Justin Germino Ramblings

The family decided to take the kids on the Polar Express train ride out of Williams, AZ this past weekend which included a 1 night stay at the Grand Canyon Hotel in Williams. It was a fun experience and involved dinner and breakfast included in the package. The kids loved boarding the train at around 8pm and singing holiday songs while the train arrived at the North Pole and Santa boarded to hand out silver bells to all the kids.

It was an experience and a great way to create a family memory that will last decades to come, my boys who are seven and four encapsulate the wonder and innocence that is the Christmas spirit and they had a great time. There was a even a cool cowboy shootout show the next morning that the boys enjoyed watching before we took off for the Grand Canyon at about 9:30am.

Here were the pics from the Polar Express train, and tomorrow I will be posting about the Grand Canyon with pics.

-Justin Germino

I was happy to see SocialSpark finally cut over to the SocialSpark 2 system as the default SocialSpark platform and my wife and I both have seen a few extra opportunities for our blogs in the past few days which I am hoping is going to be an increasing trend. SocialSpark 2 still has some issues with the editor not being as friendly particularly when adding images, custom html tags and other content to make posts look right for customized blogs but it is possible to work around it and isn’t a terribly big issue.

One good thing is I noticed that SocialSpark will now post the article in a “scheduled” status to your blog early which gives you enough time and notice to touch up the article with META data and CSS code before it goes live. This has helped me fix up some articles just before they post, but generally I am able to complete a full SocialSpark opp in around 20 minutes on average. This includes time to browser advertisers site and find a few images on the product or company I am talking about. With an average payout of $12 per article this would be a decent earning rate of $36 per hour as a blogger.

The problem is there aren’t enough advertisers in the system to supply more than one opp every few days which prevents you from really making a lot of money with the service, this is why you have to augment with many other online programs and monetization methods.

Either way here are all the features that make SocialSpark 2 better than the original version:

No Tracking Cookie

This keeps blogs loading faster as the ITK script slowed pageload times considerably.

No Social Networking

This is good and bad, but some people spent too much time contacting other bloggers in the SocialSpark system and this distracted from the purpose of the system which was to make bloggers money. I originally really liked the IZEA idea of bloggers having a network to socialize and really enjoyed the Spark opps in the first system to give bloggers a chance to offer each other free ops with link backs as a reward. This was really one of a kind type of system and it would be cool if a site like BloggerLuv would implement something like this.

Self Publishing or Direct Publishing

The new SocialSpark now allows you to self publish where an advertiser approves and you have to cut/paste the code within a time frame and publish the article, this is good for people who don’t want to provide IZEA SocialSpark with an author account for your blog, but means you need to be available more frequently to post the post within the required time frame. With direct publishing once you write the article it will publish without you doing anything manually so you don’t have to be “waiting” until you are told to publish it.

Here are some improvements the SocialSpark 2 system needs:

Lower Cashout Payments

SponsoredTweets, PayPerPost all allow for cashouts at less than $50 with a $2 penalty, SocialSpark should have this feature too for bloggers who wait a long time between opps and are stuck at like $25 – $35 and could use that extra cash sooner than it sitting in a pending queue.

Editor Improvements

The editor still needs some simplification regarding inserting images, adding video and making edits. When inserting the sponsored links it sometimes loses track of them in html mode (you can’t even insert them except in visual mode). Really it would be nice if it had the same functionality as the WordPress editor.

SocialSpark should allow you to enter post tags and possibly category ahead of time so you don’t have to do it when it publishes. Though this would involve the system having to read from your blog like LiveWriter does to read in the categories, and SocialSpark supports many more platforms than WordPress, it would be a nice touch.

Summary

Overall I enjoy the new SocialSpark 2.0 system though I haven’t seen any major opportunities with it like I did with the original SocialSpark system. My blog gets 3x as much traffic as it did a year ago and I was able to get some $100+ opps from SocialSpark 1 with 1/3 as much traffic.

-Justin Germino

There is a big gap of health coverage in this country for the Americans who are prior to the age of receiving Medicare but past the COBRA cutoff point when losing a job, there is even a gap of 2 years when somebody goes on Disability, is approved and it still takes 2 years before Medicare kicks in when you go on disability. This gap leaves you uninsured when you have pre-existing conditions, too sick to get a job and your social security payout is too high to qualify for state run medical care programs.

It is unfortunate that you basically have to drain your entire life savings to cover medical costs and only then could you potentially qualify for some aid which at this point you are nearly completely dependent on federal or state programs to help cover costs that include housing, food and medicine. I have read the stories in the newspapers on how people who saved millions over 30 years have seen it all lost due to medical costs without insurance, 1 major cancer treatment, or transplant and 30-40 years worth of saving and sacking money away could be disintegrated in a few weeks or months.

Insurance companies with the ability to outright deny acceptance based on pre-existing conditions are geared for profitability and not truly for patient care. Truthfully any public trading company is designed for profit and to keep shareholders happy. I don’t really know the solution here at all, but would think traditionally if people had more options and there would be more competition then prices would come down.

Imagine if there was no insurance companies and doctors had to charge patients directly, patients would naturally flock to the doctors who had the best service at the cheapest prices, this in turn would cause competing doctors to lower prices to attempt to gain more business and undercut rivals. In theory this should have happened and be happening with the Health Insurance industry but it isn’t and won’t be.

Something needs to be done, and likely even if Obamacare were to help alleviate the problem it is likely to be repealed before it ever goes into effect in 2014.

-Justin Germino

Received in the mail the other day 2 free PPV coupons from Dish Network as a holiday gift, overall I have been happy with Dish Network other than it is very expensive when I could switch to DirecTV and at least 1/2 the monthly payment for the first year, the problem is after the initial deals expire both services are virtually the same price within a margin of a few dollars depending on whether you are using HD DVR and other special features in the plans.

I was able to talk to Dish Network and they gave me a 1 year $10 credit per month to help keep me as a loyal customer and avoid switching to DirectTV but they should give more loyalty plans for existing customers, particularly those who have been with them for 7+ years. With the competition from Internet TV streaming going to rise, I am hoping they get more cost competitive, honestly I wish you could purchase individual channel plans I don’t need 80% of the channels I get, if I can say get a custom channel plan where I pick any 25 or 40 channels individually instead of them having to come bundled in tiers that would be fantastic.

Meanwhile, I will use those free PPV movies and enjoy them as at least they gave something for free as a gift.

-Justin Germino

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of GlideTV. All opinions are 100% mine.

I can honestly tell you that I had not heard about the GlideTV product until I started doing the research for a few articles recently and have been pleasantly surprised at how useful the Glide TV and Navigator can be for someone who wants to watch streaming movies or TV shows on their big screen TV without having to purchase a separate Apple TV, Google TV or other dedicated device.

The GlideTV Navigator lets you use your existing laptop or notebook as long as it has a video cable (HDMI, component) that can plug into your TV to handle all of your Internet TV watching needs.  It works by plugging into the USB Port of your Windows, Mac laptop and comes with a small controller which lets you wirelessly select channels and look for the shows and movies you want to stream.  It is completely compatible with Netflix , Hulu and other online websites and gives you an easy to navigate interface to find online content.

The GlideTV Navigator also works with the Playstation 3 and is compatible with Boxee according to the company website though it doesn’t support XBox 360 or Apple TV devices.  For people who just want to use their own laptop or notebook to stream internet content to their big televisions GlideTV is an excellent choice that is a fraction of the cost of some Internet TV appliances.

Currently GlideTV is hosting a contest where somebody can win a free GlideTV Navigator and all you need to do to sign up is like GlideTV on Facebook and enter your registration information into the contest.  

I have already signed up for the contest and encourage you to join and sign up, I did find that my laptop only has a VGA output my television actually supports a VGA input so while I am not getting HDMI I will still be able to stream video’s to my television.  Just not sure on how to handle getting the audio from my notebook to my entertainment center or TV now if I do win the GlideTV Navigator.

-Justin Germino

This will be the first Christmas with our new dog Donut whom is an elderly dog at 8 years old that we adopted about five or six months ago to avoid her being turned into the AZ Boston Terrier Rescue.

The dog is an avid fan of Christmas decorations and spends a lot of time under the Christmas tree but this became compounded when my wife had bought some holiday treats and left them in a package near the tree.  Donut was able to smell the treats through the wrapping and become so fixated on the treats that she refused to move away from the presents near the tree.

My wife even hung the dog treats up with the Xmas stockings and the dog just sat staring at the stockings for hours barking, whining and begging to get her holiday presents early.  Finally I had to put Donut out back and my wife hid the treats somewhere else in a pantry, but now Donut continues to wait near the tree and stare at the stockings knowing that a present exists and should be given to her immediately.

The other funny thing about Donut is she loves dog beds, and apparently cat beds.  We bought a cat bed from Petsmart figuring she would like it and she immediately loved it and curls her fat little body into it even though she barely can fit inside it.  Our slightly bigger Boston Terrier Porky however refuses to use any dog beds and always wants to sleep on the couch instead.

By far Donut is one of the quirkiest dogs we have ever owned and has so many unique personality traits for a dog. 

-Justin Germino

“Shh! We’re hiding. Be quiet everyone. That includes me. Shh! Who’s making that noise? Oh, it’s me again” – Julian (Madagascar)

I am a man with a lot going on both professional and personally in life like many people.  In addition to juggling a management position at my job which consumes 60+ hours per week, I am a devoted husband to my wife, father to my two boys and write poetry and blog on the side.  In addition I am helping my wife with our new J&S Travel business as well as help administrate her WordPress blogs while still finding time to guest post on other WordPress blogs, keep up with social appearances on Twitter and other social networks and manage to squeeze in about 2 hours of TV or movie time per night after telling my kids a bed time story.

Image Credit: Salvatore Vuono

All in all my daily routine is virtually a breakneck pace that starts sharply at 6am and often ends at 11pm where I am like a wheel spinning at 40,000RPM all day long with no break in sight.  My biggest problem is that I have so much on my plate that I can be easily distracted or lose focus without prioritizing nearly everything in my life.  I organize even the most simple of things into tasks and I even have a whiteboard in my office where my wife writes down “chores” in dry erase marker that she needs me to do during the week or weekend.  I try to clear all my chores every week and she writes in new chores for the following week.  This system works for me because I would lose track of things and that would be very bad.

I have to have an alarm on my cell phone that goes off every 2:15pm just so I am reminded that my kid will be out of school soon on the off day my wife may not be able to pick him up.  I do this because I spend about 8-9 hours a day on conference calls and I multitask during whichever ones I can to try and complete multiple things at once for maximum efficiency.

I would be prone to procrastination for things that would have distant deadlines, but I prohibit myself from this because it would be a dangerous precedent if I allowed myself to push things out until it all piled up so that I could never catch up.  An example of this is if I have some things to do at work or home and I have a month or more before the deadline to get them accomplished.  Instead of waiting until the week prior or a day prior, I mentally set 2 deadlines in my mind.  One is three weeks before a requirement is due and I strive to meet this date, penalizing myself if I don’t make it as if I failed a real deadline.  I then have a backup due date which I will further penalize myself if I don’t meet and if I do come past this deadline then I will often re-prioritize other items to get what I needed to get done.

I actually mentally trick myself to go as far as to believe that my deadline is due much sooner than expected in order to make sure I don’t fall prone to putting it off.  This drive has kept me ahead of schedule and on top of everything but it comes at the cost of being extremely busy and requiring myself to log nearly everything as an outlook task.  Believe it when I have to take my kids to the doctor or my wife wants to schedule a lunch with me, I have to make sure I put it on my outlook calendar and block out the time or else I might forget or something might clobber it.

Worst case scenario is if I am under the gun and can’t meet a deadline, I will usually kick back with 3 or 4 cups of coffee (or some energy drinks) and pull a few nearly all nighters to try and get caught up again.  I am at my worst when it comes to overload if I come back from a week vacation and have 1,000+ emails to sort through, catch up on entire multi-day and multi-threaded conversations at work some requiring a detailed response and I often will dread going on vacation just because I can’t bear to think about the work load when I return.

High strung you say?  Nope, just have a lot going on at the moment and I am hoping I don’t fall behind on anything.

-Justin Germino

I was finally able to complete the setup of the Christmas decorations this year but many of my light strands were damaged and had to be discarded. Overall I bought about ten new strands and tossed about sixteen as they couldn’t survive the summer sitting in bins in the garage, the wiring heats up from the temperature which leads to shorts and failures in the decorations. Here are some pictures of the house decorations and it is about 6800 lights by my estimating the number of strands installed plus two inflatables and both have been used in previous years.

My trees have grown much larger and I just didn’t have enough lights to make my acacia willow tree look lit so I had to leave it dark this year. Would need at least 10-15 strands just for that tree alone to make it lit up. Next year I will have to budget buying about 15-20 new strands of lights to help cover the loss this year. This year I did a better job with the power distribution over previous years and there won’t be any circuit breakers tripping. -Justin Germino

The Holidays are coming so fast with the weeks blurring together that I can barely stop and catch my breath sometimes. Literally every night is spent either fixing or working holiday decorations, shopping or browsing for holiday presents or wrapping something for someone. It is amazing that I still dedicate an hour or two here and there to keep up on my blogs or else they would be idle for a few days as I can barely keep up.

Work itself is in a mad rush and the last few weeks are among the busiest which all lead up to these final weeks to get some projects completed before the end of the year. I am hoping for a lull in the last two weeks of the month, originally I had a week of PTO but had to use it up due to getting sick last month so I don’t have as much time off as I had originally planned. The hard thing is when the kids are out of school and want to spend more time playing with me. I try to time my PTO to maximize the days my kids have off from school, it just didn’t work out as well this year.

Still, Christmas is right around the corner and I think Santa will make the kids very happy this year. I have it on good authority.

-Justin Germino

When going over to Blizzard’s website yesterday I was visited with the massive splash page for World of Warcraft Cataclysm which is on presale right now. WOW: Cataclysm expansion officially releases on 12/7/2010 and is touted as one of the most looked forward to expansions in a while. Some features of the new World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion include:

• Two New Playable Races – Goblins and Worgen
• Level Cap Increased to 85
• Classic Zones Remade
• New High-Level Zones
• Flying Mounts in Azeroth

WoW which is arguably the gold standard in MMORPG game shows no signs of slowing down and some players have been immersed literally intertwining their lives into this game much as bloggers can intertwine their lives into their blogs. There are even people creative enough to make an income from WoW by selling items, characters and other in game components and it is amazing the marketplaces that can rise up from something like an MMO game. I would dub these type of people “gaming entrepreneurs” and there are a few out there who can really spend the time and effort to make some money from gaming.

Meanwhile, I am a huge RPG and MMO fan but the monthly fee of WoW and the fact that my own time was so limited prevented me from ever diving into this game. I play Runes of Magic on rare occasion when I have some spare time as my only MMORPG. I wonder if World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will break Starcraft 2 sales records being that it is an expansion pack for an existing rather than a new standalone game?