Justin Germino Ramblings

Being trapped in a vehicle with two children under five years old for three hours will try Ghandi’s patience. One constant battle we all struggle with is to find tolerance and patience but measured so as not to let our children get out of hand and be allowed to behave unreasonably.

Portable movie devices are a solution to help the problem parents face but unfortunately do nothing to teach the kids how to have patience and deal with their own boredom. Now for little kids it is perfectly reasonable to put on a movie in the car so the driver isn’t distracted by unreasonable amounts of screaming, thrashing and mayhem that occurs in the back seat where a bored toddler does anything they can for entertainment.

For older kids I would prefer they read a comic book or any book instead of more mindless TV, even word puzzles or something edutainment like on a Nintendo DS is fine. The bottom line is if you are about to go on a long drive, you should plan something for the children to do and it should be planned age appropriately.

I have to say than goodness for the geniuses who invented car DVD players and 6″ LCD screens.

-Justin Germino

I have seen the movie Monsters Vs Aliens with my family on Friday night and I thought the movie was very good. I laughed through most of the film and especially enjoyed the parodies of all the old B horror movies and genre’s out there relating to monsters such as The Blob, Attack of the 50′ Woman, Creature From The Black Lagoon, The Fly and others.

Its funny how being a parent of young children and seeing films with them you start to scrutinize everything that may or may not be questionable for children. For instance, my children enjoyed the film very much as well, there movie however had some content and stuff in it that I thought was much more geared for adults than children. For instance there was the “couple” scene in the car where in the typical horror movie the guy is coming onto the girl and monster outside makes noise, he checks it out and gets killed…etc. In Monsters Vs Aliens, in a clever parody the woman was very aggressive with the guy and exclaimed “This is the worst date ever” this had the adults laughing, its a good thing it went over children’s head because it does have the wrong “message” for a kids movie I thought.

I also though the movie had too much relationship trouble between the news reporter and Susan, him breaking up with her and her being crushed and the man being selfish. Though these added “realism” to the film I thought the detracted from the fun and action style of the film and didn’t really come across well for kids.

My favorite characters included Bob (the blob) and Doctor Cockroach who was excellently voiced by Hugh Laurie (you couldn’t barely even recognize it was him).

Overall, I think the movie was very good and it appeals to adults and children equally well since there is a lot of scenes and references to adult horror movies that children are just too young to know about and get.

-Justin Germino

I write this article by speaking from experience, over the past several years I have participated in many online survey web sites that start by giving you a certain amount of money for signing up and then pay you for each completed survey. The problem with many of these sites is that you have to take a small survey to see if you even qualify to take the real survey, and this can waste about 5 minutes of your time just to see if you can take the actual survey.

By the time you actually are allowed to take the real survey you can find the real survey’s take between 30 and 45 minutes for some of them and at best pay you between one and three dollars for each survey you take. Many pay 50 cents on average for a fifteen minute survey.

If you consider this then you can actually make money taking online surveys, but you will average about one to two dollars per hour at best and you will qualify for less and less surveys the more you take as many of them require that you haven’t taken previous surveys in the same category for three months or more.

This makes it highly unlikely you will make enough money to pay anything but the lowest bill that costs around thirty dollars per month or less from taking surveys online. There are much better ways to make money online that can earn you around three dollars an hour that are much more rewarding than taking surveys.

That said, there are a few rare sites that offer really good surveys and give better rewards, some give you credits and you can exchange these for free gifts. I have received some free used BlockBuster DVD’s for taking surveys, so instead of cash I might have gotten fifteen dollars worth of free movies in one month.

But these online survey sites are rare and hard to find and sign up for at best, most of the survey sites are scams that require survey only to lead you to try and purchase a product in the end. My advice is to save your time and invest in another online pursuit, there are other ways to make money with the Internet at home that have a better payout ratio for your time spent.

Some sites that pay you for reading and clicking on email links also pay so little that it takes months to merely earn a few dollars, from my own experience trying to find a way to make money online, blogging is still the best way to earn a small side income online and you can do it with less hours and a better payout than surveys or clicking on emails online.

-Justin Germino

I took my wife to dinner and to see Norm McDonald at the Tempe Improv last night and our dinner and date were very nice, I highly recommend if you have children to take your spouse out on dates at least once a month. It really helps having three hours alone without children constantly vying for your attention so you can just focus on each other and share that special connection that you have always had (it just gets muted with screaming banshee’s running around the house).

Norm McDonald who was in Saturday Night Live, voiced a few characters in Robots and had cameo’s in a dozen movies or so was funny, but not as funny as I had hoped or expected. His humor is very dry and this is a good thing except his humor often is dirty and just didn’t need to be(for a clown fish, he’s not that funny). There were about four or five really funny bits but the rest was a little long and I thought he spent too much time trying to piece together the whole story of Adam and Eve and the laughter was a little few and far between.

It was good seeing him live but out of all the comedians I have seen live, Patton Oswalt is still my favorite live comedian. This doesn’t say much as I have only seen 3 comedians live at the Improv, but I am hoping that Brad Garrett, Kevin James or Robin Williams comes to the Improv at some point in the future.

Now Sunday is here and we can rest, relax and have a family day.

-Justin Germino

In an attempt to free up some cash flow I was looking into seeing if I would get a monthly savings by converting my car lease into a five year loan. Unfortunately as it turns out it would cost me more per month to own my vehicle than to lease it at this current time, so I am stuck looking for others ways to perform debt consolidation so I can have a little more breathing room in my monthly budget.

Parents it is your responsibility to teach your kids about fiscal responsibility, make sure you show them how income vs expenses are a constant battle and arm them with the tools they will need to get ahead of this financial game when they are young. Even my five year old is aware of earning versus spending and clearly is included when we talk about costs of items and things.

You don’t benefit your kids by shielding them or not teaching them about costs and sharing some information about costs and expenses with them, my parents could have given me far more knowledge and a head start had they been more sharing of the real world of finances when I was a teenager.

-Justin Germino

Tonight I am taking the family to Pizza and the movies, Monsters Vs. Aliens is the film we are all going to see and it just looks so incredibly funny and both of my kids are very excited to see it. I look forward to the time spent making an evening and having a good time with my family and hope the movie is a funny as it looks.

My son and I are already trading quotes from the previous like.

“We need raw power, we need…Monsters”

Or

“Don’t scare Insectasauraus”

I will let everyone know how the movie was later tonight or this weekend.

-Justin Germino

I have been dealing with site outages on my dragonblogger.com site for a while now and it was frustrating, my hosting company did provide me with a ton of information on how my plug-ins were slowing down my site and causing my instances to consume too much memory.  I decided to play plug-in cleanup on all four of the hosted blogs and removed about 60 plug-ins between the four blogs, after tweaking, caching, tuning and customizing I now have all four blogs loading in around 5-6 seconds according to firebug which is about 60% faster than with all the extra plug-ins installed.

I didn’t get much time to do Entrecard drops today as a result of all my WordPress performance tuning work in the last several hours.

-Justin Germino

We have two Boston terrier dogs, one who is almost 8 years old and a pup who is only 9 months old. Since we bought the puppy about two months ago he has slept with our oldest son in bed and since our son has been getting up at 5:30am.

So as an experiment we decided to have the puppy sleep with us in bed to determine if the puppy was the reason why our son was waking up so early.

That is when the fun began, it started off with the two little dogs curling up on the bed and keeping against me for warmth. I had to endure two short nasal passage dogs snoring as if they were old english mastiffs.

I got up to use the restroom and just as I came back toward the bed, the puppy started barking at me which caused our older Boston to follow suite. A one minute bark and growl fest as the two dogs defended the bed and mom from my intrusion woke my wife up and we were laughing at 12:30am.

We finally settled down only to awake to hear my oldest dog having a nightmare an our later. The dog was twitching and whimpering in its sleep and I had to wake the dog up since he appeared to be very troubled. Now it was 1:30am and we are going back to sleep again.

Listening to more snoring but finally dozing off, I awoke to the sounds of hacking and retching. The puppy was choking or barfing in bed, I had had enough and carried the puppy and the older dog and put them in the yard for the rest of the morning.

Finally I crashed back in bed at 3:30am now and fell fast asleep, waking up sharply at 6:13am when my son barges in wanting to play Lego Star Wars before school.

I face the day with energy drinks and tea hoping I don’t pass out at my desk now, and in summary it turns out my son slept in only 30 more minutes after all.

-Justin Germino

I just finished eating a Peanut Butter and Choke Cherry Jelly sandwich and I must say it was amazing stuff, the Choke Cherry Jelly that Tim from BlogNetAwards sent me set very well in the fridge and regained all of its thickness from cooling off overnight. This allowed it to be spread easily with a small teaspoon on top of the peanut butter.

The jelly tasted like fresh crushed cherries only a little sweeter, but not too sugary. It truly was one of the best jellies I have tasted and better than anything store bought. Tim, I should send you my wife’s homemade Fig Jam in a Mason jar, which also goes very well.

Thanks again for sending it and introducing me to Choke Cherry jelly, now since I can’t purchase this anywhere, you are going to have to tell me when you make batches so I can put in my order ahead of time.

For those of you who don’t know, I am an avid fan of PB&J sandwiches, some people will look for diet pills that work to maintain a healthy weight, but I just have one tasty PB&J sandwich as a lunch several times a week. It prevents me from overindulging and I love to have unique jelly’s added to the peanut butter.

-Justin Germino

Wouldn’t you believe that I finally completed my first Swaptree trade, I decided to list my Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii and someone traded me Lego Indiana Jones for it. I wasn’t playing the game for more than six months and wanted something that my five year old son and I could play together, and he loved the Lego Batman game, so I decided to make the trade.

I was just thrilled that for only the postage I was able to get a one for one swap of a Wii game instead of having to trade three or four games for one in my local gaming store. This has me listing a few other games to see what people will offer, or I can get for them.

For people with games or video’s they don’t play anymore, I found Swaptree to be very useful when you want to trade something you have for something you may want in the same category or price range, it is better than ebaying in my opinion, since you often get much closer to the original value in another product.

-Justin Germino