Justin Germino Ramblings

I have been a big fan and follower of Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel since the show first aired six seasons ago, there are few jobs in this world as brutal, devastating and with the number of injuries, deaths as the crab fishing jobs.  The fisherman on the boats have become like distant cousins that you watch every week and get to know through their personalities over the years.  Even though we all knew that Captain Phil Harris had died from complications due to a serious stroke several months ago, the show is airing the episodes from months ago and it feels like you are learning or witnessing the tragedy in real time all over again.

Some people have chided Discovery channel for showing such personal family footage and accused Discovery of taking advantage of the Harris family by showing Phil in the hospital and his kids at their breaking point about to lose their father.  Though I think I read that the family consented to having it aired and I think Discovery did a good job of showing the grim reality of these types of situations, these are every day people facing every day problems.  Jake and Josh are dealing with their father Phil Harris critically injured (who unfortunately passed away at 53 years of age in February 2010) and we see the real emotions that pour out in how the kids are trying to deal with it while making sure the boat and Phil’s legacy survive.

Meanwhile you see how visibly damaged the rest of the crab fleet become when learning of the news and you can tell that they are a brotherhood and care about each other no matter the disputes and differences.  Few moments in reality TV exude this much “realism” and emotional drama that is not forced or put on for the camera’s but is harsh and palpable.

I myself was very much emotionally touched and felt for the Harris boys and I have no idea how the next episodes deal with Phil’s impending death but I will be glued to Discovery every Tuesday watching with anticipation and a heavy heart.

Update:

Discovery did a great job I think covering the very sensitive passing of Captain Phil and because of the Deadliest Catch his legacy will be immortalized. Here is hoping to his sons Jake and Josh a speedy emotional recovery and Jake getting some much needed help.

-Justin Germino

Though Dan Harkins the owner of Harkins Theaters put more thought into leaving his dog Tenga in his car while he tended to inspecting one of his theaters his dog was still at risk.  He did however leave water and the windows rolled down, so I wouldn’t accuse the man of blatant neglect but more like not putting as much thought into the situation as he should have.  Even with the windows rolled down the heat beaming through the glass of cars can make temperatures soar to over 115 degrees inside a car as the metal retains heat and radiates it in all directions.

Passers-by did the right thing and called police to report that there could have been a dog in stress overheating in a car and Dan Harkins was cited not only for leaving the dog in the car, but he ignorantly parked in a handicapped spot when he clearly does not have a handicap nor handicap sticker on his car.  Dan Harkins is doing the right thing however and will be airing public service announcements at his theaters warning people not to leave pets in hot cars and this potential close call can help educate others.

Though we like to take our pets with us to more places than ever before we have to remember to never leave any pet locked in a car especially in the summer, in Arizona the temperatures often exceed 115 degrees on a hot day which can bring internal car temperatures to 140 degrees and can cause hyperthermia and death in a very short amount of time.  Last year a police office left his K-9 dog in a car for hours and the dog died of hyperthermia due to his neglect, and pets die every year because of the same repeated mistakes.  This misfortune doesn’t only affect pets, and is especially tragic when parents leave children in cars and its terribly sad that some little kids die every year from this.

Take care of your pets out there, and keep them safe.  Do not leave them in cars even with windows rolled down (you really shouldn’t leave dogs in truck beds either).

-Justin Germino

Nothing is more inconvenient than when telecommuting having an unstable broadband connection that drops repeatedly every fifteen minutes or so, this terminates your VPN connection and the problem amplifies when you use a VOIP service like MagicJack to conduct all of your conference calls. Without warning you instantly are met with silence and talk for about five minutes before you realize there is nobody listening on the receiving end.

Alas, I am hoping to have a more stable day with my broadband connection today as this is the first time in weeks that my connection has actually dropped more than a single time in one day. I know its the provider because the online light goes out on the cable modem and it just stopped receiving signal from the ISP or lost connectivity.

-Justin Germino

The list isn’t extensive but I did enjoy using Walmart Free Samples section on the company website to find out how to get either in-store or mail delivery product samples from a small variety of products in different categories. You can find samples of dog food, lotions, over the counter medications, and Starbucks Coffee at the times that I tried and applied for some free samples.

I think free samples in general are a great way for companies to let people try before they buy, and this is especially true for the food and cosmetics industries where there are so many choices and options, you have no incentive to switch from a brand/product you already use and trust and try something new. The Walmart Free Samples also provides you with free Music Samples which usually involve 1 free MP3 download from a featured artist or band on their website.

Walmart also offers free online tools like Fitness and Diet calculators, Food calorie calculators, Tire Selector and Allergy alert indicator tool. So far the product sample list was very small with only 5 sample products to get via mail at the time I was testing it, we can always use more lotion samples here in Arizona as skin becomes leathery very fast in the dry arid desert.

-Justin Germino

I had actually started playing Runes of Magic on and off for over a year but had let my account go idle while I was consumed with my day job and my blogging activities at night. Lately my six year old now that he has a new laptop has been gaming Runes of Magic and we started making a habit of spending 1/2 hour or an hour a few times a week at night to game together. I have him bring his laptop up into my office (wireless) and we just sit side by side and adventure together trying to complete quests and hunt down monsters.

For a free MMORPG (that is Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) for those not in the know, Runes of Magic is incredibly deep and possibly as much so as World of Warcraft. I used to be a Dungeon Master and have always looked forward to doing old fashioned pen and paper adventures with my kids, but I must admit the content and size of this game world saves me the time of having to create my own quests, write my own encounters, roll up characters and engaging in an MMORPG though it isn’t as deep and mentally creative as a true Role Playing Game pen and paper style, is certainly easier for people who only have a small block of time to play and even less time to create new content and story arcs.

The game allows you to play in little 30 minute segments, drop off and rejoin exactly where you left off. You can be one of two races (Human or Elf) but if you want to game with others you have to be the same race as Humans start off in a completely different part of the world than Elves. My son is limited in how much he can figure out due to only being seven and the game having so many advanced options that I myself as a thirty something adult can’t figure out how all of the various skills, equipment and uses of everything. He can however read and accept quests, attack monsters and use his preset skills. The rest I help him with by having him play side by side in the same room, when we get separated in game, I can just look on his map and my own and we can sync up with each other simply and easily.

I have done MMORPG games online for years and even had some GuildWars adventures with a few coworkers where we would hook up online and adventure a few times a month, but that filtered out as people get busy in their lives. This is the first week I have ever engaged in MMORPG games with my own son and I can tell you it is a unique and different bonding experience, unfortunately my three year old is still too young for such and I am busy dividing my time between Super Mario Bros on the Wii, Toys or Wrestling in between engaging in more advanced games and activities with my older son. I already taught him how to play Risk and Stratego board games.

This had me thinking though, what if family game nights which were traditionally done via people sitting around a dining table and a board game started becoming more like parents and kids all having laptops and computers in the same room and adventuring online together while talking in real time. It would be no less rewarding and would still be the family all being together in the same room and immersing themselves in an online universe of creativity. Seems like a great family game night to me.

-Justin Germino

So today one of my chores is to completely remove about 40 pounds of sand from our outdoor sandbox that was kind of built into our son’s wooden playset. My three year old loves playing in the sandbox, but my oldest son is allergic to sand which is just one of the reasons to remove the sandbox. But, the biggest reason is that neighborhood cats have been using the sandbox as their own personal kitty box and the risks associated with germs, parasites and “ick” factor now just make it to where I don’t want my kids anywhere near the box even if I raked/shoveled the cat turds out of it.

Whats worse is my dog whom I love but isn’t the brightest bulb in the batch would go out every morning and eat the cat turds as fast as he could, he has a bad habit of eating anything he can get his big white striped head on and I am surprised he isn’t sick yet.

So there are many reasons why you shouldn’t use or have an outdoor sandbox (outdoor and stray cats are the biggest reason). If you do, make sure you get one that has a cover/lid that you can put on top of it every time the kids are done playing with it.

I will be buying about 50 pounds of wood chips now to spread out and replace the play area including the former sandbox.

-Justin Germino

I had a lengthy nine hundred word article that I was churning out the other night and for some reason I thought it faster to just type the article in real time on my WordPress editor instead of typing it in a local document and then doing a quick copy/paste after the article was done. Well this probably would be fine for some people but I happened to have like 10 tabs open on my browser, and one of them just happened to crash my FireFox (isn’t hard lately) and even with the Autosave of my blog post happening, I lost about four hundred words of my article since I type so fast the autosave doesn’t catch up all the time.

This little set back now led to this post which is a reminder that unless you really trust your browser and aren’t multitasking, make sure you write all of your blog posts in Word, TextPad, NotePad or some other text editor and then copy them into WordPress when you are done so you don’t lose your work accidentally. Either that or make sure you hit save draft after every paragraph, this is just one lesson that gets me repeatedly (I feel like a hamster that keeps getting shocked trying to get the treat, this is not the first, second or third time this has happened to me).

-Justin Germino

My wife who also happens to be my best friend among so many other things is having another birthday and her age shall remain unknown as she and most women prefer. I picked her up a leather and crystal bracelet at Disneyland last week as an early birthday gift and today I took the day off to watch the kids while she hopefully spends it relaxing at a day spa. Will be going out to dinner to enjoy Teppanyaki & Sushi dinner at Kyoto’s in Scottsdale, followed by watching Toy Story 3 which she has been wanting to see since it came out last week.

My wife has had a history of having bad luck and negative events happen around her birthday and out of the past fourteen birthdays we have shared together only about half of them have been pleasant with some of them being quite negative. We tried to make a tradition of taking vacations around her birthday figuring what could go wrong when you spend your birthday on a cruise ship, but this year the timing and pricing of vacation packages were better in late August than in June.

Here is wishing my wife a joyous birthday and I look forward to celebrating many more with her.

-Justin Germino

So on Fathers day my wife and I stopped by an Arizona Boston Terrier Rescue (ABTR) event in Scottsdale where they are trying to find homes for Boston Terriers who were given up, homeless or were picked up and saved from pounds. The organization scans the various Humane Society and Pounds across Arizona and quickly adopt any that don’t find a home right away.

The rescue takes care and finds homes for animals deemed unadoptable by the pounds which include elderly dogs over 10 years of age, or injured dogs like some of the Boston Terriers they have up for adoption that only had one eye by having an injury at their previous residence or being found that way.

My wife had quickly become an avid supporter of the Arizona Boston Terrier Rescue and we submitted our application to adopt and potentially become a foster home for a dog needing adoption. The rescue does an inspection of your house before you get approved and we await our home inspection so we can get final approval to add a 2nd Boston Terrier to our home once again.

We chose to adopt instead of buying from a breeder to help an existing dog that needs a 2nd chance and we also wanted an older dog of at least 7 months to 4 years but would consider older as well if the right Boston “called to us”. Now we just wait for approval and then decide if we will adopt any of the current Boston Terriers who need a home, or we wait until one comes in that just feels right.

-Justin Germino

One thing I really enjoy in life is travel and experiencing other cultures, this is a common interest my wife and I both share and ironically we both come from backgrounds where our families rarely traveled outside our birth states or within a few neighboring states.   Neither of us had been out of the country until after we were married and took our first vacation to Mexico and we both have yet to visit Europe, South America, South Africa, Australia or some of the many other places we want to experience in our lifetime.

I think expanding your knowledge with other cultures is key to tolerance and growth and helps also to develop a person’s own spirit and personality.  We want our own children to experience cultures of other countries and places and this is one reason why we already have passports for our kids who are ages 6 and 3.  They have already been to Jamaica via the Disney Cruise and we plan on taking them to Europe when they are teenagers and including them with us in world travels when they are older.

Our oldest who is 6 and a half years old is very worldly and is into music, arts and a completely creative mind, though he spends too much time playing Age of Empires 2 and Starcraft right now and should spend more time practicing his drum lessons he loves to read and one of his favorite books is a kids version called “John, Paul, George and Ben” which is about the fathers of the United States (told in a very kid friendly way).  He also likes to read fantasy novels and loves all things with feudal or medieval times.  (like father, like son).

My youngest is a builder and engineer I think, at three and a half years old he is always building new robots, creations, armor and suits from TREO blocks, MEGA Blocks or other toys and his hero is Iron Man because of his suit and the technology.  Not a super hero with “mutant powers” but he idolizes robots and building things at his age.  As a  child I rarely lacked for anything and was given my own computer when I was very young (Commodore 64) and that is basically my passion now.

Though neither of my kids knows what they will be, how can anybody at that age, my goal is to give them as many experiences as possible as children and open as many doors for them as possible.  Only by trying and experiencing will they be able to find what they truly want to do and what they are passionate about.  You hear stories about how a master musician could learn music at age 4 and play piano as a master by age seven, many artists have a “calling” that is present in very early ages.  But for those who don’t have an obvious talent or path that you can easily see, it is best to immerse them in culture and experience and let them find their own path on who they want to be and what they want to do.

So I want my readers to share with me some of the cultural experiences or life experiences you have had as a kid that helped shape who you are or what you do.

-Justin Germino