Justin Germino Ramblings

Fluffykins is my son’s pet rabbit but I would swear that my wife loves the bunny even more than my son does.  The bunny has nearly grown by 50% in the last month and consumes copious amounts of vegetation.  The great news is we often had lettuce that would wilt or go to waste, but now that we have a bunny we don’t have to worry about rotting leafy greens anymore.

I was testing my Flip Video Camcorder and took a little video footage of Fluffykins and uploaded to YouTube:

[youtube width="550" height="339"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0pVx_Bvds[/youtube]

This bunny has some great personality and is able to withstand a four year and seven hear old man handling him, screaming at each other and he will still hop over and nuzzle his soft little twitching nose for affection and attention.

The bunny even licks like a cat at your hands and arms, but oddly only licks my wife and sometimes my son.  The bunny has never licked my hands but only nuzzles her nose against my hand.

Her nails are like little razor blades and though I try to use the pedipaws every week (the bunny detests it) they still grow fast and are sharp. 

-Justin Germino

This past week particularly I have felt time slipping away from me as I have been so busy between work, home life, blogging that every minute blurs into hours and though I get up at 6am, by the time I lay my head in bed at around 10:30 or 11pm I feel like the day flew by and I still have so much to do.

There were far too many house chores piling up so I have taken to doing some in the early morning hours or later hours to try and not have a mountain to do on the weekend.  Meanwhile today I am volunteering for half a day at my son’s school which finally allows us to meet the minimum 12 hours of volunteer time that Legacy Traditional School requires.  My son really appreciates it when I volunteer and mentions how excited he is to have me stand by him in the back of class or see him and I enjoy seeing him thrive.

He made it on the Principal’s pride again for having straight A’s in every subject which was a close call because at the previous progress report he had like 4 B’s.

Might take the family to see Hoodwinked Too also on Friday night, not that I particularly want to see the movie but its good to get out of the house and we do enjoy our theater time as a family (kind of like a family tradition to see movies at the theater on weekends).

I am however looking forward to taking the family to see Thor next weekend which looks fantastic and I hope is as good as Iron Man was.

Here is the preview for those who haven’t seen it yet:

[youtube width=”550″ height=”339″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOddp-nlNvQ[/youtube]

-Justin Germino

After seeing a fellow blogger promote one of my article links on Facebook and realizing it was to my feed on YouSayToo instead of my main blog I realized I needed to yank all my blog feeds importing into YouSayToo.com.  The AdSense revenue sharing was just crap at less than $2 per month and yet my full feeds were imported which both caused duplicate content online which is frowned upon by Google (Especially after the Panda update) and also it would allow people to read my articles on a site other than my own which defeats the purpose of having readers come to my site DragonBlogger.com.

If YouSayToo would force and import only partial feeds say the Title, Description and maybe first 50 words then I would have still allowed my feeds to be imported but as it stands right now it causes more harm than good to allow my feeds to be imported into YouSayToo and I have had it that way for around a year so far.

Overall YouSayToo account for a measly 8 visits in 30 days to my site, this makes the network negligible and not worth investing any more time in at this point.

If you are a blogger and have your RSS feeds importing into YouSayToo still then I suggest you pull them unless you see the network giving you hundreds of visits per month or at least $10 or more a month in AdSense sharing.  If you only have a partial RSS feed then maybe there is some value using the site, but currently it probably already took more visits away from DragonBlogger.com than the 8 it brought to my site in the last 30 days.

-Justin Germino

Today is Administrative Professionals day and this is a chance to take time to recognize and show support for the Administrative Professionals who are crucial to helping coordinate communications throughout businesses and so much more.  This is also known as "Secretaries Day" though that term isn’t used as often anymore it would seem.

From large corporations who rely on Admin assistants to facilitate day to day information dissemination to receptionists who handle the barrage of customer phone calls, inquiries and more I hope you all have a great day and are recognized for your hard work.

-Justin Germino

This is a compensated post written by me on behalf of Walgreens. All opinions are 100% mine.

So recently I received a pack of adhesive bandages from Walgreens Brand Health & Wellness Products to compare and use for the family.  As a parent of two boys under 10 years old I can tell you that we use around a half dozen band-aids per week in my house so an extra box will be put to good use quickly.

The Walgreens Brand Plastic Adhesive Bandages are comparable to name brand Band-Aids but save you money and this is especially true when you buy them in two or more at a time.  They work as you would expect and have a pretty strong adhesive on them.  I lost more than a few arm hairs trying to remove these babies while testing them on myself.

Note that Walgreens brand products have a 100% satisfaction guarantee and are virtual identical in every way to the name brand equivalent of products.  There is no reason not to use trusted Walgreens Brand Health & Wellness Products if you want to save some money and still make sure you get a quality product.

With every purchase of Walgreens Brand Health & Wellness Products there is a donation made to the Walgreens Way to Well Fund™ which helps provide free health tests, services and education to local communities.

With Healthcare costs rising and many uninsured many people are turning to over the counter medications that are prescription equivalent or can provide relief for their symptoms.  Walgreens pharmacists have been trusting and endorsing their Walgreens Brand Health & Wellness Products for years as being just as effective and safe as the name brand medication.

So next time you are shopping for anything over the counter at Walgreens, check and see if there is a Walgreen’s brand version of the product you want and save yourself some money.

-Justin Germino

Was interesting when I read the other day that the 563-foot Destroyer Vessel USS Arthur W. Radford was planning on being sunk 28 miles to the northeast the Ocean City Inlet.  This is not the first vessel to be converted into a man made reef but it is the largest in U.S. history that will be deliberately made into an artificial reef.

JENNIFER CORBETT/GANNETT

The ship was stripped of most of its infrastructure and had extra holes cut into the vessel to better attract the sea creatures that make up the ecosystem around a reef.  It is expected years after being sunk it will cause the sea life to thrive and eventually become a popular scuba diving attraction as well as serve to help foster the ocean ecology.

According to the Delaware Division of Fish and Wildlife’s website they have done studies that have shown placement of durable, stable reef materials can result in as much as a 400-fold increase in the amount of small sea life and fish inhabiting an area.

I think it’s pretty cool that they are turning old vessels no longer needed in service or fit for a museum into artificial reef’s, it is kind of like giving a home to the ocean community.

Original article was read from http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20110421/WCT01/104210302

Holiday’s are fun when you have kids and my wife and I spent the night helping the Easter bunny prepare a surprise for my two young boys ages 7 and 4.  The Easter bunny hid over 200 eggs between the inside, front yard and backyard but instead of having too much candy we decided to break up the contents of the plastic eggs.

Easter Egg Contents

• 40 eggs had 1 quarter in them

• 40 eggs had pennies/nickels in them.

• The remainder of the eggs had assorted jelly beans (3-4 per egg) and other candies.  No chocolate was put in any of the eggs as we do live in the Arizona desert and it would melt fairly fast even in the mornings over here.

The finding of the eggs is the most fun and my intention was for the kids not to find all the eggs on Easter and maybe find some days or weeks later as little surprises they forgot about.  This is one reason why we didn’t hide real boiled eggs even though my wife did the coloring egg tradition thing with the boys on Good Friday.

Overall we decided to have the in-laws over and do an Easter barbeque of Hamburgers with setting up and eating on our outdoor patio since it would be in the 80’s and not too hot.

Have a Happy Easter everyone and enjoy the holiday.

-Justin Germino

In an article over on Yahoo News about a six year old bringing a gun to an elementary school and hurting 3 other kids when the gun accidentally goes off I just had to rant on this topic.

There should be zero instances where a child should gain access to a family gun period.  All guns should be kept in a locked safe that only the parents have access to if you choose to be a family that keeps a gun in the home.

I am not against having a gun in the home, I believe it is a right to protect your home form invasion and especially if you live in more dangerous area’s it may be a good decision to keep a firearm in the home.

Hunters of course are still perfectly acceptable to have weapons, but all should have the responsibility to keep them locked up.  This wasn’t a teenager stealing the key or breaking into the gun safe, this was a six year old so most likely the gun was stored under the bed, closet or within easy reach for the child to get it.

At the very least there should never be bullets anywhere near where the gun is kept, and the gun should never be loaded.  For stupidity’s sake man the parents should be sentenced to prison as this is just as neglectful as leaving a toddler or infant in a bathtub full of water and then wondering how they slipped and drowned.

Accidents happen, but if you aren’t responsible enough to secure a gun then one shouldn’t be in a home where children reside or even visit.

Shotgun is Scary

Unrelated but I thought it relevant is that the best type of gun to protect your home with is a shotgun.  The reason a shotgun is best is that it has relatively short range, the buckshot cannot penetrate walls easily and there is little risk of a stray bullet entering a nearby home and killing or injuring another person by accident.  The intimidation factor of a shotgun can also deter any thief without even using it.  A shotgun is also far too small to conceal, so if I were to own a gun for home defense purposes only it would probably be a shotgun.

-Justin Germino

I really am pushing to win the Blog Engage Guest Blogging contest and not because I really need the prize money, but because I want to help promote all the sponsors and blogging community which are part of the ways to build points in the contest.

My guest article Blogging to Forge a Connection with Readers is one I am proud of and I want all my readers to visit and comment on the article to help me gain in the contest, but I also am giving back to the community by writing reviews of all the contest sponsor sites (most are bloggers) as well.  I haven’t been as active with networking with me blogging only part time and thought this would be a good way to get active and showcase other bloggers while trying to win the contest.

As mentioned on DragonBlogger.com if I win the $250 first prize I am going to give 50% of it away in a contest to my readers.  It is good to put blogging money back into promotions, giveaways and contests to help keep your audience and peers engaged.

So help me out with the Blog Engage Guest contest and comment on my article which provides some very good blogging tips that I recommend all bloggers should follow.

-Justin Germino

So when my seven year old decided he wanted to setup a lemonade stand and try to sell lemonade to make money I knew I was going to be in for some work.  My wife and I decided to support this entrepreneurial idea and my four year old got involved and was dead set on making some money for new toys.

The idea was to setup a lemonade stand on Friday night after work right near the mailboxes in the community figuring that we would get a lot of traffic as people went to check mail.  It worked out fairly well in that my kids were able to sell about 22 cups of lemonade at 50 cents a cup and netted $4.50 profit each after paying back the expenses of purchasing the cups, lemonade powder, and making the signs.

It was however hot and 94 degrees, so for those 3 hours we were roasting and almost willing to drink all of our profits to keep cool.  The ice kept melting faster than customers came in to purchase cups and in the end, it was a lot of work for us as the parents.

So my kids learned a lesson about setting up a small operation, and I learned that next time my kids want to setup a lemonade stand I will tell them I would rather pay them double just to do some extra house chores.

-Justin Germino