Welcome to Smuggle Me

Well, I’m going to write this post and then probably head back to work. I think it would just be wrong for me to do some BlogWorld Expo posts without acknowledging the whole reason for me to go to BlogWorld: Ted and company.

I pretty much just went straight to the IZEA booth. Of course it was listed as the PayPerPost booth.

I saw Brit and I went right up to her and said, “Hey Brit.” She gave me this look, like am I suppose to know this guy. The cool part was that she really had no clue who I was. I think she remembered my name from an email I sent her asking for a BWE code. However, that was the closest she came. I finally told her I was techie so she wouldn’t think I was some stalker.

I then talked to Ted for a while. He’s a fun guy. The best thing he said is that he took my advice and is trying to get together a major cake plow for lunch. That will be cool if he can put it together. I think I might have to split the conference with my wife and let her go in the morning and I’ll go in the evening. I guess we’ll have to see.

Either way, it was fun to finally meet all these people that I’ve interacted with online for over a year now. I’m excited to see what happens at PostieCon. Even if I think I’m going to be disappointed with Argus. Time will tell. The best part will really just blogging during it. I think I need to start some sort of blogger war while Ted’s talking. Jules are you in?

I think this whole LobbyCon idea is pretty cool. Especially with an eclectic group like bloggers.

Lior Haner from Yedda.com just sat down next to me and told me about an interesting twist on Questions and Answers. It actually allows you to embed questions and answers on your blog. I think it’s an interesting idea for my EMR and HIPAA blog since I am kind of an authority on EMR. I might have to take a look at it later. Could be interesting. I’ll have to see if it can drive more traffic to my website.

Today I decided to stop by BlogWorld Expo over my lunch. I figured I should at least stop by and say hi to a few people. It’s been pretty much as expected. Although, I must tell you that I was a bit surprised. Of course, the first thing that I wanted to do when I got here was to pull out my laptop and blog about it. In fact, as I walked I was just thinking about all the things that could be blogged about.

Well, I pulled out my laptop when I saw the bloggers lounge so I could blog and it turns out that the girl I’m sitting next to speaks Italian. Of course this is very excited for me since I love to speak Italian. To make it even more odd, the girl and guy that were sitting across the way were also speaking Italian (Update: on second hear, it might have been spanish). I’m not sure why, because the girl next to me is actually from france and pretty much speaks every language of the European Union. Was it just coincidence that everyone at this table speaks Italian (including me)? I think not. I should have put up a sign that said “Italian Table.”

I guess there is one other possibility of what was happening. The girl next to me is from a travel search website called Mobissimo. I guess it’s similar to Kayak or Sidestep, but she said that it searches something like 180 sites (the website says 176 sites) for the best deals which makes them larger than Kayak or Sidestep. Maybe later I’ll have to do a test to see if the extra sites find better deals or if maybe it is just better on an international level and the US sites are the same. I do think I’ll try it out for finding a rental car for my trip to Hawaii.

Turns out that it was the same price as what I would have found on travelocity, but I like it better since it’s much nicer for me to purchase it on Enterprise.com as opposed to travelocity.com. I just have more faith that I can change it if there are problems. I imagine Mobissimo is taking a cut from referrals. Either way, the process was seamless. Mobissimo could use a bit of work on the look of their site and I was sad they didn’t have the ajax city search so I only had to type Hon instead of Honolulu. However, it was pretty fast.

Interestingly, I really did need a rental car for our trip to Hawaii so I decided to book our rental using Mobissimo. Who would have thought that it would be beneficial for Beatrice, Co-founder and CEO of Mobissimo to go to a Blogger conference?

As a person working in technology I have tons of people at work that come up to me and ask me for some help in purchasing a computer. Generally I find this a painful experience because there are a zillion options and people don’t generally know what they want. However, if it is someone I like then I usually pull up my big girl panties and help them out, because I know that if I don’t then they are going to get ripped off and pay twice what I could find for them.

Even for people I don’t really care to help I always direct them to a site I’ve been using since I was in college called Tech Bargains. My favorite addition to their site was their easy link to Dell Deals. I love purchasing a dell computer and using various tricks that Tech Bargains has to get the best discount. My wife recently bought a digital camera on a whim. I wish she would have checked out the cheap digital camera list that Tech Bargains has. I think we could have saved some money, but oh well. At least she got a good discount where she got it and it looks like it should be a pretty nice camera.

I highly recommend watching tech bargains for good deals on computers. That’s what I’ve used for buying my computers and many of my friends. Sometimes you have to watch for the deals to come around, but I’ve been able to find some good ones.