Justin Germino Ramblings

The decline in script or cursive handwriting is becoming more prevalent in the last ten years with it being almost eliminated from grades prior to 6th. With high school essays required to be in “typed” format and computers being used virtually everywhere it is no longer considered an essential skill to write elegantly, but just to write and read.

People thought the typewriter would decay societies ability to write elegantly and penmanship would start to degenerate as a result, but the real death of handwriting comes from instant communication. Not only can you text a message and instantly beam it to someone within seconds, but virtually everyone is connected to each other on the planet via phones using twitter, IM and other services.

Within 20 years there may not be a single written letter hand written and mailed except for the romantics and the truly dedicated, society by then will be almost completely able to communicate in real time to virtually anybody in the world they need to reach.

I for one write hand written letters and cards only for special occasions, or to jot down notes, I usually write in cursive only because I can write slightly faster though sloppier than each letter separately. Other than signing my name in cursive though, I haven’t written a cursive letter or note in probably several months which only further illustrates my point.

Do you think cursive is something that should still be taught, or will it become a forgotten art only practiced by artists and calligraphists who keep it alive?

-Justin Germino

As I turned 32 years old day I can’t help but reflect over my past and think about the things I would change and the mistakes I would undo. I have made my fair share of mistakes and caused pain to many people including the ones I loved most, most of these mistakes were made due to immaturity, stupidity that comes with youth and the lack of wisdom that it entails.

Another mistake was that previously I had gained far too much weight by being complacent over the years, I had gained fifty pounds over ten years between twenty and thirty years of age. I had spent the better part of last year losing all of the weight but this past year I have seen it creep back a little as my willpower and commitment to being fit seemed to wane for no other reason than simple laziness.

So on my 32nd Birthday I challenge myself to start focusing on eating less again, I have been working out but unfortunately my eating has increased and outweighed my working out benefits. For anyone with a goal and a challenge to lose weight you need to make a decision and you could either finally get committed to an exercise and fitness routine, or just click here for weight loss pills and see if you want to try that route which millions of people try and few have long term success with.

For my other mistakes I can only hope that I won’t repeat the past, studying the past and learning from it is the whole purpose of being human. For human beings make mistakes and what we take from those mistakes and how we grow and learn from them is what sets us apart from animals.

-Justin Germino

Last Sunday I went fishing with the family for a day, and though we caught not a single trout the boys and I walked up and down the rocky ground rolling over boulders weighing 50+ pounds and discovered and caught some cool looking lizards and bugs.  Here are most of the critters we caught last Sunday, including the Blue Tailed Skink which I had never seen before, it has this electric blue tail and I wouldn’t have believed it was common until I caught 2 on the same day.

-Justin Germino

For my birthday which is Tuesday, my wife bought me the Behringer Podcast Kit and I decided to take it for a spin. It comes with a high quality microphone, headphones and a Xenyx 502 Mixer with Mic preamp. After tweaking Windows Vista for about an hour (My control panel kept crashing, turned out to be a bad .cpl file in my \windows\system32 directory). I was able to get my USB mic configured and setup, then it took another 1/2 hour fiddling with Audacity to get it to recognize and use the mic.

Here was my test podcast using this new birthday gift, I intend to use it to make more screencast training demonstrations and post them on YouTube and in my blogs.

-Justin Germino
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These past several weeks have flown by in a blur with days seeming to pass like hours for me. I need to figure out a better way to slow down and enjoy each day a little more and let each day have a longer lasting impact instead of days and weeks blurring together. It used to be that time was very slow when I was younger, I think as kids time appears very slow with hours seeming like days. I have been told that time seems to speed up as you get older.

This week I had some huge project milestones at work and frantically worked 10 hour days to make sure I keep up with all my projects, while blogging has taken an interesting turn as I reached my biggest milestone with DragonBlogger.com hitting a high of 1139 unique visits on a single day. Most of the traffic coming from my NBC Heroes review which I do weekly and have seen huge spikes since Heroes has started again.

I found two new blog networks to get my blogs registered on, and started configuring my blogs on my facebook profile. I also configured all of my blogs to be DoFollow blogs last week.

-Justin Germino

Our Boston Terrier Porky was suffering from red irritated skin and itching and scratching so badly he was causing scratches and bleeding on his feet, face, chest and stomach. We took him to the vet and they ran blood work, tested for fleas, mites, ticks, bacteria and more.

It turned out he probably has allergies and he did have some bacterial infection on his skin, so the vet prescribed various pet supplements that had omega 3 fatty acids, and special spray to clean his fur and skin. His red irritated skin looks like it is starting to clear up and fur is starting to regrow in his bald spots near his ribs.

We managed to find a “bath free” cleaning spray with aloe that seems to be really good at cleaning up his skin and making him seem more comfortable, he doesn’t scratch as much and is feeling better.

As mentioned in my article Owning Pets Costs Money you never know when your pet will come down sick or need to go to the vet, make sure you can afford to keep pets and keep enough money saved to cover unexpected vet bills.

-Justin Germino

Karen over at Blazing Minds asked me to do an interview with her and I was more than happy to oblige.  BlazingMinds is a blog I have been following for a while and I consider to be very well written, informative and a benefit to bloggers and technology enthusiasts.

Everyone should check out the Interview with Justin Germino over at Blazing Minds.

Thank you again Karen for the opportunity.

-Justin Germino

Owning Pets can cost you quite a bit of money, in fact even if you go by the ASPCA.org pet care costs and assume all averages, you are probably low balling the cost estimates for owning a pet.

According to this ASPCA calculator, the first year of owning a small dog breed will cost you $1,314 dollars which includes the one time adoption fee, neuter or spay, training, initial medical, treats, food, and first year coverage of all of those items. A large breed of dog has an estimated cost of just over $1800 dollars, but these assume that you are spending only $55 per year in food for a small dog and $235 per year on a large dog.

I know I have two Boston Terriers but due to their dietary needs, we have them on high omega 3 salmon dog food that is $50 a bag, which we go through about 1 bag per month for two dogs, so we are looking at over $600 just for food annually. Take the fact that my eldest dog who is over 8 years old, which is old for a Boston Terrier with a life expectancy of 10 years who has suffered a spinal stroke, urinary tract infection and pneumonia all in the last year which has cost over $500 in medical bills.

It is no suprise that if you factor your dog living for lets say 8 years on average, and estimate the $1,500 per year, you are looking at spending $12,000 caring for a small family dog over the average lifespan of the pet, with costs increasing as the dog gets older and more frail.

Many people do not consider this when choosing to adopt or purchase a pet for their family, and with economic times being as lean as they are you might decide now is not the time to financially afford a pet. By the way, even a cat as a $1000 per year estimate (which I think is too high, they are estimating you buy health insurance on cat which is $600 per year itself). A cat is more likely to cost about $400 per year if you don’t purchase health insurance, and a hamster or rat is estimated at $300 per year due to costs of litter, food and treats, no medical factored at all on hamsters in the calculator.

I believe pets are as essential to a family for so many reasons, but you must consider the financial aspect before adding a pet to your family or you could be stuck suffering financial hardship that you didn’t realize, or your pet may need an unplanned medical expense that you just will not be able to afford.

-Justin Germino

Sometimes I wish I could develop some custom software that can parse through all the social networking and article sites and submit my articles automatically. I mean it takes more time to promote your content than it actually does to write the content on your blogs, and when you run as many blogs as I do, it means you not only have to write 21 posts per week, but try to find time to promote the articles in the right social sites and networks.

You can’t submit poetry and personal blog posts on technology social networks, so I had to build a vast array of different social networks each to fit my own blog themes. I tried to simplify this by using Firefox folders, but it still takes far too long to submit content. That is one of the biggest things they don’t tell you about blogging when you first start out, that even though you can have good and constant content churning out, if you aren’t promoting and networking it is like having a concert in the middle of an abandoned desert.

In the meantime, back to writing more content and promoting, it seems like an endless cycle.

-Justin Germino

I have been eating some items from the Fresco Menu at Taco Bell for about two months now and figured I should do a blog post about it. Taco Bell has some of the healthiest options as far as fast food is concerned. If all you are watching are calories and fat, then you should check out the Fresco Grilled Steak Soft Taco which only has 160 calories nad 4.5 grams of fat. This is my favorite and I normally order 3 of them for dinner, I can gorge on 4 of them and still come in under 500 calories. The Fresco Grilled Steak Soft Taco tastes a little like pot roast in a flour tortilla, and the fresco tomato/cilantro/onion mixture they put on top actually tastes better to me than the sour cream and cheese normally found in taco’s.

If you want to pack more calories into a smaller package, you can get the Fresco Burrito Supreme Steak which has 8 grams of fat and 330 calories. If you haven’t tried the Fresco Menu at Taco bell, I do recommend it as many of the items taste at least equal to the regular menu. If you are trying to cut down on your white flour, or corn, you can get a Border Bowl which has less than 400 calories and cuts out the unnecesary carbs.

-Justin Germino