Justin Germino Ramblings

I am an IT Geek, but am also in the beginning stages of IT Management. When I associate with my fellow managers, and executives from other companies I am finding that I am “left out” more than I thought. Golf apparently isn’t just a recreational hobby, but its true when they joke about how all men play golf and business contacts are made on the golf course.

I feel like I have to learn how to play golf at least well enough just to network and socialize with my upper management peer’s and this is probably a skill I need to pick up on in the future. I don’t know the first thing about golf equipment and I mean that. The only golf I know is from Wii Golf and from what my coworker tells me about his golfing and stuff. I know a driver, wedge, putter…etc but those terms don’t mean much and I only loosely know when to use which instrument. I know hole in one, birdie, par, # over par…etc and what they mean and how the scoring is done and the course having holes that are a par #, and you have to try and equal or do better than that.

But I have never actually played a single game of golf, only miniature golf. I have never swung a driver, hit a ball, or anything. So it seems I should eventually start to learn and have my friend teach me.

Living in Arizona, I can’t imagine golf is fun in the summer with it being 115 degree’s outside, so the winter is coming up soon and it may be a good time to start to learn.

-Justin Germino

Like most parents who spoil their kids I buy my kids way too many toys in my opinion.  When they have so many action figures that one breaks they are like “Oh Well”, then you know they don’t care that much.  That being said one of the most memorable and best things I do for my children is not purchased.

My son loves drawing and artwork, and I am not a good artist.  I can draw childlike creations at best.  My son loves transformers and I started making him home made Transformer cards hand drawn and colored by me.  He collects these cards and they mean so much to him.  He asks me to draw him new ones often and I have drawn dozens of them over the last year and a half.

I often sit with my son and we will draw together, I love what he draws me as well.  Sometimes I just draw them in pencil and let him color them in.  This is something we do and love together and means more than any bought toy.

So more than just material items, spend time with your kids, do crafts with them, create and be artistic.  Draw on whiteboards, read them stories, create a little “hobby” that only you and your children do one day a week and make time for it.  This are the memories they take with them for life, barely any kid will remember his 46th Star Wars action figure when they are twenty one years old, but they will remember when their parent took time to draw them figures.

Here is an example of the Silly Transformer Cards I draw that my son loves so much:

-Justin Germino

I am someone who loves food and especially the types of food which are not very good for you, I adore cheeses of all varieties, blue cheese, goat cheese, feta, Jarlsberg and I love restaurants with cheese plates as desserts, and pair the cheese with things like pear slices, honey or sweet wine. I am also a lover of rich Italian food and any other hearty food.

My point to all of this is that I have mentioned before on my other blogs, I had gained much weight over the years of 1996 – 2006. I had gained 40+ pounds and was a heavy set 207 at my highest weight. I had decided to take back control of my weight after some stomach issues and acid reflux problems (turns out they were stress related, but still glad I lost weight).

I had always had a treadmill in my house and used it but not as often as I should have. It took a steady amount of food portion control (not dieting) and muscle building exercise. I seriously just bought an old fashioned bench and started doing weights, I also supplemented with 30 – 45 minutes of Wii Fit every day. I kid you not, if you are not in shape, Wii Fit will help give you a great jumpstart. Just do 20 push up and side planks, and 30 Jack Knifes and you will feel sore for 2 days until you get used to it.

Bottom line is reduce your portions, eat whatever you want, but be aware of the total calories. Reduce your carbohydrate intake but don’t go nuts, keep healthy fats (plant fats are healthy), and eat a little less over a longer period of time. A combination of these factors will help anyone.

I lost 50+ pounds in around 22 months, which is a very healthy weight loss. I am now between 156 and 159 pounds and I feel lighter, I am stronger thanks to the weight bench and I find myself eating whatever I want, but not as much in one sitting as I used to.

Good luck to everyone trying to lose weight, I know how hard it is. I was a compulsive eater and would gorge myself until I was full. I would eat emotionally when I was depressed too, would down a whole box of poptarts at night watching TV. So I know how difficult it is, and I still break down and eat cheese before bed, or pepperoni and cheese platters once and a while as a treat.

-Justin Germino

In playing with twitter I knew people were working around the default 140 character text limit for twitter. I saw many people using tinyurl version of their blog links and wanted to find out how to do it. Some quick investigation led me to the TinyURL firefox plug-in, where from the Tools menu, you can create a TinyURL from any copied link, or from the link of your current page.

This plugin works great and saves you from having to visit the Tinyurl.com website whenever you want to make a TinyURL.

Here is the link to the TinyURL Firefox Plugin

-Dragon Blogger

Many people and bloggers use the Twitter Social Networking service, I am just learning to use it and determine how it can be of value.  Obviously I have no followers, and not many friends just casual readers of my blog.  I have decided to setup some “Follow Me On Twitter” logo’s on both this site and my primary site Dragon Blogger.  I drew these logo’s from the Twitter homepage.

I will update twitter as often as I can based on how many people show interest in following my moves on twitter.  This is a little social networking experiment.  I do follow my friend “Damien Riley” on twitter and its nice to see that he gives twitter updates fairly frequently.

So how many of my blog friends use twitter, does it help with your blog promotion, or do you use it more for your closer friends?

-Justin Germino

• Update

Dani talks about when she started using twitter as a result of seeing her blog friends using it.

Kasumi has excellent information and twitter tools to help you maximize your usage of twitter.

Architect talks about having twitter but not leveraging it that much and focuses mostly on posting blogs.

I am trying to return drops like crazy, already did 300 drops for Dragon Blogger, trying to do at least 150 for each of my other 3 blogs, for a total of 750 drops today. Entrecard switches to the next 24 hours at 9pm PT, so I literally can do 300 drops at 8pm, and an hour later, I can do another 300 drops for the next day. To help improve the speed of my drops tonight, I actually have Firefox open and doing one blogs drops, and Google Chrome open doing another blogs drops. Each browser has like 30 tabs open at the same time, and I am dropping like a bat out of hell.

Unfortunately Firefox is much slower loading 30 web sites in tabs than Chrome, I can do 20 drops on Chrome for every 5 on Firefox. However, Chrome will lose the cookies and I could have 30 tabs open for Entrecard to say “Must Login” and I have to reload all 30 pages. Not sure why Chrome browser loses track of the cookies after a period of time, or if an error occurs. It is quite annoying.

I still like the speed of it and even with the crashes Google Chrome is faster at getting my browsing and drops done. That being said, whenever I have to leave a comment, I open Firefox and cut/paste the URL from Chrome to Firefox, this is so my CoComment plug-in can record my comments and track them. There are no such plug-ins for Google Chrome.

Have a good evening everyone.

-Justin Germino

I was browsing Aronils web site which I do daily, she runs a beautiful site and its so artistic and I like what she writes about. I saw she had a typing results page up on her latest post and decided to try my hand on the typing test. I usually rate between 91 and 100 WPM on normal typing tests, and this test is very accurate. I was able to knock out 95 words per minute with 0 errors, now, I do make errors but you can hit backspace and correct them before finishing the word and they count as not making a mistake. I would probably have been over 100WPM had I not backspaced to fix some errors before finishing the word.

This was a fun little test just wanted to share it with my readers, thanks Aronil for finding this and posting about it.
95 words
Speed test

Only a few more working hours left until the weekend, but this is a long week for the family as it is fall break for my eldest son.  I hope to pack in as much play time and family time as possible before going back to work on Monday.  Lots of house cleaning and yardwork to do, need to trim all my plants in the yard.

On another note, I dislike how it is still over 90 degree’s during the day and already approaching the middle of October.  I sure do miss having 70 degree weather in the fall that is one bad thing about being in the desert, there really is no spring/fall.  Summer abruptly shifts to Winter and vice versa.

Entrecard appears to be down all day today, not only can I not access the site, but the badges are broken on all my blog pages (no Drop) buttons display.  Is this happening for everyone?

-Justin Germino

I am one who relies on network speed for various online and multimedia functions in my house. I do run a wireless network but that is only used by one laptop. Most of my PC’s and laptops are connected to my router via CAT5e cables. One of the main reasons is speed, you can achieve 100/Full or 1000/Full speed on your home network if all of your NIC cards are the same. This allows you to transfer files between your home computers much faster than a wireless network.

I have a NAS (Network Attached Storage) Drive, that is 100MB full, and if I were were using wireless to tranfer data to and from my external drive my backups and file transfers would take twice as long. So if you have desktop computers I always recommend using ethernet cables for maximum transfer throughput. Wireless is only for portability of laptops, but you do suffer on transfer speeds.

Note: Most ISP’s even broadband rarely top 8mbps, so therefore wireless won’t really notice any speed performance impact when browsing the internet. You notice the loss when transfering large amount of media between computers and servers. I do Digital Video recording and a ten minute video can be 400mb or more, this would take much longer to transfer via wireless than with ethernet cable.

-Justin Germino

Saguaro Cacti, you know the classic western cactus that grows up to 50 feet tall and sprouts the arms that you see in classic western movies and roadrunner cartoons are in danger of theft. Saguaro’s are native only to the Sonoran Desert, which limits their native land to Arizona, California, Baja Mexico and Sonora. They take fifty years before they first flower and seventy years before growing their first limb.

Everyone wants a nice 6-7′ Saguaro in their front yard and people don’t want to pay full retail prices, so there is huge black market for thieves who go into the Sonoran Desert and steal Saguaro’s and sell then to nurseries or directly to consumers. A typical 4 – 7′ Saguaro can fetch $1,000 or more on the market which is quite substantial for a plant.

In an effort to reduce Saguaro theft the National Parks are implementing a microchip tracking device that is similar to the ID chips put in pet dogs and cats. This chip will be implanted about 1 inch deep in the cactus and can be read with a scanner from about a foot away. This allows officials to walk into nursery’s and scan over Saguaro’s to see if any are stolen property, and when policy or park officials stop trucks with Saguaro’s in the bed, they can quickly run the scanner’s to determine if the Saguaro’s are stolen.

I had no idea there was such a demand and market for these cacti, I mean sure they are everywhere, and sure they are really nice and scenic to look at. Microchip implants for cacti aren’t new in Arizona, there was a similar program implemented in The Lake Mead National Recreation Area which performed the same tracking for Barrel cacti to reduce poaching there as well.

Thought this was an interesting tidbit of information to share with my readers.

-Justin Germino