How about it, eh? Some of you know I recently completed a family vacation to the Great White North. One of the delights of the trip was fighting every night with Wife over what unknown restaurant we would eat at. Montreal was especially fun because everywhere had crepes, however, my little guy is picky. Finding good spaghetti recipes in a French city is sometimes hard. Please, save the snarky comments about the French being great chefs, I’m talking about appealing to a kid’s appetite. Not some haute intellectual.

Since we are home now, I think it might be time to have a summer Italian dinner, with my son’s godfather as chef. I swear he has the best spaghetti recipe ever and his meatballs taste the best, if I may say that. Now people who are raised on bland sauce and Prego would not appreciate his cooking, but if you like flavor, garlic and fennel, his stuff in top notch. Throw in a couple of bottles of red wine and you have some good eating.

We’re off for vacation tomorrow. Pretty excited about it too. Our last vacation was to go skiing back in January, so we packed up our ski bibs and snowboard goggles and heavy winter coats. This time, we’re definitely traveling a lot lighter! Shorts and t-shirts are what we’ve got, and we’re ready to enjoy some cooler temps. Highs in Toronto this week are in the upper 70’s - sweet stuff after sweating it out here in Florida. And the rain that Weather.com was predicting seems to have gone away as well, so here’s hoping for cool, dry days.

We’re going to be in Montreal this weekend, and while the humidity is high (56%) the weather there should be cooler than here in Florida too. And if we get too hot, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to Niagara, where we can get wet in the falls. I’m stoked.

How do you think George Steinbrenner feels knowing the highest payroll in professional sports has virtually the same record as the lowest in Major League Baseball, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays?

Try not to hurt your brain.

Wife took the kids to see Pirates on Sunday. I’m just not a big fan. I saw the second one and it felt like it took forever. I had the choice of going to Pirates or going shopping at the mall. Tough call, but I took the mall. I knew I could find beer there. Wife made me go buy some new clothes for vacation.

I typically read the newspaper every morning, if it’s arrived before I leave the house for work. I don’t typically watch the news, just because I’m not usually home when the news is on, and when I am, I’ve got better things to do. I tend to get a lot of my news online instead. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’s quick. I don’t have to listen to 5 minutes of weather and consumer reports in order to find out what the score was in last night’s hockey game.

Now, thanks to The News Room, I can not only get the news for my own benefit, but I can share it and make some cash. Because this is an advertising supported product, I can embed relevant news onto my blog and get paid for sharing it. For instance, I was able to find this neat video of the play of the night (Rob Neidermeyer) from the Stanley Cup Finals to share here. It’s relevant, timely, and I make money!

You can also earn prizes for using the service. Putting that video up was easy too - you just find a category of news, pick a story, and share it. The layout is easy to change, and all of the code is provided to you.

Friday night I took the kids ice skating. I had a good skate, worked on my edges and crossovers. My son is dying to join a league, hopefully by the end of the summer he will be ready.

You all know my wife is big time into the PayPerPost thing. She’s made over $12,000 with the company by doing blog advertising. She’s also been (thanks to PayPerPost) featured in the L.A. Times, Orlando Sentinel, and now on Forbes.com. You can also check out her listing in the brand new PayPerPost blogger directory. She’s got a very high ranked blog, but her price for a review is extremely reasonable. She’s also a 5 tack rated blogger on PayPerPost, and very few others are. In fact, most of the people charging MORE money than Wife have much lower ratings. Ironical, isn’t it?

The point of this blog entry really isn’t to brag on Wife though…although, if PayPerPost keeps on what they’re doing, Wife will surely go places with them. They just obtained another $7 million in investor backing, bringing their total to $10 million. That’s a lot of RockStartUp episodes. Or PayPerPost Big Blue Monsters. Or red velvet jackets. In fact, PayPerPost is already spreading the money around, via opps just like this one, so it’s a great time to sign up YOUR blog for PayPerPost. You can start earning money right away, and maybe even catch the $700 opp that will be appearing some time this week!

The PayPerPost Revolution Accelerates, Sponsored
Blogging Marketplace Secures $7 Million Series B

Draper Fisher Jurvetson leads round and joins Board of Directors

ORLANDO, FL – (June 12, 2007) – PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers and other consumer content creators, today announced it has completed a $7 million second round investment led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an investor in the company’s Series A and one of the world’s leading high-technology venture capital firms. The financing brings the total amount of capital raised by PayPerPost to over $10 million, giving the company considerable resources for further development as the industry’s leading Consumer Generated Advertising marketplace. Additional participants in the round include existing investors Inflexion Partners and Village Ventures as well as new investor DFJ Gotham. With this investment, DFJ Managing Director Josh Stein also joins PayPerPost’s Board of Directors.

“PayPerPost created this exciting new advertising space and has established itself as the industry leader,” said Ted Murphy, chief executive officer of PayPerPost. “Although we’ve only used a portion of our first round capital, this added support from investors unlocks significant growth potential. Our content creator and advertiser ROI metrics clearly demonstrate the upside for PayPerPost’s model. We intend to use this capital to build the infrastructure, visibility and professional expertise necessary to reach and retain a greater network of advertisers and content creators than ever before.”

Since its founding in June of 2006, PayPerPost has signed more than 6,500 advertisers to its groundbreaking service, which has enabled Consumer Content Creators to be compensated for their efforts discussing specific companies, products or services via blogs, videos or other media. The content creators are required to disclose relationships with advertisers on their blog, providing transparency for the end reader. Over 125,000 Internet postings, most in the form of blogs, have already earned money for their creators through PayPerPost’s innovative marketplace. PayPerPost recently released PayPerPost Direct, a disruptive new service that allows advertisers to contract and negotiate directly with individual bloggers they identify through a safe, managed system.

“PayPerPost has laid a strong foundation for the future,” noted Tim Draper, founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “It continues to attract a critical mass of participants from both the advertising and blogging communities. Analogous to Overture’s sponsored search model, we believe PayPerPost’s business model holds disruptive potential and will enable the company to thrive in the evolving paid-content arena.”

To mark the $7 million dollar funding, PayPerPost has launched a new website detailing the company’s service offering at http://www.payperpost.com. Bloggers and advertisers can easily sign up at the site and begin leveraging the self service marketplace.

Listening to Don Cherry and Brett Hull discuss fighting in the NHL was awesome. I think they echoed the sentiments of most fans by saying the league has gone to far to limit fighting and the Instigator Rule is a detriment to the players safety and the NHL. When all of these players and former players slam a relatively new rule, someone should listen. The players police themselves, and without the Instigator Rule, a lot of the cheap shots that cause injuries (Pronger), would not happen. The player would be held accountable by his peers.

What a game Monday night. I thought the Senators were going to make a series of it, but MacDonald of the Ducks may have won the series for Anaheim with two goals one minute apart. The hockey was great, but even better was the intermission after the second period with Brett Hull(who is turning into a good announcer) and Don Cherry. What a treat to finally see Don Cherry. In Tampa, we do not get the CBC, so there is no Hockey Night In Canada for us to watch. Man, his suit was outstanding! The only thing that could have made it better is a fur derby. I hope they bring him back for game 5.

Tonight I went to the library looking for a book, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for and was rushing before the library closed. I wound up getting a Hemingway novel, but now that I’m home, I have a better idea. Wife was telling me about a new flick coming out this summer - the 1408 Movie based on a Stephen King short story. So I watched the trailer, and must say it looks like an pretty good story. For some reason, the trailer reminded me of “Sixth Sense”, but the story line was psychological. The 1408 Movie comes out later this summer, so I think I’ll pick up the book of short stories and give it a read. Sometimes reading the book is as close as I come to seeing the movie. At least the book will give me something entertaining to read while on vacation.

I used to read Stephen King, but have not since I was sixteen or so. I think the last book of his I read was “It”, which was my favorite of his and probably the scariest thing I ever read, with “The Shining” coming in close behind…”All work and no play makes Jack dull boy”. Classic. In “It”, a demonic thing in a clown suit terrorizes a town. Clowns are scary enough on their own, but this was one bad clown. And The Shining - wow. I love a good psychological thriller like that, and the lines and quotes were great. I didn’t sleep for weeks afterwards.

After Stephen King, I dove into classic literature and from there into Tom Clancy. I think it might be time to give his books another shot. I love the way he always incorporated lyrics from rock n roll songs into his stories.

Here is a preview of the new movie: