Justin Germino Ramblings

My son recently became enthralled with Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame from 1996, and I watched it again with him after not having seen it since it was first released thirteen years ago.  When I first saw the film I was still a teenager, and I didn’t remember how dark the undertones of the movie were.  From the subtle indications of torture, whipping, genocide the film is actually the darkest Disney film I have ever seen.  I couldn’t believe I didn’t realize how dark it was back then.

However the film to me is just simply superb, it feels like an opera (like Phantom) and really draws your emotions out.  Only serves to remind me that Disney has been making exceptional films for more than fifty years and if they can make this dark of an animated film, it shows that Marvel is in good hands with Disney and I am certain we can expect good things for Marvel films and cartoons in the future.

-Justin Germino

My wife and I were just unhappy with the public school in our area and have decided to pull our child and enroll him in Legacy Charter Schools instead in Casa Grande.  This charter school has an impressive dedication to academics and allowed us to tour the school, see each of the first grade teachers and talk with the principal for almost an hour.  We like that they have uniforms, and they have a much more efficient and safe parent drop off and pick up system.  But most importantly they believe in challenging children academically and set the bar higher than the bare minimum for a first grade curriculum.

In his current public school, the entire school had done away with homework for first graders which is appalling, at least he will have an expected homework regimen and be required to have read 30 books by the end of the year.  It is always scary making such big decisions for your children, and I hope we are making the right one as we just want our child to have the best education and school experience possible.  He is a very smart boy and was just not challenged in his former school and his teachers and the school itself had a “don’t care” attitude seeming to have no interest in whether students succeed or fail.

-Justin Germino

In New York City (no surprise there), a musicians flugelhorn was stolen along with his Bach Stradivarius trumpet when he fell asleep on the train with the instruments by his side.  The Flugelhorn was worth just over five thousand dollars and the trumpet another two thousand.  Musicians who often save up for years to collect their instruments need to take extreme care in making sure nothing happens to them, I sure hope the police find the instruments at a pawn shop and recover them.

While growing up in New York City myself, I was no stranger to subway dangers and have witnessed robberies, assaults and worse on train rides from Queens to the City many times.  Though I think NY has an outstanding metro system with the buses and trains, not enough is done to keep them safe (at least when I was living there 13 years ago).

-Justin Germino

BlogCatalog Site has a contest that one winner will win tickets to Blog World and New Media Expo 2009, the winner of this contest will also have their featured on BlogCatalog and you are given a million page impressions for free from Blog Catalog.  I am entering this contest because Las Vegas (where the contest is held) is only a half a day’s drive from here, and I would like the chance to go and network with other bloggers and be more active and recognized in person in the blogging community.  The page impressions don’t hurt either and only help to further spread your blog recognition online.

Wish me luck,

-Justin Germino

The Dutch National Museum in Amsterdam learned this week that the rock they had on display which was supposed to be a piece of the moon that was given to Prime Minister Willem Drees in 1969 and was acquired by the museum in 1988 is actually nothing but petrified wood. In the early 1970’s NASA had given moon rocks to more than a hundred countries so the claim was never disputed until it was on display in 2006 and a space expert informed the museum that it was most likely a fake.

The Dutch National Museum still intends to keep the Petrified Wood Moon Rock on display as a curiosity piece.

I was visiting a health and fitness blog (my Firefox crashed or I would post the link) and it had an article about how some people are afraid to workout and weight lift because they may get too built or look like what I call ‘Roided Mutants. The simple truth is that weight training is one of the best ways to lose weight and gain increased muscle mass at the same time.

You don’t have to take a mountain of Stimerex ES to lose weight if you can adjust your diet and exercise level by just a little bit at first and them a bit more at set milestones. Muscle burns calories faster and the more muscle you have the more calories your body burns while in “idle”.

When you work out you won’t get freakish looking bumps and muscles that look like tumors unless you are taking Steroids or other chemical enhancements for such. If you work out and lift weights while properly in-taking nothing but healthy proteins, carbohydrates and fats (healthy fats) you will see your body slim down and tone very quickly.

Even if you don’t have a bench or weights in your house you can leverage some existing home objects.

• A gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds and you can use these to curl, or raise as tricep extensions

• If you need lighter weight, use a think can of soup.

• Push ups are still among the best ways to strengthen your chest, shoulders and biceps and you should do them in as many sets as you can.

• Crunches work but are even more efficient if you jackknife which is where when you crunch your abdomen together you raise your legs at the same time. This works both your upper abdomen and lower abdomen muscles.

Get creative working out, you can find tips online to leverage leaning against a chair, wall and even your desk to improve your fitness level.

-Justin Germino

When Joanne Olivieri contacted me and offered for me to take over the poetry and creative writing typepad blog called “Ya’Sou Ezine” I was honored but had to decline as I am too busy managing a full time job and already have my hands in 11 blogs already. I had become a guest author and frequent contributor to Ya’Sou Ezine, and I was sorry to hear that the blog has been shut down. Like many people, bloggers are looking to earn income and make money to live. When you can’t bring in enough income or you need to find another source of income, your blogging which is mostly your hobby unless you are making enough income to live off of it will suffer and be put off.

I have known at least six bloggers who have retired their blogs in the past twelve months, most have jumped out of blogging to spend more time with the family while others jumped ship because they needed to find a more stable way to make a 2nd income and couldn’t spend any more time experimenting and waiting with no results from blogging.

Blogging is a very tough business, with more than 19 million blogs online this is one of the most competitive online markets right now and will only continue to get more competitive which will make it harder each year to grow. The earliest blogs from five or six years ago often already have a strong claim and thousands of indexed pages to keep them at the top, but even they are subject to being usurped if the do not continue to churn out fresh content on a regular basis.

Good luck bloggers, it is a jungle out there.

-Justin Germino

The second day of our Disney cruise we spent almost the entire day at Nassau in the Bahamas, but most of the day was spent at Atlantis on Paradise Island, which is a world class resort that boasts so many pools, lagoons and lavish suites that you can’t imagine the luxury. Atlantis is famous for the $25,000 per night penthouse made famous by Oprah and Michael Jordan who have stayed there.

Atlantis is also the home to one of the largest aquariums that is simply breath taking, as the aquarium is actually part of the hotel itself, and you can walk in an out of the hotel corridors and see the various fish and marine life swimming all around you. Take a look at this photo album that is almost exclusively all shots from Atlantis and the aquarium, truly one of the most majestic places I have ever visited.

-Justin Germino

With Starcraft 2 coming out soon, I wonder if I will need to start looking at new desktop computers. Mine still has an older Geforce 7800GT with 256MB of RAM, and I have 3GB of memory on my Dual Core Athlon X-64 cpu. I just am not sure if this is powerful enough for the peak gaming performance I seek when I start delving back into Starcraft.

I remember when Starcraft was released in 1995, I took a whole week of vacation from work to stay home and play the game every day until I beat the campaigns with Terran, Zerg and Protoss. I spent endless nights creating custom modules and playing in the dozens of creative mini games spawned from the campaign editor. I truly hope Starcraft 2 can live up to the greatest memories that I have of Starcraft and Brood Wars.

It was one of the best RTS games of its day, with original unbelievable story and along with Warcraft put Blizzard on the map to become the gaming giants they are today.

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty is one of the best RTS Games I have ever played and well worth the money, I encourage my visitors to read my review of Starcraft 2 to see more in depth analysis of the game.

Will StarCraft 2 Play On an Old PC?

The simple answer is yes, Blizzard designed the game to scale down to older machines with ancient video cards, cpu’s and lower amounts of memory.  I installed Starcraft II Wings of Liberty on my old Athlon Dual Core PC with GeForce 7800GT and it works fine at 1920×1440 resolution with medium detail. I installed on my sons Inspiron laptop and it works pretty well there too with 64 bit Windows 7 and 4gb of RAM but it uses shared video ram, not a dedicated video card and plays just fine.

You may have to reduce the shadows, and switch unit profile pics to 2d instead of 3d, but the game will play and it will be a great experience even on older PC systems.  Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty was worth every penny I paid for it, the single player campaign alone is full of rich content, cut sequences and works as a stand alone game if you never even perform a multiplayer match.

Order Starcraft II right now

Finally got around to getting some of my photo’s sorted, and decided I have enough photo’s and things to say to make my Disney Cruise expand the week. So I will do it in parts with each part covering a little more information.

First I would like to say that we took a red eye flight that left Phoenix at 10:05pm and stopped in Atlanta, GA then connected from Atlanta to Orlando, we didn’t arrive in Orlando until around 9am. This was an all night travel by air and was hard to do both children ages almost six and three. They were a little hard to get relaxed and did eventually fall asleep on the planes, but thank goodness for portable DVD players and small portable toys, they make life so much easier.

My initial experience compares the Disney cruise to the other cruises we have been on (parents only, no kids) and Disney has easily one of the fastest and most streamlined check in and boarding processes compared to Royal Caribbean and Carnival. Not that the other two cruise lines are bad, just that Disney is faster and easier and you can check in from the Airport so you don’t even have to wait in line when you arrive at the harbor. Your cruise world cards are printed at the airport and you merely arrive at the port and board the ship, no fuss at all.

The ship itself is gorgeous and decked out in Disney art and flare all over the vessel, the ship is massive in size and bigger than some of the other cruise vessels we were on. The food was very good and compared well to Carnival and Royal Caribbean. The kids were just amazed and we knew the trip was going to be great when the Disney crew welcomes you on deck wearing their giant fake Mickey hands and giving all the kids high fives.

The first evening we ate at The Animator’s Palette, which is famous for having black and white sketches all over the walls that light up throughout the dining. Unfortunately due to an overly tired toddler our dinner was cut short and we didn’t wind up even eating our entree’s, but taking them back to our hotel room. The wait staff was nice enough to hand deliver our entree trays from the restaurant to our Hotel room.

The next day we arrived at the first port in Nassau, Bahamas which is one of the smallest but most densely populated island in the Bahama’s. The location is beautiful, and the water is so crystal clear blue that it is very different from the ocean waters of Baja Mexico or the Pacific coast. The temperature was hot, but tolerable and we explored the island by bus prior to adventuring to Atlantis Hotel Aquarium which will be the topic for tomorrow’s post.

Here is a slideshow from the arrival day and the first part of arriving in Nassau in the Bahama’s:

-Justin Germino