Justin Germino Ramblings

So was gaming Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty in campaign mode almost every night for the past few weeks doing 2 campaign solo missions per night.  I work as many bonuses as I can and am playing the "Normal" mode.  I am not that good of an SC2 player that I can do hard mode at this time.  Each mission takes about an hour or so to complete so far.

The Dig is the last mission I completed and it has you investigate a Terran mining operation that went silent.  You are sent some marines who just go into the mission and encounter some Protoss early on.

You quickly find the base after being deployed two tanks who help you fight off some incoming Protoss armies.  When taking over the base you need to build turrets and deploy tanks really fast as you have Protoss armies attacking from two sides.

The coolest thing about The Mine mission is you get control of this high powered Laser Drill which can target enemy Protoss Zealots and Archons and wipe them out quite rapidly.  Using the shift key to select multiple targets so the Drill can automatically just fire one after the other without you having to micromanage it as much is a really nice feature.

Bottom Line:

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is fantastic and one of the best PC games I have played in years.  The single player story campaign is engaging, entertaining and keeps you hooked.  I haven’t been this addicted to a game since when Guild Wars released originally.

-Justin Germino

According to an article by the Associated Press and written by Sharon Theimer that I read from the Casa Grande Dispatch newspaper, short snouted dogs are less likely to survive being transported in airplanes than their long nosed brethren.

In a report of all dog deaths since May 2005 Bulldogs with 108 purebreeds reported nearly 1/4 (25 dogs) were English Bulldogs who died during transportation.  Pugs were second with 11 deaths and French bulldogs accounted for 6 deaths.

These result from heat increases in the cargo section of a plane combined with a dogs increased panting and breathing rate due to nervousness.  Short nosed breeds have a skull formation that restricts their airways and if they can’t pass enough air they can pass out or overhead as panting is the only way they can cool off.

Though short nosed pets are more at risk of being transported on flights the overall death rate of pets flying on a plane is very low overall compared to the number of pets that are transported.  Still this is little consolation to the owner of a beloved family member who may lose a pet being transported in a plane.

-Justin Germino

I want to highlight that one of my favorite blogging networks BlogEngage has now offered out 100% AdSense revenue sharing to bloggers who are active members of the community and meet certain criteria.  How many article submission sites exist that actually share the AdSense earnings of your submitted articles with you as it is?

BlogEngage had previously a 50% AdSense share rate, but they are bumping up to 100% for bloggers who want to go the extra step and help them promote.

Read the article How to Earn 100% AdSense Revenue on BlogEngage to determine how to configure your account to setup AdSense earnings on your submitted articles as well as how to earn your way to 100% earnings.

Every blogger who writes decent articles should be submitting them to BlogEngage, we are talking about a rapidly growing article submission site that also offers networking and the ability to guest blog.  You can find and meet some of the best up and coming bloggers in a variety of niches in the BlogEngage community.  Many of these I have been following for the past six months or longer.

BlogEngage already has an Alexa rank of just over 11k and who doesn’t want their article to be indexed on a site with that good of an Alexa rating.  This site is relatively new and within a year will probably garner 2x as much traffic as it gets now.

Using BlogEngage is simple, just sign up and register for the blogger network.  This is no simple sign up and spam articles to it submission site, you need to join the community.  Proudly display your blogengage badge or actively participate as guest blogger and request an invitation from the forums.  If the quality of your blog and content are approved then you will be sent a registration invitation.  

This careful selection and screening keeps the BlogEngage Community tight and everyone gets to know each other’s work pretty quickly.  You establish yourself by voting and commenting on other bloggers articles and don’t just expect to submit content and not be involved or you will be kicked out of the system.

I love to check out the "Upcoming Blogs" most often and I really like that when you submit an article it sends you to the upcoming posts where you can find the latest blog posts and vote them up.  Articles only get "published" when they reach 10 votes.

BlogEngage is one of my favorite online article submission sites that also servers as a blogging community.  Now go out and network with other great bloggers.

-Justin Germino

After nearly three weeks of working with a websites DNS provider, Hosting provider and contacting the web administrator I have finally noticed that all of my stolen content has been purged from the offending site. This has me relieved and I owe a huge thanks to Jonathan Bailey from PlagiarismToday for helping me find the hosting provider and providing templates of DMCA Copyright infringement notices that I was able to use to send to the offending sites hosting provider.

The easiest way for content providers to steal your content is not by cutting and pasting your article as you would think. What these content poaching websites do is read in your RSS feed with wordpress plugins and then spin your entire feed into a blog post on their site. There are only a few ways to try and plug this loophole up and those include the following:

Use Summary RSS Feeds instead of Full Post Feed

This is an effective way to ensure that nobody can read in your full feed and steal 100% of your article, the bad thing is this prevents your regular readers and fans from being able to read your full content from the convenience of their email or RSS reader. So it is a trade off and one that I heavily considered and would consider in the future if I run into this situation again.

Add Copyright Information To Your Feed

Okay, this one I did myself just recently. I downloaded and installed the RSS Footer plugin for WordPress by Joost De Valk which is a fantastic plugin which allows you to add custom text, links and information to the bottom of your RSS feed. It is so simple to install and configure and anyone who reads in your full feed will have the extra task of manually having to strip out your copyright information or else they would be blatantly displaying they are stealing your content on their site.

Summary

Those are pretty much the only two mechanisms I can see to try and thwart poachers, but ultimately if they want to steal/copy your content verbatim there is nothing that prevents them from cut/pasting the text right off your site. Though this will help deter and easily find anyone who feeds your RSS into their site, this is especially true if you put a backlink to your site in the RSS Footer where you will get a pingback potentially notifying you that another site is reading in your feed.

-Justin Germino

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty was released with all this hype and so much to live up to.  I bought it the morning it came out and took the day off of work to play it with my six year old son and have to say that the game was very well done but doesn’t revolutionize the real time strategy genre, nor does it take advantage of as much as it could have.

One of the biggest strengths about Starcraft II is that it looks and feels just like the original Starcraft, but this is also one of its biggest drawbacks.  Most RTS games have evolved to let you have multiple “worker” units assist in constructing a building to allow for faster building of structures, but this isn’t in Starcraft 2.  This is however a strategic decision of course, as Protoss and Zerg don’t build facilities but warp them in or mutate into them, so having Terrans be able to combine units to build structures would give too much of an advantage to the Terran race.

I really like the Addon of the Terran Barracks which allows you to build and release multiple soldiers at the same time, this allows you to create an army of soldiers with a few barracks very quickly.  The Zerg in Starcraft 2 are even more bountiful and numerous than the first game.  Toe for Toe unless you leverage bunkers and massive amounts of soldiers and healers (which are awesome and kept from Broodwars) you won’t stand a chance repelling the Zerg armies in Hard mode.  I also really enjoyed the interactive backgrounds such as on the Lava planet where every five minutes lava would rise up from the ground and incinerate any units that weren’t moved to safer high ground.  There is also missions based on time of day where you have to wipe out enemy during the day and defend your base from onslaught at night.

Installing the game takes a very long time, the game takes 12 Gigabytes of disk space but you get to watch an overview of the original Starcraft games and listen to some audio narration during the install.

The game itself is a mammoth graphics hog and my older GeForce 7800 GT with 512mb Video Ram was barely able to play the game at 1920×1200 resolution without lagging and staggering.  I could only muster medium graphics settings and detail but the artwork was simply wonderful to look at.  The way buildings explode with a shockwave, the artistic style of the units are all very nice.

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It is no suprise that Starcraft 2 has been the #1 selling video game on Amazon.com for a while in the pre-orders. This game has the weight of being the predecessor to one of the greatest real time strategy games of all time. Blizzard has only released a handful of games over the past several years and has mostly been focused with World of Warcraft that we shall see if they still have the creative power to reshape or at least hone the real time strategy game to where it feels fun, exciting and new again.

Here is some video footage of the game play of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty I found on YouTube:

I myself will be heading over to purchase a copy of the game today and have been flirting with even taking a PTO day or two this week to just sit back and revel like old times in a new awesome game. So be sure and pick up your copy of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty if you are a RTS fan or a Starcraft fan, this is your chance to finally see what they hype is all about.

I will be doing reviews with screenshots soon.

-Justin Germino

I hear people complain about how the cost of postage keeps rising even though I wonder how many people are really sending letters anymore these days.  I myself try to pay as many bills as possible online through either the companies website or through my BillPay.

Postage however is still required for some mail correspondence and I send about 10 mail items per month which require postage, this is about $4.10 cents per month or nearly $50 per year just to send postage. Imagine the people who spend two or three hundred dollars per year sending postage and this adds up.

I wonder why the United States Post Office hasn’t opened up postage to advertising which would say allow big advertisers to brand postage, or even stamp their company on postage for a fee and the post office in turn wouldn’t have to increase prices and may even be able to lower them for consumers. I think the main reason this may not be done is to devalue postage stamps, but I am not opposed to having advertisements placed on postage if it would reduce the cost.

I also think that regular postal delivery doesn’t necessarily have to happen on Saturday’s, but I realize this would affect peoples jobs and cause them to earn less so would cut costs at the expense of cutting peoples working hours and income. What other ways could you come up with to save money for the United States Post Office as well as decrease the cost of postage for consumers?

-Justin Germino

This is probably old news to many people who were following the world cup but earlier this week I read about Paul the Octopus who is a celebrity in Spain and lives in the Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany. Paul the Octopus successfully predicted all seven of Germany’s matches in the month long tournament and even predicted that Spain would beat Germany in the semi finals.

To make these predictions they would paint the Country’s flags on mussel shells and then the Octopus would pick the flag that appealed to him at the time. This of course is pure coincidence I think, but the Octopus has gotten so popular that Spain requested borrowing or purchasing Paul the Octopus so they could keep him in their home Country. Sea Life spokeswoman Kerstin Kuehn made it clear that Paul the Octopus wasn’t going anywhere and there has been a little rivalry ever since.

By the way, Paul the Octopus also successfully picked Spain would beat out the Netherlands in the finals.

-Justin Germino

The worlds oldest drinkable Champagne bottles were unearthed from a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea recently. 30 bottles of Champagne were recovered and awaiting final testing from France to confirm the authenticity. The bottles were dated back to the 1780’s and one of the bottles was opened by diving instructor Christian Ekstrom who thought they bottles were wine or other liquor. The taste of the more than two hundred year old Champagne was described as sweet with tobacco and oak flavors.

If authenticated each bottle could fetch as much as $65,000 dollars which would make the total case worth nearly 2 million dollars. The fact that the Champagne is so old and still potable makes this an amazing discovery and watch for eccentric billionaires to move swiftly to add one or two of these to their collection I bet. These bottles of Champagne were believed to be on transport to Russia and make them nearly 50 years older than the previous oldest bottles of Champagne found which were dated to the 1830’s.

-Justin Germino

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of ampm. All opinions are 100% mine.

Recently I have discovered some secret menu items at a variety of food places after being told about them by a coworker last month. I didn’t even realize that food companies were putting “easter eggs” that people had to be “in the know” or look for them online to figure out how to order special items that aren’t on the menu and have to be ordered with a code word.

So it was another surprise when I saw that ampm is offering a slew of “secret items’ on the secret menu tab of their Facebook page.

I was curious to know what hidden times you could order and right away the Towering Inferno looked like quite a formidable order, though the Tower of Torta would be a close 2nd. In my younger years I probably could have devoured either of those in a single sitting, now I would have to order it and share with a few people. I have always liked massive entrée items and saw them as a giant challenge much like the Man Vs Food TV Show.

ampm has unveiled 4 secret menu items already and they will be unveiling five more items on 7/26, 8/2, 8/9, 8/16 and 8/30. They will also have a “create your own secret item” tab which will be live on 8/2 and will let you create your own secret concotions right on Facebook.


I think having “secret menu items” is a clever way to generate buzz and interest and ampm has a nice little showcase of secret items that I will have to follow as they are unveiled and lets face it if you are going to order a secret menu item, you have to get a delicious Blizzard to go with it!