Justin Germino Ramblings

My mother in law had won four tickets to the Wildlife World Zoo and Aquarium out in Litchfield Park so we have decided to make a family trip to the Zoo.  This is the first time we would be visiting the Wildlife World Zoo itself and it is about a two and a half hour drive from my house each way.  I am going to take my camera and camcorder along and see what pictures I can take, though I still don’t have my telephoto lens yet and am not able to really get close zoom shots of animals with my default lens of my Canon Digital Rebel XT.

My only qualm is that the temperature is over a hundred degrees now and it will be a little cumbersome to endure such a hike while baking under the sun.  Sometimes I wonder why I even live in one of the hottest places on the planet, I can’t stand temperatures over ninety degrees.

-Justin Germino

I had a deep dream the other night where I was standing at a cliff in some post apocalyptic version of the world with ruin and discourse behind me and a green pasture ahead. The problem was the cliff was too far away to jump to the grasslands and I had no hope of escaping the desolation without taking a chance and jumping. (Yes, I have very strange dreams in case you were wondering).

I don’t usually read into dreams but thought the dream itself was a good metaphor for taking risks and leaps to achieve rewards (it was almost a perfect metaphor for this actually). I thought how people who are afraid to start businesses, new adventures and explorations often will miss out on important and life changing experiences because they were afraid to take that first leap.

I myself am always conflicted with decisions, it is one of my weaknesses and a flaw in my character. I do believe this has to do with being a Libra, I am always evaluating both sides of every decision and weighing which one will provide the most positive outcome. This combined with my phobia of heights has caused me to pass up on a few adventures. We have a cruise coming up in August and my wife who is a die hard adventurer when it comes to excursions wants to do something with hang gliding or jumping off a cliff or something, and the thought just petrifies me. I told her I would go spelunking inside a partially submerged cave but I won’t do anything with heights.

Maybe I should face my fears and just leap.

-Justin Germino

My son had watched the Starcraft 2 trailer with me and is a big fan of real time strategy games so I thought I would purchase him a copy of the original Starcraft and Broodwars which would play fine on his older machine. He had been playing Warlords 2 & 3 and has played Glest and some other Real Time Strategy games. At six year old he plays far more complicated games than I was playing at ten years of age, and his reading and ability to figure out these type of unit and resource management games is very good for his age.

I do think RTS games teach him to manage resources, count, calculate and develop strategy and help in critical and analytical thinking. The fact that most RTS games have a fairy amount of reading in them also helps with his vocabulary and reading skills. So my son dove into Starcraft with abandon with me assisting whenever he ran into trouble and I got to fondly remember Jim Raynor, Tassadar and the other characters in the original Starcraft universe.

-Justin Germino

While at the Mandalay Bay Resort last week I walked into a Peter Lik art gallery and was amazed by the quality of his work. Some of the best landscape images I have ever seen were on display, with camera techniques that far exceeded anything I could even think of doing. The way he leveraged shutter speed to make water, lava and smoke seem to stream and blur while the rest of the image was sharp in focus was amazing. His images were so stunning they appeared as if they were digitally altered or created rather than true raw photography.

If you are into landscape photography at all and want to see the planet through his eyes then you should check out Peter Lik and his photo gallery and see some truly amazing photography.

-Justin Germino

I want to know who was your favorite pet?

Share in the comments the name of your pet, what type of pet/breed and why they were your favorite. Many of us have had a special animal in our lives that touched our hearts and we continue to think about every once and a while. Pets are like family members, we develop bonds and emotional attachments to them as they befriend us unconditionally. They may not have the intellect of people but they make up for it in simplicity, charisma and loyalty.

This was a hard question to ask myself, as one of my strongest attachments was to my family dog Sheba who was a black and white Border Collie / German Shepherd mix and I grew up with her. She was a great dog and on more than one occasion defended my brother and I when we were children from other dogs and strangers. She was incredibly intelligent and fiercely loyal to the family and she will always be remembered as my favorite pet from my childhood.

My favorite pet in my adult life was my gray tabby Tassadar who I no longer have, he was amazingly loving and loyal and one reason I bonded with him is because I wanted a gray tabby as a kid and wasn’t allowed to keep one when I brought a stray home one day. Tassadar unfortunately wasn’t so friendly to my wife and even less so to my kids, so I had no choice but to give him up after my kids were born. Some pets bond with a single person and just don’t like any others, this I find to be true more with cats than dogs from my own experience.

Now I have a great dog named Porky who is a big headed, loving, snorting, flat nosed and fish bowl eyed Boston Terrier. He is clumsy, snarling, and is the most fun and amusing animal. He loves the kids and adults unconditionally and plays and sits with anyone who will give him attention.

So how about you? Share your favorite pet and why, I want to hear your story.

-Justin Germino

I noticed that a few months ago I must have injured my left wrist, there is a pain in my wrist when I bend it slightly and this prevents me from doing push-ups or working out easily. Just supporting my own body weight on my wrist causes a sharp pain, and it now has been so many weeks that I don’t think it will heal on its own. I have a set of training gloves which help support the wrist, but I am not sure what the best approach is to heal my wrist as fast as possible.

I think I will try going my chiropractor to see if he can adjust my wrist, I had a finger that would lock up at the joint in my sleep a few years back and would just get stuck extended with no way to bend it back. I had one adjustment on my hand from my chiropractor and my finger lock up issue never happened again since that adjustment, I had the same thing with my back giving out when I was shoveling too many landscaping rocks, it wouldn’t heal on its own until I had a few adjustments to help my back recover.

Failing an adjustment on my wrist, I am not sure what can heal the weakness and pain when it is bent in any direction other than completely straight. It feels like it is either in the tendons or joint where the hand exactly meets the wrist, and I am concerned that my wrist will give out if it isn’t corrected.

-Justin Germino

My wife who has been a Suns fan for a while manage to pick up tickets to Game 4 tonight vs the Lakers in the playoffs. This will actually be my first time attending a live basketball game ever, so I am excited to join her as we go and root for our home team. We watched the Suns in the last the playoff games (my wife actually had money on games 1 and 2 and lost both times) and enjoyed watching them win game 4 and avoid what could have been a shut out.

Hopefully the Suns will win the game tonight against the Lakers and tie up before they go on the road where the battle will be more difficult.

Go PHOENIX SUNS!

-Dragon Blogger

This week starts the count for a project that I am running at work that leads up to a huge weekend deploy on June 11th weekend, I have limited time to coordinate projects with hundreds of customers and this may leave me with little time to keep my blogs updated at night like I normally do. Fortunately, I still plan to carve out time on weekends to write a weeks worth of blog posts, but I ran into a case of writers block on Sunday where I just sat and could not think of what to write. Fortunately, I stepped away and received some inspiration while doing other activities, sometimes you just need to walk away from something to get a clear head.

I am not generally a procrastinator and this is why I am able to maintain a very high level of workload and accomplish many things in a short time frame, I have met many people who put off something until the last minute and if something else or additional gets dropped on their lap, then they are quickly overwhelmed. My philosophy is do whatever you have as soon as you have the time to, don’t put something off if its due next week until the day before its due.

This has generally prevented me from ever hitting a “Hurry Up” wall where I am stuck having to complete something with little time to do it, though this project has me feeling the strain of so much to do with so little time.

-Justin Germino

I have noticed a faster uptrend in my social media following over the last few weeks and traffic spikes on all three of my blogs in the amount of 20% over the past month which is a huge gain considering I normally have a 2-5% traffic gain month after month. My Twitter followers reached 5000 for the first time a few days ago, and my two of my blogs have over 50+ FaceBook fans each already after only putting FaceBook fanpages together about 45 days ago.

In having so many social networks one thing I strive to do is not become just a content distributor where I only broadcast links or articles without any interaction and engagement with my fans and friends. I try to do my best to carve out some time during the early morning (pre-work), lunchtime and evening to socialize a bit and engage my followers and fans. My poetry game is my best and well known method of interaction as I am constantly calling for new words and taking user feedback, but I will also pose questions, answer other peoples questions and help retweet and read others promoted content as well.

The only downside to being on FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, SocialSpark, FourSquare….etc is that I can spend too much time on the social networks at the expense of time that I could be researching, writing and promoting blog content.

Despite having increased social networks “referral visits’ account for a very low number of visits to my sites overall, about 5% of my poetry blog and about 1% of my Technology blog visits come from social media networks. Yet, I know many bloggers who have 15-30% of their traffic come from their promotion and interaction on Social Networks so I continue to do my best to be active and expand my presence in such spheres.

What is your preferred Social Network, and how do you leverage it to keep your fans and friends interactive?

-Justin Germino

The trailer just has me quivering with excitement as the Star Craft 2 Wings of Liberty is set to release on July 27th 2010. I remember when I bought the first Starcraft and took an entire week PTO from work just to play the game. The innovation and style made StarCraft among the best real time strategy games of its day, this was when Blizzard and Westwood Studios were the heavy players in the RTS arena. Before Westwood was bought out by EA and division shut down in 2003 that is.

This is just a teaser trailer but the animation is top notch and really has that gritty feel (marines are very similar to Dawn of War 40K series it would appear).

I hope my aging PC is powerful enough to play StarCraft 2, I have an older video card and CPU from like 3 years ago, I probably won’t be able to play with all the bells and whistles enabled, but will be looking forward to it.

One of my favorite features of the original Starcraft game were the custom maps and editor, there were so many online customizations and variations on the game. People had created RPG like starcraft adventures, tweaked units to have different strengths and make bosses. Some of the creative maps, adventures and modules of the original starcraft are what kepts its longevity around for so long, I hope Starcraft 2 has that kind of flexibility.

I wonder if I am going to be able to keep up blogging when I dive into Starcraft 2, I only have so many hours in a week, and for me to make room for a game something has to give.

-Justin Germino