Justin Germino Ramblings

Today I had to deal with several hours of outages for my wife’s music production company site Rock Along Productions as the WordPress kept erroring out with:

500 – Internal Server Access Errors

In the apache error log I would get:
[Sun Jul 19 17:36:42 2009] [error] [client 66.235.116.128] Premature end of script headers: index.php
[Sun Jul 19 17:36:46 2009] [error] [client 70.176.170.126] Premature end of script headers: index.php
[Sun Jul 19 17:36:56 2009] [error] [client 209.85.238.11] Premature end of script headers: index.php
[Sun Jul 19 17:36:59 2009] [error] [client 74.125.44.136] Premature end of script headers: index.php

As it turns out my Hosting Company has scripts setup to kill your php and apache processes when they consume too much RAM, this is a common issue with shared web hosting plans where to prevent one website from negatively impacting the rest you have to put such measures in place. My hosting company informed me that php plug-ins for wordpress were the most likely cause, and I disabled all of them, but it looks like my All-In-One-SEO pack and the Google-XML-SiteMaps are the worst offenders of plug-ins. These in my opinion are really important plug-ins for your blog though, and as a result I have decided to upgrade my shared hosting plan to Virtual Private Hosting instead. Though I will be paying more per month, I need dedicated processor and memory usage that I can tweak so that I can avoid site outages and run the optimization plug-ins I need.

-Justin Germino

My wife has run into many struggles and issues with running her music production company, including finding that some clients are requiring her to carry “Liability Insurance” to simply provide a DJ to run a two hour show at an Apartment complex. So she checked various insurance companies to get an insurance quote for liability insurance for annual or one time event.

It turns out that the liability insurance is staggering and costs almost twice as much as what she would have made for the event itself which made it impossible to take the gig and the company lost out on a client event. In Arizona production and promotion companies are not required to obtain liability insurance and in fact, in most states the do not.

One wonder’s why it would even be required just for providing a simple DJ server for a private event, when the cost is astronomical in comparison to how much promoters make for single events. All part of the learning process of running your own production company, my wife is constantly trying to find new ways to balance services for clients while obtaining liability insurance isn’t in the cards right now.

-Justin Germino

This week I have to travel for work and will be on the road from Tuesday until Thursday evening, which I don’t usually do more than once or twice a year for my job. It is always hard on a family when one of the parents travels for work, this leaves the other parent being solely responsible for taking care of the kids with no break or co-parent to step in and help out after work hours. I hope to give her some reprieve when I get back and let her get some relaxation time tonight and tomorrow before I leave on Tuesday.

-Justin Germino

I will be going out to see one of our favorite Rock bands “Razer” who is playing at Club Red tonight in Tempe, this band is a local AZ rock band and puts on a great show with some fantastic original rock music. I always enjoy going out on the town with my wife, usually when I go to rock shows, they are her company productions and I am busy running the door as an employee and can’t just kick back and relax as a music fan.

-Justin Germino

I take my two kids for walks almost every morning when the weather is still nice, and they enjoy looking for bugs, lizards, toads and other critters which dwell in the common area’s of our community, in the last three days we have found a lizard, three spiders, four beetles and some crickets. When we catch the critters, we mostly put them in the bug tank we have and we let them go after a period of a few days. Lizards we always return to the wild, sometimes bugs we keep longer. The kids love to explore and find new creatures and seeing my two year old yell “bug” while holding a butterfly net is priceless.

Here is some pics of the latest catches, btw, this spider was the biggest one I have caught so far to date.

-Justin Germino

There is no refuting statistics and surveys that show that people who receive MBA degree’s have a higher average salary and job security than those who are undergrads or have no college degree at all. In this day an age it is extremely difficult to just go to college full time anymore and most people are stuck trying to earn a degree and working full time.

The University of Scranton has a 100% AACSB accredited online MBA program that is ranked in the top 15 by The Princeton Review. They are the only top ranked AACSB program that is 100% online. In certain circumstances the GMAT exam can even be waived.

Unlike some other Universities where the program can take 3 or more years to complete, The University of Scranton MBA program can be completed in 2 years. As someone who works in Information Technology and in the Financial Sector, I know firsthand how important it is to have an MBA and I recommend anyone looking to advance their career or establish a good career in these sectors work to acquire one.

-Justin Germino

Guest post by Shona Germino

The most common food allergies in children are peanut, milk, egg, wheat and shellfish. What is a parent to do when your child suffers from such food allergies? Children can be picky in what they eat, so here is a recipe and some suggestions that even the pickiest eaters love.
Here are some name brand products that are good options for kids who have allergies. These products can be found at any grocery store.

Gluten-Free Syrups:
Mrs. Butterworth’s
Log Cabin syrup

Snacks:
Nabisco Golden Oreos are nut-free and chocolate-free
Stella Doro cookies offer many snacks that are dairy free. Be sure to check the labels on each cookie variety.
Gak’s Snacks are organic and allergen free cookies, coffee cakes and snacks.

Yeast and Gluten Free Kids Pizza:
This is a kid-pleasing yeast and gluten free pizza. To make it easier use a small spring-form pans . Your child can get involved by helping you make the pizza’s.

* 1 1/2 cups instant mashed potatoes
* 1 cup milk
* 1/4 cup butter, melted
* 2 teaspoons Italian seasoning
* 1 teaspoon garlic salt
* 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
* Tomato sauce and toppings

1. In a food processor, combine all ingredients except for optional sauce and toppings and butter. Blend until well incorporated. Let dough sit for 10 minutes.
2. In a greased spring form pan, push desired amount of dough on the bottom and halfway up the sides of the pan. You may have thin or thick dough.
3. Brush melted butter over dough and place in a 425 degree oven for 30 minutes. Thinner dough will cook faster. For a crispy crust, turn the broiler and crisp the top for an additional 5 minutes. Remove and prepare your sauce and toppings. Bake again just enough to slight warm top.

Dairy-Free Variation: Use rice milk or water and margarine. Omit Parmesan.
Be sure to always check the labels for the ingredients list. However many ingredients lists are not accurate. More than 3 million children have food allergies of some sort. Some schools are even designating special tables for those students that have allergies. This has become a hot topic as of late. Is this protection or segregation? Keeping your sensitive child safe from what could harm them is a tough job. There are several cookbooks and online resources available for recipes and suggestions for an allergen free lifestyle.

www.kidswithfoodallergies.org

If you don’t believe that pets are part of our family then you are still in denial the amount of impact pets have on our lives. With people not only celebrating pets birthdays by throwing parties, they also print up and send out announcements similar to couples sending out birth announcements to let their friends and family know that they are celebrating a new member of their family.

Pets relieve stress and help foster empathy in both children and adults, it is proven that pets help reduce allergies in babies and toddlers as they develop stronger immune systems from being around pets. They provide playtime companions for kids, or some even provide relaxing ambient sounds (in the case of certain birds).

As pets are a member of your family and people continue to treat them as such, we will see more and more products and services geared toward pets. I have seen more restaurants over the years allow you to bring your pet and eat on the patio with your pet on a leash, in addition there are bakeries and dessert establishments that make pet treats.

Always remember though that a pet is still an animal and poses some risks to the family, research the type of pet you want very carefully, you should not have large constrictor snakes or other dangerous pets if you have children. Pets also need to be supervised around little children as even the most friendly pet can be scared, frightened or accidentally injured by a little kid and may bite to defend itself.

I still find some people ignorant and treat their pets so poorly, leaving them outside in the summer heat all day long and abandoning them for long periods of time. Some people still treat pets like they don’t deserve the same affection, love and emotions as family members, and some can be downright cruel.

-Justin Germino

I was reading Popular Science magazine last night and they had an article talking about how sixty years of killing rats with various rat poisons is evolving the creatures so that they are becoming immune to various rat poisons.  These genetic mutations are happening extremely quickly in the grand scheme of the evolutionary chain but these mutations pale in comparison to how fast bacteria and virus mutate and evolve to become drug resistant.  One of the primary reasons for bacteria drug resistance is not in fact caused by humans using antibiotics, but it is because antibiotics are given to animals in large mills and farms and the bacteria are only partially killed and grow and fester and mutate to become stronger strains.

Looks like to keep rats at bay, people should have good old fashioned house cats on their sites, or will have to start resorting to manual traps again with bait, toxins and poisons are dangerous to use around sites with pets and children anyway.

-Justin Germino