!! Enjoy the walk and supoport a great cause.

Yesterday, I also did my part by wearing a pink ribbon on my shirt. I know I was suppose to wear pink on Monday, but I was out of town. So, since it is for the entire month I put on this really nice pink ribbon on a nice white shirt I wore. It looked like it was just part of the shirt. Go forth and be aware of Breast Cancer.