Justin Germino Ramblings

It is with great sadness that this weekend marked the passing of a fake Christmas tree that had been used in my wife’s family for over sixty years.  The tree made with a solid wood cylinder and old style metal wire hooks to slide in branches slowly eroded over the past decades and even with every attempt to repair just it just isn’t able to hold up anymore.  This marked the first time in probably 8 years we had to go out and buy a new Christmas tree and fortunately Big Lots was running some good sales.

We wound up getting a 6′ tree with lights built in for around $60 and bought an extra set of multicolored lights to string around it.  I don’t have it all completed yet, but we already have a start on our indoor holiday decorating and 3 trees are already up but full decorations are not yet completed.  In my family we tend to decorate pretty heavily and will probably have 6,000 lights up outside the house by the end of Thanksgiving weekend.

There will be some pictures to showcase the display when I am completed.

-Justin Germino

I was really glad when I read the latest notes for Paint.net 3.5.6 that they fixed the copy/paste issue to Windows Live Writer and this will make it a bit easier when working with Live Writer as I don’t have to save off my images to my desktop first and now can just copy/paste them from Paint.Net right into the Windows Live Writer editor.

This feature was actually lost with the 2011 version of Windows Live Writer and I am happy to see the functionality has been restored.  Live Writer is not as efficient as it used to be since they moved the options into the top ribbon and your description and slug are no longer accessible on the same page but you have to click "View All" just to see the slug and post description options.  This costs some time when editing posts and reduced efficiency from the previous version of Live Writer in my opinion.

Still this Paint.Net fix for copying and pasting images into Live Writer does save some time again and I just hope that some additional Live Writer enhancements come out like being able to place custom options anywhere in the ribbon bar like you do for Word become available.

-Justin Germino

Doesn’t it feel like time accelerates toward the holidays or the end of the year?  I swear each day ends faster than the previous one and I especially noticed that time seems to move faster in my thirties than it did in my early twenties?  Is it a perception, why is it that when you are a kid it takes forever for Christmas to come, yet as an adult it comes far to fast?

With only 3 biweekly paydays left until Christmas this has everyone penny pinching and stretching checks as best as possible, I keep telling myself that it is the “thought” that counts and because of commercialization, media and our own instincts and habits of spoiling kids with more gifts or more elaborate gifts it makes it only that much harder when you have to penny pinch one year and the previous ones weren’t as much a struggle.

Kids young enough to still expect Santa’s gifts can be taught that because of the economy Santa and his elves have to stretch gifts and deliver more gifts to even more kids and as there are more needy people than ever each person can’t get as much and this is a good experience.  I mean how many duplicate action figures that get played with for three months only to get chewed to pieces by my dog could they possibly need?

On the other hand, I am finding that there are some toys that get played with for years.  Anything from PlayMobil and Treo seems to be played with longer than any other toy brand here in my household, my kids are natural builders and systems that allow for putting blocks together encourage imagination.  Lego bricks (the small ones) are too complicated for my three year old so the Treo system with blocks and connecting sticks are perfect for his age, and allow for a greater variety with far fewer pieces.

I can’t tell you how many scattered tiny Lego pieces were found around the floors, and each shelf/drawer system we buy and try to arrange and organize ends up just being a toy junk drawer with no organized pattern to which toys are stored in it in a matter of weeks.

Time falls short, and over commercialization makes it hard to remember the reason is not about the presents but about celebrations of family and loved ones. Heck, why are they trying to sell Xmas stuff in October, let Thanksgiving pass before starting December holidays already.  I know I am thankful for my family and will be making sure I spend time appreciating them in between the moments when I can actually take a breath.

-Justin Germino

I realized after finally reaching the $12 or so mark on Amazon affiliate earnings this year that I hadn’t specified a payment system at all to collect my earnings, I decided to accept my earnings in the form of an Amazon.com coupon since nearly all of my Amazon affiliate earnings come from my personal blog ID and they pay you in $10 increments without any wait or fee like when you select a check from them.

Sure, I could allow them to direct deposit into my bank account but I don’t have any of my blogging accounts in anything but PayPal so the effort to move the money from the bank to Paypal isn’t worth the time. Instead with the coupon I tend to buy products from Amazon.com fairly regularly anyway and I might get the coupon in time to use it before the holiday shopping starts. I know last year I bought about 70% of all gifts through Amazon.com and it was a busy week for UPS and package delivery at my house as I had all products shipped as they were available rather than in one bundle so many shipments arrived.

Overall, I stick with Amazon affiliate because I think it has potential as my sites grow to bring some passive income, I haven’t had too much success at it with $8 in one month on 4 affiliate sales being the most success to date. I am considering hitching a “best products” or “top picks” kind of Amazon.com store off of my but at this time I just don’t have the space or traffic to where I think it would be a huge hit.

When BlogEngage announced a while ago that they are offering paid subscriptions which automate your blog posts into the BlogEngage directory I decided to be among the first bloggers to sign for the service and give it a whirl.  I opted to test out with the Bronze Membership for $1.99 per month which scans your blog every 8 hours and auto submits 1 post per 8 hours to the General Blogging category.  So far the service has saved me about an hour of time per month.  This assumes it takes 2 minutes for you to manually type in the title, summary, keywords and click submit of one article per day to BlogEngage.  So really is $1.99 worth saving me an hour of my time?

The answer is yes because in addition to that one hour, I get about 150-200 visitors from BlogEngage on any given month and this also equates to only about 1 – 1.5 cents per visit which is cheaper than any AdWords purchases.  I also know that as BlogEngage keeps growing (it is already a 10k Alexa rating and averages over 2,000 pageviews per day) the number of visits to my own site will also go up in proportion which means the click through rate is even cheaper.

Now, I do run 3 blogs and now that I have a multi author blog I may consider upgrading to a higher monthly account in the future where I can submit my blog to more categories and read in more feeds at every three hours or hour depending on how many posts per day get published to my blogs.

Digg supports RSS feed integration automatically and my blog is submitted there, however I consistently get more visits, comments and higher quality visitors from BlogEngage, blog engage visitors are mostly other bloggers and they know and respect the value of building relationships and engaging in communication with bloggers.

So as it stands right now, I think the BlogEngage automatic RSS Syndication is providing me value and saving me money and time that could be better spending engaging in writing more articles or doing other social media promotion for my technology blog.

On Sunday we decided to get an early start to the holiday season by emptying out the entire garage and sorting through two dozen Christmas decorations creates and testing lights to make sure all would be in proper order for the upcoming weekends. My wife wanted to get her part done early, she is the one who climbs the extension ladder to get on the 2nd story roof and hang the top pitch icicle lights. There are a few reasons why I don’t do this and the biggest is my acrophobia, I can’t tolerate being at heights higher than about 5 feet and can barely climb a ladder ten feet or higher without becoming shaky. Combine this with the fact that we have Spanish tile roof shingles which can crack and fracture at the support of my weight on them also deters me from climbing on the roof even if I were more courageous.

As my wife was stringing up the first set of lights the corner Spanish tile on our 2nd story roof was so loose from previous wind storms that it tumbled off and shattered a tile on the lower roof under it. This unfortunately now leaves me scrambling to find a roofer who can repair the broken tiles and get it fixed at a decent price so as not to impact my holiday budget too much. Unforeseen household expenses continue to win battles in what I feel is a losing war of bad luck.

I am just really glad that my wife wasn’t stepping on the tile and it wasn’t supporting her weight when it gave way, it is dangerous putting up Christmas lights I may have to start paying someone to put them up in the future.

-Justin Germino

I was saddened when I saw the mishap in the local news about the hero dog rescued from Afghanistan and brought back here in the U.S. that was put down by the pound as a result of employee error. You can read more about the story here, but in summary the dog whose name was Target had helped a company of soldiers avoid potential disaster at the hands of a suicide bomber escaped from the gate of their home and a neighbor found the animal and turned it into Pinal County Animal control.

Photo: Puppy Rescue Mission

An employee at animal control failed to follow proper procedure and euthanized the wrong dog the morning the dog was supposed to be picked up by the owners. This is a tragic tale of a family losing their pet to negligence and this kind of stuff happens all the time and with people in medical procedures not just pets. There needs to be more accountability and better policies and procedures in so many fields, especially ones where medical practices (human or pet) are at stake.

Unfortunately, this happened in the same county I live in so the local news had a field day and the county is in more papers and having more media attention (negative) than usual as a result.

-Justin Germino

For the first time I actually purchased a complete game with the Amazon.com digital download and within an hour I had my full version of Kings Bounty:Crossworlds and was playing it on my PC.  This included the activation key, 2GB full version of the game and everything.  The only thing I found was the installer defaulted to C:\ drive and I must have missed where you tell it to install to another drive or else it always uses C:\ by default.

One thing about the Amazon.com Digital Download service is that some of the older games are cheaper if you buy them as physical products, I saw some older games that were $6 – $12 dollars if you bought the game but it was still priced at $24.99 or $29.99 for the digital download.  This makes no sense and Amazon.com needs to adjust their digital download price to match the price of the game if it is purchased brand new in box from Amazon.com.  I mean sure some 3rd party retailers or used sales are much cheaper, but Amazon.com own offering shouldn’t make it more expensive to download and purchase the game than to pay for the full box.

I still would like to see more discounts for digital downloads of games, maybe a good $5-$10 cheaper than the full versions.  I would rather get digital downloads of my games as I can play them sooner and I don’t need to keep collecting game boxes, manuals and such on my shelves.

Has anyone else used the Amazon Digital Download service to make purchases?  What was your experience with it?

-Justin Germino

This weekend the family brought our two Boston Terriers to the annual Fall Boston Terrier picnic put on by the Arizona Boston Terrier Rescue whom my wife and I support and she assists where we can.  We actually fostered our Boston Terrier Donut for them before adopting her.  Most Boston Terriers are friendly and energetic dogs that play rough but are extremely friendly, my older Boston however is a little bit of an aggressive girl at home and we had to keep her on a leash as we were afraid she wouldn’t be so friendly with other Bostons.

I forgot to bring my camera and had to take picture with my Blackberry phone so they didn’t come out nearly as well as I would have liked, but you get the idea.

One of the funniest sights was a guy who had jury rigged a kids towing attachment to a bike so that it allowed him to transport 5 Boston Terriers leashed up and able to be towed by a pedal bicycle, it was an ingenious modification and looked so funny.

Here are some pictures from the Arizona Boston Terrier 2010 Fall Picnic:

Late last week I finally beat King’s Bounty: Armored Princess which was one of the most enjoyable single player turn based combat games I have played in a while.  The game mixed role playing elements with combat strategy and was set in a fantasy world where you build armies of elves, dwarves, orcs, lizardfolk, dragons and demons.  By the end of the game my character reached level 54 and I was packing an army of Green and Black Dragons, Ancient Treants, Archdevils and a few dozen Cyclops.

I had done a review of Kings Bounty Armored Princess a while back when I first started playing and for anyone who was a fan of the Heroes of Might and Magic series of games or even the Kings Bounty game would be a fan of Kings Bounty Armored Princess.  The game which can be found for less than $15 now on Amazon.com and even less if bought used is worth every penny and gave me several good weeks of a few hours a night play time.  Because you can choose to be a Warrior, Paladin or Wizard there is some replay value as I chose the warrior and wasn’t able to truly take advantage of some of the scrolls and magic potential in the game.  There were also some quests and side kicks I couldn’t hire because I lacked the prerequisites.

Kings Bounty Armored Princess will play on older computers, as it is turn based and you can tone down the graphics you can pretty much play it on any system.  There is also an expansion pack called Kings Bounty: Crossworlds that I must get next.

-Justin Germino