Justin Germino Ramblings

Christmas Eve is almost as fun as Christmas day in my household and includes my in-laws coming over for dinner and everyone gets to open 1 present after dinner as sort of a teaser.  My wife really has me curious with a few gifts she has for me sitting under the tree which were not on my Christmas list and she spent more than she should have I think.  I will be having my video camera ready on Christmas morning as I have taken family footage of the kids opening their gifts for 5 years running since my oldest was 2 and my youngest not even born yet.

These collages of video are often used in future holiday celebrations where I occasionally let the kids watch the video’s of themselves opening presents from years past on Christmas eve, they can’t believe the things they say and get a delight watching and seeing the toys that they used to have and play with (some still exist but many have gone to donations or trash over the years).

These are some of the best times when family is sitting around together and sharing in the appreciation of surviving yet another year together.

-Justin Germino

So for the first time I checked out Wii Sports Resort with the Wii Motion Plus and I have to say the controller is more responsive and sensitive to motion in such a way that it is clearly noticeable.  The fencing game in particular is fun on Wii Sports Resort and my sons and I took turns battling openings and gaining rank, you can really work up a sweat if you fence aggressively too (but this could be because I am not in the best shape too).

The Wii Motion Plus is a small white box that installs in the bottom of your Wiimote and you can plug your nunchuck into the bottom of this box.  I found out that Nintendo includes the extra chips into the main Wiimote if you purchase it that way, and this is really good because the extra box has to be removed when playing games that have you hold the Wiimote like a classic controller, when holding the Wiimote horizontally the extra Motion Plus always has to be removed or it feels kind of awkward.  Example you can’t really leave the Wii Motion Plus plugged in while playing Kirby Epic Yarn for example.

a Wiimote with Wii Motion Plus is actually only about $37.99 on Amazon.com which is the same price as a new Wiimote without motion plus built in.  Still if you have existing Wii Motes, it is only about $18 to add Wii Motion Plus device to attach to existing controller to extend functionality.

The Wiimote with Motion Plus is called a Wii Remote Plus by the way if you wanted to know what the combined functionality controller is called. The only problem when playing a game that requires Wii Motion Plus is that you need to make sure you have the extra Motion Plus capability for all remotes if you want to play multiplayer as you can’t play those games on multiplayer if your primary Wiimote is Motion Plus and your other Wiimotes don’t have it.

-Justin Germino

Thanks to @gjmarketer on Twitter I learned there is a website called Creative Copy Challenge, where the blog owner challenges writers to create content and include random words that he provides for readers to use in their comment.  This was similar to my Random Twitter Poetry game where I craft poems that include random words submitted on Twitter and I decided to take up the challenge on December 20th for Creative Copy Challenge 102 and I created a poem in less than 5 minutes and tossed it into the comment area just to test myself.

With the following 10 words provided in the challenge:

1. Rush
2. Pilates 
3. Pump
4. Lozenge
5. Indigo – the hue between blue and violet; a shrub; a blue dye;
   
6. Equestrian
7. Survivor
8. Blur
   
9. Friends
   
10. Winding

I came up with the following poem:

Equestrian Survivor

A savage rush winding over you
as friends pump fists into the air
movement a blur of indigo and brown
rehearsed forms like choreographed Pilates
yet defeat tastes like a bitter lozenge
and you are once again, for the last time
just a lonely equestrian survivor

-Poem by Justin Germino

I told my wife that I loved how soft my pillow cases and bedsheets were and she said they were made from Beech Wood. I was like what!? Looked it up and saw they were 70% Modal and 30% cotton and sure enough Modal is actually a fiber made from beech trees that is smoother and softer than cotton and resists hard water better.

India produces about 4,000+ tons of Modal per year and it is used in many fabrics (particularly spandex because of its shrink resistance and flexibility). I didn’t realize just how soft and comfortable this beech wood fiber can be, and you wouldn’t think a “wood” based plant could be spun to be so comfortable.

My only problem is now that I have two pillow cases that are rough and course compared to my one that is spun with Modal in it.

-Justin Germino

Was a good weekend spent with the family as we finished some last minute chores around the house and took the kids to see both Yogi Bear and Tron: Legacy this weekend. Both were enjoyable but my wife and I thought Tron: Legacy was fantastic and she enjoyed the film as much as I did.

I wrote a review of Tron Legacy over on DragonBlogger.com that doesn’t contain any real spoilers on what I thought of the film, you can’t trust movie critics and I believe most films just require you to see for yourself.

Yogi Bear was fun but definitely is a simple movie and meant for kids, my 4 year old loved it and adults thought it was okay. Dan Aykroyd did actually a really good job as the voice of Yogi Bear, but the movie could have used some more substance and storyline.

We decided to replace the broken Nintendo Wii with one we were planning on giving away in a contest in the future, this was the Wii I won from Leapfish earlier in the year. So I was able to replace my Wii literally for free by using the spare I had in the office upstairs. This came with Wii Sports Resort which I hadn’t played before and I found the Fencing game to be quite fun.

-Justin Germino

My wife has really been doing well with her blogs lately and her Arizona Music Blog is the number one site in the Arizona market for music news, reviews and information about local Arizona musicians and artists.

Now that the site has several authors writing for it it is becoming more like an Arizona specific Rolling Stones magazine and hopefully will soon compete with the likes of AZ New Times which is the current reigning top dog publication in the same focus area.

Still, her blog is ranking #1 and #2 for the two targeted keywords in the Google SERP pages and only continues to increase its traffic as more content is created.  The site has gotten so much popularity that some shows are considering the writers "press" and are being given special backstage access to local events just so they can get a review up and on the site.

If you live in Arizona or want to know more about the Arizona music scene, then AZ Music Connect is the site for you.  It also features national and international music news and articles and publishes daily.

-Justin Germino

I finally got around to adding a Top Products page on this blog which is something I had been wanting to do for a while, it is basically a page which lists all my favorite products I have purchased or used over the years and doubles as an Amazon affiliate page where people can search for products or purchase the product if they are interested from the link. It is done as more of an experiment to see if I can gain more income from Amazon affiliate, but also as a way to share which products are my favorite.

I am intending to have at least top 10 products each year on the page, though it is still being completed I have a handful up on it now. I wanted to eventually design a kind of Amazon aStore for DragonBlogger.com that featured my top technology product recommendations and was considering this experiment for 2011. The more I blog the more I realize that true income lies not in doing blog reviews but in selling products and earning from commission, though Clickbank and many other programs have huge $20-$40 commissions on single product sales the product offerings are very niche and very limited, it may be better to sell 10-20 products at 4% commission than one at a $40 commission.

The fact that Amazon sets a tracking cookie which is valid should the user purchase anything and you still earn the commission is a huge bonus in favor of Amazon affiliate. I still am not that experience with Amazon affiliate having sold only about a dozen products over the entire 2010 year, but it is something I intend to focus on more in 2011 and experiment with.

-Justin Germino

I broke a new milestone this week when I reached 100 people who have signed up for SponsoredTweets under my referral ID

SponsoredTweets is one of the best programs to earn money from your Twitter account and I can attest for it as I have been using it since the service was first released.

I have earned around $170 dollars over the past year or so with SponsoredTweets and just around $40 was my commission from my referrals taking opportunities and making money from SponsoredTweets. Considering I average about .10 cents commission per tweet from my referrers, I get about .30 cents per day by doing nothing but collecting from other people who signed up and make some money with the program.

I am however very picky with what I choose to promote, and have turned down over $130 in offers from advertisers, so whereas I made $170, I could have earned over $300 if I wasn’t as picky as I am. Mostly I will turn opportunities down if I don’t think they are good content matches for my twitter audience, I tend to promote technology products around software, gadgets and sometimes entertainment (movie/dvd stuff) but housewares, kitchen and other products that don’t fit my niche I reject not because I think there is a problem with the advertiser, but only because it isn’t a good content match for my followers.

In fact, SponsoredTweets has more reputable and quality advertisers than any other social media earning platform on the web in my opinion and consistently has more big name companies than MyLikes, Magpie and other programs.

If you want to earn a few bucks a month from Twitter sign up for SponsoredTweets, you only need a few hundred followers and a good reputation. Only promote products you truly are willing to endorse and you can find yourself making a little extra change each month to help cover some fast food (or in my case it goes toward web hosting fees for my blog).

-Justin Germino

It only took me returning from vacation to realize that blogging is feeling more like a 2nd job and less like a hobby these days. I have enough emails and correspondence to catch up on from my day job and the fact that I have dozens of emails, comments and follow ups that need to be done for my blogging hobby hit me like a brick on how “job like” blogging really is. Though you set your own hours and write on your own schedule, there is follow up that is required to keep readers engaged as well as advertisers who inquire about purchasing ad spots or other opportunities.

Combine this with social media presence and follow up and I can honestly say it takes a good hour to catch up on blogging related activities for every day I take PTO and this only applies to filtering emails and communication and has nothing to do with writing content or articles. Since transitioning into my new role at my day job I have had to cut back on blogging gradually over the past few months and this combined with my renewed interest in PC gaming I have tried to limit my blogging hours to no more than 15 per week.

I can make more money out of my blogs if I put more effort into them, but the fact is that I am spread so thin that other than a few sponsored reviews per week and mostly passive earning from AdSense and selling ad spots I don’t actively pursue advertisers or paying content like I did in 2009. This ironically has not hurt my site income too much as my site traffic has increased enough to where my passive income caught up, but it means my income has flat lined for the past several months.

I can see why many bloggers quit or give up after a year or two blogging, and even bloggers who run successful sites can suffer from burn out or inability to keep up with the demands of blogging while holding down one or more day jobs and a family life. Rest assured blogging is in my blood and I won’t be retiring from it, but I will try to balance it by offsetting the number of articles I have to write per month.

This may mean this blog may only get updated every other day instead of every day in 2011, but not sure yet if I am going to adjust my blogging frequency. DragonBlogger.com will always have at least 1 new article per day as this is my flagship and technology news blog, with having several authors I am hoping it grows rapidly and I don’t have to keep writing 30-35 articles per month for it as I am hoping to produce about 10-15 articles per month for DragonBlogger when I have enough writers to keep my blog satiated with quality content on a consistent basis.

The bottom line folks is that if you are serious about blogging and wanting to carve a portion of the Internet for yourself, know what you are getting into. It takes time and few can just set it and forget it when running a blog.

-Justin Germino

Would you believe that I have been living in Arizona since 1996 and two days ago was my first time up North to see the Grand Canyon? The Grand Canyon was just about an hour away from Williams, AZ where we were to ride the Polar Express train with the kids so we thought to take a day off of work and school and visit the Grand Canyon. The canyon itself is massive and my wife wanted to go on the skywalk which is a clear transparent bridge you can walk on but we found out that it was over 3 hours away out of Kingsman so we had to settle for some points in the Southern part of the Canyon.

First of all I am acrophobic and just being next to the edge of the Grand Canyon made me on edge and a little shaky, I couldn’t even step up to the very edge and the drop and view are breath taking and terribly frightening for someone who is deathly afraid of heights. Still I snapped some great photo’s and you really get a sense of just how “big” the landscape is and how small people are when you are looking at rock layers that date up to a billion years ago at the very bottom layers of the canyon. You are literally looking at the crusts history in millions of years by following the various colorations and slices of rock from top to bottom.

Here are some pictures I took of the Grand Canyon

I was really glad we finally went to see the Grand Canyon and it only took 16 years for me to finally go up there and do it.

-Justin Germino