Welcome to Smuggle Me

I’m really glad I just spent 10:48 of my life watching this video. The style of the video is great, and the content really amazing for anyone that’s a manager at a company or an entrepreneur like myself. Very cool. I’m sure you’ll all enjoy this RSA Animate about what motivates us:

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Tony’s Pizza. All opinions are 100% mine.

Everyone that knows me knows that I eat a lot of pizza. It’s my favorite thing to eat in the world I think. Well, there might be a few desserts that come close, but as far as a meal I eat pizza far too often. People at my work make fun of me for only eating pizza. What can I say? I will often be found going to a buffet and then just eating the pizza. To me a buffet is often just all I can eat pizza.

With this background, you can imagine how excited I was to get some Tony’s Pizza coupons for free pizza in the mail. My wife called me when the free coupons arrived and I told her to go to the store and get it, because I needed me some Tony’s Pizza tonight. Since I’m an expert on pizza, I’ve always found Tony’s to be the best value. It’s a much better quality pizza than say a Totino’s pizza, but isn’t overpriced like a Red Barron pizza.

The pizza was delicious as usual. The only problem was that my kids decided to eat the Tony’s Pizza too and so I didn’t get enough of it. Dang kids never eat dinner and they chomped down this pizza.

I must admit that it’s always nice to have a frozen pizza that I can just throw in the oven and eat. I say this because my wife recently ordered some Dominos Pizza. They told her it would be 30 minutes, but then it showed up 30 minutes late. Do you know how annoying that is? I can barely wait the 15 minutes for the frozen pizza to cook. Imagine waiting a good 30 minutes extra for pizza when you’re hungry.

Of course, Dominoes heard that we were mad that it was late and so they sent us something in the mail saying sorry and offering us some coupons. This would have been really cool. Too bad the coupons were of no value since they were the same discounts we can get by just calling and ordering. Seriously??? So, to make up for their crappy delivery service they’re going to try and sell us more of their product?

Needless to say, I don’t have to worry about that with frozen pizza. Looks like more Tony’s Pizza for me and less Dominos.

We just got the call from the management company that rents us our house. Turns out that the owner of the house has stopped making payments. It’s actually really nice of him to do this since most people don’t find out about it until the notice is on the door that the house is in foreclosure. Needless to say we have a lot to think about now as we decide how to deal with this news.

The news was pretty unfortunate since we had kind of settled into the idea of just staying there for a while. We thought that rent was a little high, but we didn’t want the cost of moving either. Well, I guess now we don’t have that choice it seems.

Of course, if you look at people’s comments on Twitter and Facebook they feel so bad for us. I don’t feel bad for us. Sure, it’s a bit of an annoyance, but we’ve already lived in 3 houses in Las Vegas, might as well live in a fourth.

Plus, there’s always a silver lining to everything. Maybe we’ll get cash for keys and make some money out of this change. Maybe we can get them to lower our rent since he’s not paying the mortgage now anyway. Maybe the new house we move to will be even better than the one we live in now and with lower rent. Renting is still 100 times better than if we’d bought 3-4 years ago and would now be $100k+ upside down on a mortgage.

Certainly, there’s plenty to complain about, but that’s not me. I prefer to see the good parts of whatever happens. Sometimes it’s hard, but for me it just comes naturally.

Get your minds out of the gutter. This is the mile high club for bloggers. I’m writing this post from 30,000 feet on a flight from Las Vegas to Atlanta. This is just awesome. I can’t wait until every flight has this available. Not to mention, I’m watching the Olympics on NBC at the same time. The US just won gold in 4 man bobsled.

I just did a speed test and it’s showing 0.97 Mbps download and 0.25 Mbps upload. Not bad for most of the things that I do. I might have to go test out Youtube and Hulu and some things like that and see how it does. Amazing!

Oh yeah, and the best part is that I got it for free. That a baby!!

Only problem is that now I won’t get any sleep on this red eye flight. Tomorrow’s going to be rough, but it will be so worth it.

I’ve been doig a lot of networking lately. What’s been interesting is the more that I network the greater ability and the more opportunities I have to network.

For example, I just won this little business plan competition. From that I was able to network with some really interesting people that I believe can really provide me and my budding business some amazing benefit. The next step is to turn the talk into action.

As I’ve talked with people about my business I think the one thing that differentiates me from some other people is that I just consistently hammer away at something. Networking is an example of that. You have to just keep going out and seeing what you can make of the experience. Plus, you have to be laser focused on why you’re trying to network. Not that you can’t and shouldn’t talk about them and their needs, but always keep in mind how your business could benefit bot people. Then, you’re getting the best of both worlds. You’re focusing on them, but still finding ways to build your business as well.

Life is a really interesting thing. There are so many things to do each day that you could never do all of them. In fact, you are certain to transgress something or someone in life. It’s just the nature of life.

This really isn’t a problem per se, but it does mean that you have to learn to balance your life. The better you are at balancing your life the happier you’ll be. Plus, if you balance it better I believe you can also get more done.

The key to that is that I believe you’ll get more done when you’re happy. That’s not to say if you’re out of balance you can’t get stuff done. However the sum of all the things you get done will be less. That’s why you have to balance.

Of course, it’s not easy to balance everything in life. In fact, it’s extremely difficult. However, the difficult things are usually those of the most worth.

A week or so ago I got an interesting email from my little sister. She wanted to borrow our Asus eee (basically a little computer) since she really wanted to finish a novel she’s been working on for a while. I don’t know if my sister knows what she’s getting herself into. I think I might need to ask my friend in New Orleans to talk to her about writing a novel.

Anyway, my sister isn’t giving me many details about the novel. I think it’s because she’s writing some smutty romance that she knows I won’t like. That said, I do love seeing people live out their dreams. So, we sent our little computer to her. This should be interesting. I’m going to tell her that in return for borrowing the computer I want 20% of her book sale royalties. Seems reasonable to me. I wonder what she’ll think.

I have a friend that is really good at scouring the internet to find all sorts of ways to save money or even make money in many cases. His wife would always make fun of him for how much time he spends online looking for deals and ways to make money.

My favorite is when he combined a whole bunch of deals from credit cards and ended up with a stack of cash, miles and other benefits. Although, the funniest one was when he made his wife wait 30 minutes to go to dinner so that he could get a discount which would save him $0.80. Shows you how serious he is about saving money.

Well, I was talking to him the other day and told him he should start a blog about all the various deals he finds. After our discussion, I helped him out and setup Mound of Money. He’s already created a post talking about getting discount hotels and Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program. Watch that site and I think you’re going to really like what he posts.

Also, if you like what he’s written do him a favor and stumble some of his posts. Thanks!

I got the following email today:

Dear Customer,
At Vonage, we’re committed to providing our valued customers with the best experience possible through meaningful updates to our services. To ensure that we continue to deliver top-notch service and quality, we will modify two of our existing fees as follows:
The Emergency 911 Cost Recovery will become the Emergency 911 Service Fee, which ensures we maintain nationwide E911 service in compliance with FCC regulations. Our customers’ safety in an emergency is our primary concern and this update allows us to continue delivering reliable emergency services.

The Regulatory Recovery Fee will become the Regulatory and Compliance Fee, which covers our regulatory-related and legal compliance expenses. For example, this fee pays for charges associated with benefits like procedures to ensure customer privacy, identity theft protection measures and phone number porting.
These fees will each increase from $0.99 to $1.49, effective July 15, 2009. This change allows Vonage to maintain our commitment to safety, innovation and customer service.

If you have any questions, call 1-VONAGE-HELP and speak to a customer service representative. We’re always available, 24 hours a day, everyday.

Thank you for your business,
Vonage

Does Vonage really think I’m that stupid? They aren’t raising prices in order to “deliver top-notch service and quality.” They’re raising the prices so that they can make more money. Call it what it is. Don’t try to blow wind up my skirt.

I really hate when people forwarded me an email. Most people only do it once, because when they do I politely ask them to stop sending me a forward. Some people don’t like it, but luckily most of them are good with it. I just don’t usually have time to read forwards. Not to mention, I hate getting duplicates of something I’ve seen before.

I’ve always thought a nice alternative to the email forward would be to create a website which took the best things from these forwards (since some of them really are funny, interesting and enjoyable). Turns out someone else had the same thought and created a website called Mostly Safe For Work: A compendium of interesting miscellany from around the world.

Turns out it’s a great idea. As a website you can go when you want to take a break so it doesn’t interrupt your work like a forward could. You can also get it through RSS if you’d like. You also don’t have to worry about getting the same thing over and over.

As a side note, anyone that would like to buy me this blogging house, I’d appreciate it.