Justin Germino Ramblings

I will be digging more stuff out of the attic this evening for the Garage sale we will be having on Friday and Saturday morning. It is surprising and amazing just how much stuff one accumulates over the years.

We have only been in this house for almost 4 years and we probably had over a hundred items at the first garage sale two weeks ago and probably will have another seventy or so items at this second garage sale. Everything that doesn’t sell we donate to our local charity who comes and picks it up via truck. We have given probably four hundred items to St. Vincent de Paul over the past two years as a result.

-Justin Germino

Arizona Game and Fish have reported someone has been shooting and slaying Mexican Free-tail bats in an abandoned mine east of Apache Junction. The bats were shot and either killed or left crippled and dying on the ground at the Peralta Trailhead in the Superstition Mountains between April 1st and April 10th.

Over 90 bats have been killed in the shooting incidents and the department is looking for help in identifying the people responsible. Callers may be eligible to receive up to $2,500 for the tip leading to the arrest of the suspects responsible.

Some information on the Mexican Free-tailed bat from Wikipedia:

The Mexican Free-tailed bat is known as one of the most abundant mammals in the US but because they cluster together in huge roosts they are prone to human disturbance from habitat destruction or other environmental disruptions. The largest colony known is in San Antonio, Texas and has an estimated 20 million bats in a single colony.

-Justin Germino

One thing I have found while on this blogging journey I have undertaken seven months ago is that you quickly find out who are very friendly and outgoing people and who really think they are above the rest and don’t really socialize very well. I have found some really amazing bloggers and writers online who have been so helpful in sharing information and engaging in open communication seeing the benefit of teaching and learning from someone joining the party so to speak.

Then there have been some who consider themselves above giving advice or even communicating with someone who is still a little low on the totem pole. You find people like this every day in day to day life, you can tell by the unfriendly glares, the disgusted looks and general unpleasant vibe you get from being around such people.

I just have little tolerance as I get older for the snobby, stuck up and generally unpleasant and angry people who have lost the ability to show compassion and empathy for fellow human beings. They should spend all their time writing Colonix reviews as punishment for being so unsocial and unwilling to be friendly.

Moral of this little post is this, being friendly to others begets friendly responses back in most cases. You never know who you might connect with and you really should be respectful of anyone and everyone that crosses your path.

-Justin Germino

I cannot find the microphone part of my TurtleBeach Ear Force HPA headphones, I unplug the small microphone attachment periodically as sometimes it creates feedback when playing audio in winamp. I have scoured everywhere for it and just cannot find it, this was my best microphone and I just bought it as a replacement for the one my two year old dipped in iced tea back in January.

This little microphone attachment will set me back about $30 if I have to rebuy it, in the meantime I am hard pressed to create any more audio poetry or screen capture demonstrations with only my backup USB microphone which doesn’t have nearly as good recording quality.

It is amazing how when you have little kids stuff just disappears, DVD’s, CD’s, library books, kitchen silverware and gadgets make their way to limbo as a two year old finds and teleports these objects into a random dimension from which they are never to be recovered. It must be the same place that all the missing left socks in the world go to, some sort of black hole.

I will just have to save up some more blog money to buy a new one if I don’t find it by the end of the week.

-Justin Germino

We had a massive yard sale a few weeks ago and much of the leftovers were turned over to charity and whatever they wouldn’t accept we decided to haul to the city dump. There was a surprising amount of left over garbage that was unusable and in poor condition that had been collected by the family for over thirty years. Most of the stuff added to our yard sale came from my wife’s parents and had stuff that was from the fifties and sixties.

If it had not been for my father in law owning his own Nissan truck I would have had to pay for a truck rental to get all the stuff loaded and hauled to the city dump. Fortunately Casa Grande allows residents to dump up to a half ton of garbage for free at the city dump and I was able to get the stuff offloaded.

Meanwhile there is still enough decent items left over to hold one more yard sale and my wife will probably hold one this weekend coming up.

-Justin Germino

One advantage to being able to telecommute for your business is the ability to work from home when you have a bad cold or mild flu. If you are able to work but are sick enough that you would have taken a sick day, you can instead telecommute and know that you aren’t spreading germs around the office and infecting other people.

I would think more companies will leverage the telecommuting option where they can as reducing employee’s from getting sick can increase employee productivity and efficiency which in turns increases company revenue. Many companies still are slow to adopt or take advantage of telecommuting plans and policies and the more companies that jump on the bandwagon the more we will see this become prevalent and a key asset in searching for jobs.

I for one appreciate the telecommuting that is available to me and utilize it to be as productive and efficient as possible, I am not one to slouch and often work nine or ten hour business days to keep on top of my busy schedule. This allows me to work the extra time that I would normally be spending on the road driving, so I can basically use the same amount of time and get more hours of work put in by telecommuting.

Even while I am sick, though I have just a cold so it is not so bad to work, but at least I don’t have to drive into the office and worry about getting everyone else sick in the process.

-Justin Germino

Seriously when my kids take baths or showers together they hang over anything in the tub that they can get their hands on. The safety bars to help you stand become jungle jims and my two year old became obsessed with turning the faucet on and off over and over to make the shower run and stop.

This caused the hangle and rusty bolt holding it in place to snap and come apart, I jury rigged it for now but will probably have to spend some time looking for discount faucets to replace the broken handle.

I am not a plumber, and have rudimentary handy man skills so when I see this faucet it appears to require some plumbing work and caulking to get it replaced, I may give it a go, or I may take the easy route and hire somebody. For now lets see if my jury rig fix holds.

-Justin Germino

I had convinced my wife to use Ubuntu Hardy Heron for over a year but finally she had just had enough, Ubuntu lacked the printer drivers for inkjets, Internet Explorer, Active X, and many other programs that we just could not find equivalents of on Linux. So I spent eight hours yesterday and two hours this morning completely rebuilding her PC as a Windows Vista Home machine.

With 2GB of RAM (Toshiba Satellite can only read 2GB RAM max, and only has 2 bays for 1GB Sticks) the operating system is sufficient and not terribly slow. I miss being able to work openly on a Ubuntu Linux box now, and creating posts on my technology blog will be harder to do now that I don’t have Ubuntu to play around with.

I would dual boot my other machine, but with my 200GB hard drive crashed I only have 10GB of free space left and need to save up to buy a new hard drive.

Score 1 Microsoft and Linux 0 in my household.

-Justin Germino

Seriously, I drank like three diet cokes and three energy drinks yesterday and my stomach is actually expanded worse than normal from all the carbonation today. Why does anyone drink this crap, I almost never let my kids drink soda and I should follow my own advice.

Meanwhile I realize that putting on my size 34 short this morning were a little tighter than I like and it can’t all be from bloating, my eating habits have slipped considerably in the past few months mostly due to dining out to frequently and snacking before bed again.

Hopefully I won’t resort to looking for the best diet pills and I can get my eating habits under control, it is a much tougher battle than you think because I like Homer J. Simpson enjoy eating, the flavors and tastes of food combined with the fact that I never feel full and almost always feel hungry are a dangerous combination.

-Justin Germino<!–noadsense–>

All it takes is to come down with the common cold or flu to realize that even though modern medicine is further than ever before it is still light years away from being where it should be.

Such a simple tiny organism, the virus is and yet it is do pervasive in its ability to change and vary itself to avoid being targeted and eradicated.

I ponder these things and wonder when we will achieve a point in the future where there is no illness, no disease, no cancer, no HIV as human kind has unlocked the genetic secrets to prevent and cure all of this.

Maybe I just have a little too much Sci-Fi running through my brains.

-Justin Germino