Justin Germino Ramblings

White Collar and Men of a Certain Age are back with new seasons this week which makes me a happy camper. Combine that with me picking up True Grit on DVD and I have my evenings set until Friday.

Going to be a busy weekend as I unload and unpack the boat and get it ready for a trip to the cabin where we are staying on Rainbow Lake.  One thing that concerns me however is the Wallow fire which is now the 2nd largest fire in Arizona and is only about 60 miles east of where I am supposed to be staying.

There still may be a risk the fire will spread west and my whole camping trip could be in jeopardy.  With 3 wild fires spreading through the state right now (that I know of) it is announced that all three fires were caused by man and not nature.  The fact that people still flick cigarettes out their car windows or leave untended campfire without making sure all the embers are extinguished is just simply irresponsible or negligent.

Millions of dollars in damages and resources spent combatting the fires, lives at risk and this speaks nothing of the ecological damage to the landscape and wildlife as a result of the fires.  People need to be more responsible when they go into the dry country up north, they need to be more accountable and aware of their actions.

-Justin Germino

One activity my wife and I really enjoy doing is having some Dim Sum at C-Fu Gourmet Chinese restaurant in Chandler, Arizona.  This is probably our favorite Dim Sum place in the valley and they have at least 40+ items to choose from and include everything from Shrimp Dumplings, BBQ Pork Buns to more exotic items like Shark Dumplings and much more.

I really enjoy opening up with a serving of Bok Choy with Oyster sauce then diving into some assorted dumplings, the noodles are great, the roasted pork slices are amazing and you can gorge yourself silly in a hurry if you don’t pace yourself.

Your eyes are always bigger than your stomach when you order Dim Sum at C-Fu Gourmet Buffet, which is located at Dobson and Warner in Chandler.

We had to spend hours shopping for a new wardrobe for myself and prior to the mall excursion we enjoyed some Dim Sum.  Of course this meant I had to try on clothes while stuffed like a sausage, but I didn’t mind so much.

-Justin Germino

So last week I purchased Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 from Steam the game service by Valve so that I could play with my son.  I wasn’t thrilled that I had to buy 2 copies of the game, 1 for his computer and one for my own just so we can play together but what happened next frustrated me even further.

The purchase and installation itself were flawless and Valve definitely makes it easy for you to instantly buy/download/install and play games from their library.  I don’t think the faults I encountered are specifically a result of the Steam service, but it is possible it is related to their installer somehow.

After installing Red Alert 3 it works fine in single player campaign, but the moment I try and set it to work with Multiplayer I start running into trouble.  I registered and created a new EA Profile for my game just as I had done with my son’s game.  Of course I used a different email/username….etc for my own profile since you can’t have 2 separate profiles under the same email account. 

No matter what happened next I was never able to connect to the game server with my new account.  The error "Disconnect Notification" followed by The EA account name or Online ID you entered is invalid would plague me forever from that point on.

I tried re-registering with 2 separate EA profiles and neither one worked, I Googled the issue and some said that passwords with special characters have issues so I changed passwords but that didn’t resolve it.   I finally opened a case with EA Support who told me it was wrong password at first, which I showed them my password change confirmation and that I could login to EA profile just fine online.

They then told me to uninstall my game from scratch and not only uninstall it, but send me instructions on how to manually wipe out all registry entries and folders/files for the game.  This is a very manual and ugly set of instructions to give to an average user, but I am no average computer user and so I followed the instructions (though I had to tailor them a little because I installed the game through STEAM and not from CD’s or DVD’s which the instructions must have assumed).

After game was wiped out I rebooted my computer and reinstalled my game, literally another hour spent waiting for another install.

I loaded it up only to encounter the exact same problem again, so here I paid $20 for a game for the sole purpose to play multiplayer with my son online and I have no ability to get it to connect online.

Generic error messages like The EA account name or Online ID you entered is invalid suck and companies should put error codes that they can use to identify more correctly what issues are whenever users encounter issues.

In the meantime, maybe there is something about the Windows 7 64bit system I am running, and when I get a new computer in August and try re-installing it the game will work then.

Again, the same Steam install of Red Alert 3 worked fine on my son’s computer two months ago and was able to get his account connected just fine via multiplayer.  When I used my son’s EA Profile, it signed in just fine but just gave an error about the license key not matching the one on the account, so I don’t know what went wrong with the new EA Profiles that were created.

-Justin Germino

Between my new iPad, BlueTooth headphones, USB Microphone, Camera, MagicJack, Printer, BlueTooth Mouse, Wireless Keyboard, iPod, Blackberry, and USB external hard drive I have left myself with 0 free USB ports on my home computer.

I was at Walmart and just saw a cheap and quick 4 Port Belkin USB 2.0 powered hub and picked it up.  It works well and was able to move 3 devices to the hub (it takes up 1 port in the PC) plus add a new one for the iPad 2.  The one problem is the iPad 2 cannot charge via USB from the computer, I tried on several computers and it seems to only be able to charge from being plugged into a wall outlet.  I don’t know if there isn’t enough power to the USB from the Power Supply, or if USB 3.0 is required to charge or what, but this means I can’t leave my iPad 2 plugged into my computer assuming it is charging like I do my iPod.

Meanwhile, I did find there don’t appear to be any USB 3.0 external hubs yet as only the latest motherboards are sporting them and I don’t know of any USB 3.0 devices at this time.  USB 3.0 is supposed to have 4.8GBPS transfer rates and real world analysis by PC World puts this should be around 1.2 Gigabyte moved between PC and USB 3.0 Flash Drive in 3.3 seconds compared with almost 40 seconds on a USB 2.0 drive.

This rate would make USB 3.0 drives much more desirable for doing backups of Terabyte drives instead of through a LAN which are still really slow to backup a huge hard drive to a NAS on 100MB lan and worse on a Wireless G network.  It can take more than a day to sync a large hard drive over a slow wireless network to a SAN drive.

Anyway, after looking at Amazon online, I realized there are far better USB 2.0 powered hubs with more ports that are cheaper, so I probably should have not been so hasty and just ordered one from Amazon.com.  I am not unhappy with the Belkin USB 2.0 4 Port Hub, it’s just that I probably could have gotten a 7 or 10 port hub for cheaper.

Even Walmart isn’t much of a deal compared to Amazon.com lately.

-Justin Germino

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I don’t go clothes shopping very often, but I have to actually pick up some outfits for our vacation to Rome where there is a different clothing style and dress code than the United States, this is especially true for Vatican City where you can’t wear shorts of any kind, even docker shorts.

I already have a more fashionable hat than a ballcap and will likely wear more polo and button shirts and far fewer T-shirts on my vacation this time around.

I still think clothing is expensive for men, but even more so for Women, the fact that you can spend over a hundred dollars on a single outfit is just nuts.  I maybe spend a hundred bucks a year on clothes for myself with the exception that I have to buy a new pair of sneakers every few months because they wear out fast.

Women, can spend hundreds of dollars on an outfit they wear once and then sits in the closet on a rack forever.  They should just have clothing rental stores everywhere so you can rent outfits and such for evenings out for those who don’t dress up often.

Then again, I should start dressing up more often, but if I dressed up just to walk into my home office and telecommute all day, who would I be dressing up for?  I am lucky if I wear anything other than a T-Shirt and shorts while working on my computer all day long.

-Justin Germino

My son clearly is a chip off the old block and instead of drawing a typical get well card showing a sick person or a doctor, he presents me with a fantasy style map showing human, elven and orc kingdoms.

I thought it was such a cool drawing I just had to share, not bad from a 7 year old LoTR fan.  He even said Arcundor to rhyme with Gondor 🙂

-Justin Germino

For the first time in almost three years I was able to break $200 in a single month of Google AdSense earnings.

Now these earnings are from about 5 different URL sources, but DragonBlogger.com accounts for about $178 of the earnings by itself for the month with my baby sites only making up the last $22 or so. 

Site traffic has been up about 20% steady for the past several months in a row, but I found that AdSense earnings outpaced the site traffic growth percentage wise.  I think this is due to so much of my site traffic being based on Organic Search which is the most likely traffic to click on a Google Ad as they may not have found what they were looking for on your site.

AdSense is probably the easiest form of passive income for me as I don’t really do anything besides let it collect and pay out.  I will say that my site is not optimized for AdSense clicks and the best CPC ratio’s.  I can’t show exact metrics without violating AdSense ToS but let’s say that my average CPC was under 50 cents and the number of clicks seems a bit low even for AdSense ads.

This is in part because my site is such a large portal that target ad placement/keywords used may not match the best paying keywords.  There are some bloggers who will research the best paying AdSense keywords and then write articles around those keywords/similarities and collect better performance and payout on their AdSense earnings.  I don’t do any of this, I really don’t have the time for that fine level of detail and research and would rather focus on writing articles that I want to write rather than focusing on keywords to optimize AdSense return on those articles. 

Still, I have run across several sites with 1/4th the traffic I have that earn more from AdSense monthly because of such optimizations so if you want to get serious about AdSense earnings it is something to consider.

One thing as a blogger and person who tries to make money online, do not put all your eggs in one basket.  I have heard of people being banned from AdSense with little warning and their income sources vanishes.  Diversify your online income sources to make sure if you lose a revenue stream you aren’t impacted too harshly and can find an alternative.

-Justin Germino

My wife was sharing pictures from years past with my son on the weekend and I couldn’t help but remember the time when I had more hair and looked so youthful.  However I did notice that I actually weigh less now at 33 years old than I did when I was 20 and am quite surprised that I let myself get so heavy 5+ years ago.

I was always someone who had little portion control and when eating I would consume as many plates in front of me as possible, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to tell you that when I first moved to Arizona and ordered at Jack in the Box I could eat 2 Jumbo Jacks, 2 Tacos and a large fries in one sitting.  Sure enough this food consumption did catch up with me but it was slow and subtle and took years to add on.

I did lose most of the weight almost three years ago when I had reached my heaviest at 207 pounds and was wearing a size 40 waist pants.  I did wind up losing about 50 pounds over the next 48 months and was a trim 158 pounds a year and half ago.

Then I started neglecting my portion control again and started eating more than I should, 6 weeks ago I was up to 185 so decided to add my membership to the LA Fitness here in Casa Grande, and I also started working out more at home and trying to keep my calories to no more than 2000 per day while adding more lean protein and less carbohydrates and fat.  Fat accounts for 8 calories per gram, so fatty content always has more calories than protein and grain based foods.

Photo back in 2005

Photo in February 2011

The good thing is by 5 weeks later, I weighed in at 174 pounds and probably only about 9 pounds away from reaching my target goal of 165.  I was a little too bony at 158 (what my wife says) and wanted to put on more lean muscle mass figuring 165 would be about right.

It requires constant effort to lose weight and make sure I don’t consume too much food, I enjoyed eating and live for eating.  I haven’t had pepperoni in about 5 weeks which is something I used to snack on at least 3x per week.  To further assist with my fitness goals and focus I started up Weight Loss Belts blog where I was putting The Flex Belt to a trial as I was sent one to review by the company.

The belt is actually really good at tightening ab muscles and combined with diet and exercise I really feel my stomach stronger just after 1 week of using it consistently and you can read my journal about it over there.

One thing I am intent on is trying to make sure my kids don’t develop and adopt bad eating habits and translate that into adult hood, it is important as parents to make sure we set examples for children and obesity is an epidemic in this country and contributes to much of the health care costs and expenses in this Nation.  I know from experience how hard it is to have willpower and force yourself to leave food on your plate when eating out at a restaurant instead of feeling compelled to eat everything on the plate and I still don’t make good choices, but I try to offset them by order a side of broccoli instead of fries if I order a burger.

-Justin Germino

After spending the last year being woken up at least 1 and sometimes 2 times a night to have to go let the dogs out in the back to use the restroom. We decided to get a doggy door and install it on the back patio sliding door.  I didn’t want something that would involve cutting a hole in my wall because it would be harder to undo later on.

It wasn’t too much trouble to setup, but we finally got it installed and Donut the oldest Boston Terrier figured out how to use it in 5 minutes.  Porky on the other hand was afraid to push the dog door open with his head and would only go through it if you held it open for him.  By the 2nd day he was able to follow Donut out if she already opened it ahead of him and before it closed and finally he was able to open it to go out but for some reason was afraid to push on it to come back in.  As it turns out by the end of the 2nd day he figured it out but now he goes outside so often just to bark at random noises, I think the doggy door only exacerbates his paranoia. 

Donut

Porky

We love Porky, but honestly sometimes I think of him as the Patrick Starfish of Boston Terriers.

-Justin Germino