Justin Germino Ramblings

Yes, I meant Rome instead of roam.  My vacation to Italy starts tomorrow and my kids grandma will be moving into our house to take care of them while my wife and I spend a much needed 12 day excursion to Rome, Italy.  Though we spend 2 days in Rome itself, we are actually enjoying a cruise that departs from Rome and travels to Sicily, Greece and Turkey before returning to Rome.

This will be the first time either of us have ever visited Europe and we are hoping the experience is magical.  I actually cannot believe my wife was able to fit all her outfits in two checked suitcases and a carry on.  I swear I thought I would have to conjure up a portable hole or a few bags of holding (D&D jokes for the RPG’rs) for this one.

Meanwhile, I will be taking lots of photo’s, some video and will hope to put together a few posts detailing our journey when we arrive home.

Note, normally I don’t condone declaring we are going out on vacation but for all would be burglars out there who may know where I live.  My house will not be empty, people are moving into it while I am gone.

Thank you,

-Justin Germino

This bird had been taunting me for weeks and has frequented our community for at least a few months.  There are a pair of roadrunners that I always see in the very early morning or evening hours running up and down the street but my camera was never handy.

My wife finally pointed out he was in our yard, and I grabbed my camera with telephoto lens.  As I opened the front door he started running and I was just able to snap off a few shots with 2 of the 4 being too blurry to post.

This bird is fast on foot, seriously fast and hard to shoot and track with a zoom lens.

He paused only briefly in the street as if to smirk at me after realizing I took his picture.

-Justin Germino

So my son was using my email account too often to sign up for free to play games online and I got sick of all the spam so set him up with his own custom email address hosted at one of my blog sites.  This private email is his personal "free game sign up" email that he can use only to sign up for games but he doesn’t do email communication at 7 yet.  So no thunderbird or means to check his email, if something requires activation or a click then I will open the email and follow through with any final activations.

Lately my son has been wanting to play Wizards 101 and the commercials spewed all over Cartoon Network and other cable channels I am sure absorbed many kids.  I didn’t like AdventureQuest so much but MonkeyQuest was fun and let him join that one.  Roboblocks is getting popular and he also plays that with his friend down the street.

Rather than buying console games I see most kids getting into Free to Play games because they simply don’t have money to purchase games and do have "TIME" to spend building up characters in games so they can kind of offset needing in game purchases to get big items quickly.

It does however mean that a kid like my own son who has a short attention span for games filled up his 240GB hard drive to where he has less than 1.6GB free from all his various free game and game demo downloads.  I mean some demo versions of games from STEAM are 4GB in size for a single game demo.

Meanwhile, both my boys already want iPad 2’s for Christmas and I am going to go broke with my kid’s gadget requests at some point.  Good thing kids can become online entrepreneurs at a young age because the moment my kid turns 10 I am welcoming him to the world of blogging and affiliate marketing so he can make his own money to buy his latest gadget wants.

-Justin Germino

Captain America coming out in a few weeks and this is the last Avengers movie about the single team members before the Avengers movie actually comes out in theaters.

I can’t believe Hugo Weaving (LoTR, Matrix) plays The Red Skull, this actor has his hands in so many franchises and I couldn’t recognize him at all behind the make-up.

Do you think Captain America will be as entertaining as Thor, Iron Man or the Incredible Hulk? 

How will it fare against Green Lantern which came out just a few weeks prior?

Here is the preview:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J3HfllvXWE[/youtube]

-Justin Germino

We used to have a really awesome pool table years ago that we sold when we thought we were moving to California.  This pool table had red felt top, was solid and we bought a top board to turn it into a ping pong table.  My kids were babies at the time but now that I have a seven year old and a four year old I know they would have enjoyed hitting the balls around.

There are so many great luxury pool tables to choose from when looking at pool table sites like Liberty Games which sells everything from refurbished pool tables, reconditioned pool tables to American style pool tables.

I even saw an all steel pool table which is something I had never seen before.

But with kids if I were to get another pool table I might consider the 6′ Strikeworth Multi Game Table, which though it is only 6′ has air hockey and table tennis to increase usability with my boys.

I really do miss my pool table and sometimes consider getting one for our front room again in the future.  I do recall my only problem is that other than my wife and I occasionally playing or me practicing by myself I didn’t have company over often enough to play it more than a few times per month.

Here was my old pool table by the way:

-Justin Germino

Earlier in the week I was a featured blogger of the week over at e-Junkie blog where they interviewed me and I shared my history and experience with blogging to the site’s readers.

I was very open and honest around my blogging mistakes and advice I gave to anyone thinking of starting a blog.  I also shared some of my best blogging memories and several of them were around adding staff members to my site and building a sense of community around dragonblogger.com.

Read my interview with e-Junkie and share your thoughts.

For those looking for a little more information about Dragon Blogger and various interviews with Justin Germino you can find all this on my Dragon Blogger Press page where I link to all site reviews and interviews I have done.  So far I have had 8 site reviews and given 7 interviews over the past 3 years.

-Justin Germino

Today’s is my wife’s birthday and to celebrate we are taking her out to Benihana’s for dinner and to see Cars 2 tonight which happens to open today.  The kids are excited and I know my wife is really most looking forward to the combined birthday/Anniversary vacation we have coming up which is our Rome, Italy vacation and cruise which is approaching rapidly.

I won’t dare disclose ages as I know women hate that, I will say however that my wife is as lovely and fair as the day we have met and though she complains about getting older I only see her as more beautiful than ever before.

She is probably going to kill me for posting a picture of her on my blog, but wish my wife a Happy Birthday along with me!

-Justin Germino

It was interesting watching doctor Oz last week where they showcased how certain types of cheeses, most notably Gouda, Jarlsberg, and other types of aged cheeses have quantities of vitamin K2 which can help reduce the risk of cancers and even of heart disease which is contrary to the normal information you hear about reducing dairy which tends to have fat, as a way to be more heart healthy.

I do believe that moderation is key to many food items, but there are exceptions of course.  Not to pick on Twinkies for this example but this is a type of food that one could probably do without and would benefit from not having even if it were only in moderation.  Alcohol for example is beneficial in moderation but cross the line and consume too much on a regular basis and it can lead to a world of health problems.

Selenium continues to show its value and Brazil nuts which are among the highest natural sources of selenium are among the healthiest types of nuts you can eat.  They also have a very hard shell and are a pain to crack so I buy them shelled when I can find them sold this way but it isn’t very often.

I did like one of the quotes used by Dr. Oz on the show and that was genetics are the loaded gun but environmental factors are the trigger for a wide variety of health issues.  Taking better accountability for what we put in our bodies and for making time to exercise and keep fit are imperative not only for longer life but for maintaining health through the older years.

-Justin Germino

I was reading SocialSpark’s blog post about the new Staff Pick and Premium selection process changing from a manual one to an automated one based on the amount of traffic your site receives.  Based on the information in the article it appeared that my DragonBlogger.com site should have qualified for becoming a "Staff Pick" based on my site getting over 40k unique visits consistently for several months. 

I sent an inquiry to SocialSpark team but unfortunately received a less than favorable reply:

Hi Dragonblogger,
While we truly appreciate your enthusiasm for the program your blog is not quite at staff pick level yet. When we choose our staff picks we base our decision on traffic numbers, reader engagement and past performance (if applicable). Keep up with your blogging and remain active with your readers and you’ll be on your way to staff pick designation.

Thank you,

So looks like I will have to wait a while to see when my site will be included as a Staff Pick, honestly SocialSpark is my favorite paid blogging program online and I have been using them since September 2008.  I have made thousands from SocialSpark over the past two and a half years and have enjoyed doing each and every product review I have chosen.  I never picked a review I didn’t WANT to do and the flexibility and professionalism of the whole system is the best I have worked with.

I am looking forward to becoming a large enough ‘entity’ that I can eventually get Staff Pick or Premium status someday on the SocialSpark system.  My site is very close to the same Alexa rank as Chris.Pirillo.com which is a technology blogging site I admire and a person who I am attempting to reach a success level of in my profiles.  I chose Chris Pirillo as an example due to his technology niche, though Chris Brogan would be a great example as a social media expert.  It is my intention for my identity Dragon Blogger to become every bit as popular as these media icons.  I specifically point those two out as I remember seeing them both use SocialSpark previously and doing reviews for the system in the past.

If you haven’t signed up for SocialSpark yet, the are a fantastic way to incorporate product reviews into your blog for decent compensation and are the most professional way to do reviews without having to contact individual companies directly or wait for them to contact you.  They have a high number of advertisers and I never see lousy or poor quality offers like you can with other services (which I won’t specifically point out).  Example is I have never ever seen a gambling, e-Cigarette, legal…etc opp come my way and this is probably because my site tags aren’t in those categories.

-Justin Germino

I was surprised and overjoyed that I was the 2nd place guest blogging contest winner for the BlogEngage May 2011 Guest Blogging contest.  This came with a cool $150 cash winnings and much of that will be recycled for an upcoming contest I will be doing on DragonBlogger.com in August. 

BlogEngage also is providing even more value as of late since I signed up for Business Membership for the RSS Syndication Service, this makes me a Business Level sponsor in all upcoming contests which has already netted me 2 site reviews from the June contest.  The attention, publicity and backlinks alone are a good value and I am looking forward to seeing how many sites showcase DragonBlogger.com as a result of being a top level sponsor and membership plan in the BlogEngage RSS Syndication service which does all of this plus automatically submits my articles to 6 directories for backlinks, exposure and such.

BlogEngage rocks and I will be entering future contests I just needed to space out a bit since I will be taking a quite a bit of vacation time in June/July and didn’t want to enter any more guest blogging contests until I had enough time to devote to article promotion and such.

-Justin Germino