Justin Germino Ramblings

Yep, we are pretty much a family of gamers here in my household.  My eldest son is a total PC gamer as am I, but my youngest prefers the Wii or Xbox 360 consoles primarily because at 5 years old he can use the controllers better than a keyboard/mouse combo and most console games don’t require as much reading at the moment.

When we do PC game the three of us, which is rare until I get my 5 year old his own laptop we have done Wizards 101 which all three of us like to play.  Runes of Magic would probably be the next triple family member game we do together when my youngest is a little older.

Pretty much when you have 3 gamers in the same house free to play MMO’s are the best bet,  you can’t afford to buy 3 copies of a $50 dollar game just so everyone in your household can play anymore.  It isn’t like the old times when you could buy 1 copy of a game and play on “Multiplayer LAN mode” where you can install it on multiple machines and all just connect via local network and play on a single copy.

Almost all games have DRM now and require connecting to a live server online and each copy is specifically registered.  What’s worse is separate licenses are the same price as a full copy of the game.  Ouch!

As a result Free To Play reigns supreme in my house and when it comes to multiplayer gaming with my kids.  Who can justify spending $150 on 3 copies of the same game in the same household?

Wizards 101 is a great Free to play game for adults and kids!

Some of the free to play games tested recently which are fun and worth spending time with:

Wizards 101 (RPG / Strategy)

World of Warcraft (Free for 1st 20 levels)  (RPG)

Lord of the Rings Online (RPG)

City of Heroes  (Now completely free!)  (RPG)

Runes of Magic (RPG)

World of Tanks (Tank Sim / Shooter)

Age of Empires Online (Strategy)

Allegiance  (Strategy)

League of Legends (Multi Player Battle Arena)

-Justin Germino

I play more console games with my 5 year old than my 8 year old who prefers PC gaming to console gaming.  When I got [easyazon-link asin=”B004BD1DWG”]Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters[/easyazon-link] for the Xb0x 360 I didn’t know what to expect and was pleasantly surprised to find that this is a solid game worthy for not only fans of the Green Lantern series, but anyone who enjoy’s a good super hero romp.

[easyazon-image-link asin=”B004BD1DWG” alt=”Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51HBJzEkHeL.jpg” align=”center” width=”358″ height=”500″]

What makes the game so much fun is the special abilities and constructs that you acquire and unlock after earning levels and points.  Some of the constructs are just massively fun and my 5 year old loved turning into a giant Iron Man like suit construct and just smashing through enemy manhunters.  The game doesn’t follow the movie at all, so it is an all new adventure and experience and playing Co-Op is the best.  I let my 5 year old lead as Hal Jordon while as player 2 I settled in playing Sinestro and helping him pick off varying Manhunter villains.

The voice over work is good, the story is clever and the action is non-stop.  Every time you upgrade a power it has a unique look that makes it look cooler, and my son and I had quite different powered heroes by the end and wound up favoring different constructs.  Though the Armor Suit was a favorite of mine as well.

The game was a little short and beaten in about 20 hours of play time, but you can replay on a harder mode.  Since I was playing with a 5 year old, I found any mode but easy was too difficult for him for now.  We did make it through the game on easy mode and he had no trouble figuring out how to assign constructs, upgrade and learn combo moves.

Bottom line, if you are looking for a superhero game that is fun and you can just play with your kids or even by yourself then [easyazon-link asin=”B004BD1DWG”]Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters[/easyazon-link] is a good choice.

-Justin Germino

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This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of LG DoublePlay™ for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Only at T-Mobile you can get the LG DoublePlay™ which is an impressive dual touchscreen with a full Qwerty keyboard that slides out.  The LG DoublePlay is the utimate social media smartphone and allows you to crank out communications via any social network or through Cloud Text or Group Text.

I generally send out about 200 texts per month, but I do thousands of tweets, Facebook or Google+ updates from my mobile devices so having a full keyboard is essential for me to communicate quickly and efficiently.  

The LG Doubleplay runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread and features up to 7 home screens and 9 shortcut buttons to provide access to anything you need to use quickly.  The LG Doubleplay has a main screen that is 3.5″ with the sub-screen being 2″ and both operate independently.

CNET lists the following positive information about the LG Doubleplay:

“The LG Doubleplay has a vibrant and sharp display, a 1GHz Qualcomm Scorpion processor, Android 2.3 Gingerbread, DLNA support, Wi-Fi calling, mobile hot-spot support, full Webkit browser with Adobe Flash, support for T-Mobile’s 4G/HSPA+ network, a 5-megapixel camera with 720p HD video capture, and great call quality.”

How often do you perform social media communications on your smartphone?  Have you looked at the LG Doubleplay yet to see what it can do for you?

Note, the design can be described as taking some getting used to but once you adapt to the split keyboard and dual screen you may find the unique configuration appealing.  This phone is for the adventurous willing to improve efficiency at communication and wanting something different than a typical cookie cutter smartphone.

-Justin Germino

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Norton Small Business by Symantec for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

With 6 out of 10 small business owners reporting having company PC’s infected by malware in the past 3 years it is a no wonder why antivirus and anti-malware software is essential for every single PC period.  For those small business owners who have reported infected computers over half of them had to pay to have an expert remove and clean up the PC and this was far more expensive than simply making sure they had an enterprise level anti-virus program running such as Norton Small Business by Symantec.

The Norton Internet Security 2012 launched this past September and provides some of the best spyware and malware removal rates in the industry.  CNET gives Norton Internet Security 2012 a 5 star rating and says “Low-impact performance, strong security, and useful features are the hallmarks of Norton Internet Security 2012, one of the best security suites available.”

You can get get 30% off Norton Small Business Products now and make sure you get all of the protection you need for the computers running in your small business.

But, Norton Small Business isn’t just for business, families can leverage the product to protect multiple computers in the same household.  Norton 360 checks where files came from and also protects all Internet activity from email, chat and web surfing.

At only $9 more than Norton Internet Security 2012, there is no reason not to go for the Norton 360 and get complete protection and additional peace of mind knowing that your PC’s are getting top notch security to help reduce the risk of identity theft, malware and Trojan infections as well as viruses.

Have you tried Norton 360 yet, which software do you use to protect your PC?

-Justin Germino

Last weekend we finally put up the last of the Christmas Lights and did the ceremonial lighting on Sunday night.  Of course we cut back this year and only did about 1/2 as many lights at 6,000 as I had done the previous years.  We had a lot of damage to the lights and weren’t spending as much time in AZ so didn’t want to have so many lights up to be lit only 20 or so days.

Still, they came out pretty well and you wouldn’t really notice that there are 1/2 as many lights which is the amazing part.

Happy decorating!

-Justin Germino

Several video entries for the Kindle Fire Giveaway were quite entertaining and the contestants did a good job talking about the Fire and ways to enter the contest.

[youtube width=”550″ height=”343″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hfnx3A9kgU&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

[youtube width=”550″ height=”343″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktL88dOiXEw[/youtube]

[youtube width=”550″ height=”343″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eLMy6nKkgA[/youtube]

This video was worth 10 entries into the Kindle Fire Giveaway contest and I can tell Brad is hoping to win one for himself this year for Christmas.

Meanwhile, over 1400+ Entries have been recorded so far in the contest and there are still 8 days left to enter.  So join now and enter if you want to see if you can win 1 of 2 Kindle Fire tablets being given away on December 15th to lucky fans of DragonBlogger.com

-Justin Germino

Bloggers all have different goals and measurements of success, but what do you do if you don’t reach your goals or your blog isn’t what you consider a success?  Say your blog doesn’t get the traffic you want to consider it successful, or you aren’t making enough income as much as you need from your site to consider it a worthy investment.

Prioritization is in order and in some cases just simply fine tuning your goals and what you expect.

Hosting and Your Own Domain

There are quite a few limitations if you are using a free blog hosting service like Blogger, WordPress.com, Tumblr to host your blog.  You are limited in the amount of monetization options available to you and you are even further limited if you are not using a dedicated domain but you are still using a subdomain like “yourblog.wordpress.com” which most advertisers won’t even consider.

You should take some time and look for the best hosting you can find for the money and make sure you purchase a domain name to go along with it.  I recently learned there is value in purchasing a domain name several years up front and it can provide SEO benefit. So if you can afford to buy a domain for 3 years or more ahead of time, I would do it.

This sets you up for both increasing your traffic and income potential but you must start with your own domain name and a hosting provider is also recommended due to the flexibility in what you can implement as far as plugins, monetization methods…etc.

Also, another way to make some extra money may be to consider reseller hosting where you purchase a hosting plan and you can sell out domains to customers on the same plan you already own.  This can be a way to augment site income by offering out hosting packages on your account and I have seen many bloggers give away hosting plans or sell them as packages that they offer in their blogs.

Content Targeting

Find out what is doing well on your site and tailor or structure your content to align with what is resonating well with search engines and readers.  If you originally wanted to be a broad personal blog but find a few specific niche articles are taking all the traffic you may want to focus and specialize your blog a little bit.  Pick a few key categories and focus on improving and adding new articles in those specific categories.  This is where leveraging Google Analytics, Alexa, and other tools come in.  I add focused content to my sites all the time to help bring in specific target audiences.

Social Media Promotions

It is nearly impossible to run a blog without backing it up with several social media profiles which all need their own time and investment to grow and expand.  Gone are the days where a blog doesn’t need a Twitter, Facebook and Google+ presence.  You need to be social and you need to have people get to know your site and writing persona.  Be active, answer questions, be helpful and most of all promote others as often as you promote yourself.  This will help build relationships and show you aren’t all about the “sell”.  Use Twitter Search, Twellow and other tools to find bloggers and companies in your niche and engage with them.  Leverage Facebook fanpages and join other pages and groups related to what you write about as well.  My motto is Be Active, Be Friendly and Be Professional in all social media communications.

Adjust Your Priorities

Sometimes we set goals way higher than we can reasonably reach and when we fail to meet those goals we become demoralized.  Instead research your goals to see if they are reasonable and if you feel they appear to be out of reach for the time frame you are looking for, break them up into smaller subsets.  If you were attempting to reach 100,000 pageviews per month in 6 months for example, instead focus on reaching your first 5 or 10,000 pageviews per month and make sure you can keep it up for a few months in a row.

If you are looking to make 1,000 per month from blogging related activities break it into smaller amounts and decide which plans and methods of earning you will investigate.  Try PPC ads 1 month and affiliate advertising the next, tweak AdSense locations, banners and such to try and improve performance.  Consider possibly a new theme or design for your site if it isn’t grabbing the attention or as functional as you need it to be.

Never Give Up

Like most jobs blogging is a learn as you go hobby and it isn’t just “writing articles”, in fact writing articles is the least amount of work a blogger actually does when it comes to trying to bring in traffic, promote, monetize and establish relationships with readers.  Keep approaching your goals with optimism and refine where you need to.  Sometimes you have to completely alter what you write about or how you approach things to reach success, sometimes all it takes is one breakthrough article to get a surge in traffic too.

One thing I know from the three years of blogging is that you have more options available to you if you have a blog on a web hosting provider that is not free.  There are too many limitations, even with WordPress.com offering their own AdSense like PPC ads I would take the time and invest a little bit into your own dedicated web hosting account and domain name if you are using a free blog right now.

-Justin Germino

As I got the Kindle Fire devices as Christmas presents for my kids this year, we decided to get cases to help distinguish which kid has which Fire.  (Besides the fact that each boy has their own name on the Fire home screen.)

My oldest son’s favorite color is red while my youngest prefers green to all other colors.  I found a nice set of matching Kindle Fire cases which also come with stands that meet those color requirements.

[easyazon-image-link asin=”B005TN0MMO” alt=”CaseCrown Bold Standby Case (Green) for Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Dg2USwfcL.jpg” align=”center” width=”500″ height=”500″]

[easyazon-image-link asin=”B005TN0NIW” alt=”CaseCrown Bold Standby Case (Red) for Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51qJVwzd1oL.jpg” align=”center” width=”500″ height=”500″]

The cases above were ordered but didn’t qualify for my Amazon Prime so I hope that they arrive before the holidays however.  Still at $15 per case it is a great deal and they do stand out!

While looking at cases for the Kindle Fire, I did find an awesome dragon skin for the Kindle Fire and this would be perfect as a DragonBlogger.com Kindle Fire skin.  What do you think?

[easyazon-image-link asin=”B005Z45CX6″ alt=”Decalgirl Kindle Fire Skin – Dragon Legend” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/611bGojg15L.jpg” align=”center” width=”500″ height=”500″]

-Justin Germino

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One thing I like about Klout is the ability to give you quick metrics of your social media activity at a glance.  It does compile a great amount of information that you can use just to see how your social media communications are propagating across various networks.

The quick 90 day activity report from Klout shows me a summary which I can use to see where my social media strengths are.

This shows the power of Google+ compared to Twitter considering I have just less than 2,000 followers on Google+ yet I have 1.1k comments, 380 reshares and 987 +1s, with about 1/5th the network size of my Twitter network.

This tells me that my followers are engaged more and more interactive on Google+ in some ways.  It should be interesting to see when Facebook statistics are added how they measure up.

Klout Score Jump

I had a temporary huge boost in Klout Score from my Kindle Fire Giveaway contest which caused a huge amount of retweets over the past few days, this jumped my Klout score more than 5 points in about 2 days and is an anomaly and will fade when the contest ends.  I am curious to know how high my Klout will get just as a result of the insane amount of retweets I have been getting from the contest however.

Overall I use Klout fairly regularly as a means to check the pulse on my Social Media, and there is certainly value in the analytics that you get at your fingertips.

-Justin Germino

Last weekend we spend time in Encinitas, CA where on Saturday we had went down to South Ponto beach during low tide and the ocean had pulled back away from the jetties.  It was during this walk that we discovered dozens of various star fish clinging to the rocks eating the black mussels covering the jetties.

The star fish were mostly purple and some were horned, while others were orange.  I started to peel them off the rocks to show them to my kids and people came from everywhere to look at them, I handed them to kids and parents alike and we all just marveled at all the sea life.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

It turns out they are Ochre Sea Stars, which are very common but being that I am from New York originally I never saw giant purple starfish before up close except at an aquarium.  It was amazing to hold these things up which were the size of dinner plates and some had mussels still in their beaks and mouths when I extracted them from the rocks.

All star fish were returned to the water and rocks when we were done observing them and it was like a discovery show with me as the host.  I also read that they can live at least 3-4 years but in some cases up to 20 years if they survive long enough.

Either way they were amazing to look at and hold, and they have the tightest grip on hard surfaces. 

In addition to the Starfish there were Starburst Anemone’s all over the rock alcoves as well and they would kind of grab on to your finger and pull if you touched them.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

One cool fact about these Starburst Anemone’s I read is that they move around and when two anemones touch tentacles they unleash their fighting tentacles and battle until one of them gives up and decides to move along.

Source of information: Wikipedia Ochre Jelly & Wikipedia Starburst Anenome

-Justin Germino