Justin Germino Ramblings

So my replacement MagicJack arrived and worked perfectly right out of the box, I plugged in my phone and no more “Line in Use” error that I had received with my older USB MagicJack that somehow went south on me after using it for a year.  The problem I have now is that my telephone which plugs into the USB seems to have such a low volume compared to using the Logitech Wireless computer headset that I was using.  This means that even though I can use my phone again and it is more convenient I can’t hear out of it even with all volume controls turned up to max.  Now the phone itself isn’t great and it is possible with a higher quality phone I could get better and louder audio quality, but because my ear is still clogged I have more benefit from the binaural audio from my computer headphones.

Though the microphone is clearer on the telephone and people say they can hear me better, I am still using my headset due to better volume controls and being able to hear conversations in both ears instead of a single ear.  I still think the MagicJack is a value and even though Skype is free when calling other Skype phones the MagicJack is free calling any phone anywhere in the country no matter what.  You only pay for the $19.99 per year plus the cost of the MagicJack itself.

If you do buy the MagicJack make sure you do it from the original MagicJack website, the company will not honor warranties on MagicJack purchases made from Radioshack, BestBuy, Wal-Mart or other retail stores, you must have the original website order number.  This is how I ordered it and I am glad I did because they replaced my MagicJack after 14 months when it broke, they would not have done so if I had purchased it from a local retail store.

-Justin Germino

I happen to use FourSquare on occasion and one of my favorite things to leverage with FourSquare is the Chili’s out here in Casa Grande offers you free chips & salsa if you check in with FourSquare and show them you are checked in.  This is what I do every time to get my free chips & salsa and as much as I frequent going out to eat I wish other local businesses would leverage FourSquare check in specials more here in Casa Grande, Arizona.

I just found out that WeReward has BlackBerry version of the application out that allows you to earn money for checking in at local establishments and I am going to have to download it and install it to see if there are any local establishments in my small city that I may be able to collect rewards from.

Overall, I think FourSquare and other local check in type applications are good for promoting local businesses but not the wisest thing for people to constantly declare they are not home and out and about in the town.   There are risks of robberies, stalking and other potential for abuse but so far there hasn’t been any publicized crime that was the result of someone taking advantage of someones broadcasting their location yet.

It is only a matter of time,

-Justin Germino

I have been a fan of natural fruit drinks and recently when I tried a new one called Fruit2Day I was really impressed with this creative and healthy beverage.  Fruit2Day drinks are different in that they have not only a collection of fruit juices but have cut up bits of fruit pulp inside the drink itself so while you are drinking you actually are eating some chunks of fruit with your drink.  This makes for a unique experience where as you drink you have to stop and chew and I have tried four flavors total and enjoyed every single one so far.

My favorite is actually the pomegranate blueberry which I didn’t have a picture of when I was taking photos of my bottles for this post.  The chunks of blueberries are delicious and the whole drink is fairly small but only has about 130 calories.  Each bottle offers 2 servings of fruit per day and starting your day off with one of these drinks in place of a snack or breakfast is a great way to add some healthy fruit to your diet and reduce calorie consumption (provided you don’t drink these and just keep on eating a normal snack or meal, the trick is to replace a snack or else you just add calories).

Still the Pineapple Banana is fantastic and the bits of pineapple taste delicious when you are chewing them up between swallows of the drink.  I found Fruit2Day at my local Fry’s Marketplace and became completely hooked.  I do drink the Naked juice brands and enjoy those as well, but the chunks of pulp in the drink really add something different.  One think I noticed is that the vitamin content of the Fruit2Day drinks seems to be a bit lower than the Naked brand juices when you compare.

If you haven’t tried the Fruit2Day brand of fruit juice and pulp I highly recommend you give it a try, I became totally hooked and buy about 4 of them per week.  They aren’t overly cheap though and I wish they sold them in four packs where you can save a little bit buying them in packs instead of individually.

I did find out if you go to their homepage and sign up for their mailing list you can print out coupons for $1 off the product which I have done.

-Justin Germino

I was recently interviewed by Nile Flores who runs the site Blondish.net and I provided honest and real answers about what it means to blog for profit and recommendations for others who are active or thinking about joining the blogging community.

Here I discuss my blogging history, monetization and what I feel bloggers need to do to become influential in their own niches and markets.

So read the Interview with Justin Germino and let me know how you think it turned out.

-Justin Germino

I had been a Blockbuster Total Access subscriber for over two years and had their highest end 3 at a time with unlimited trade in plan.  I was happy with their mail order DVD service and loved trading in the movies when I was done with them for a new DVD on the same day, yet I finally had to make the switch to Netflix for one simple reason.

When it comes to streaming instant movies to your TV, PC or Game Console Netflix blows the competition away.  Blockbuster doesn’t even offer free streaming and charges a rental fee for their “On Demand” movies which is just pointless and only further prevents them from competing with Netflix.

I myself have a Nintendo Wii and five minutes after signing up for Netflix I downloaded the Netflix App from the Wii Shop Channel, hooked it up to my Netflix account and was busy streaming live SpongeBob season episodes for my kids within 10 minutes.

Now I can have my kids instantly watch classic films like Tron, Clash of the Titans (the original) and some old Jackie Chan flicks without having to wait for them to arrive in the mail (my local Blockbuster store had a limited selection of movies and only one copy which was usually rented out of some older titles).

The funny thing is Netflix gives you DVD’s by mail and Instant Streaming movies for less per month than Blockbuster Total Access.  I am getting 2 dvd movies at a time plus streaming movies for $14.99 per month.  Blockbuster Total Access will charge you over $20 for 2 movies at a time plus unlimited in-store trades and $16.99 for 2 movies at a time with 5 in store trades per month, this is all with no streaming video.

It is ironic that someone who is as into movies and TV Shows as myself has taken so long to jump on board with Netflix, but now I can tell you my household is Netflix enabled and I don’t intend to look back.  I also did this and wound up saving $7 per month over staying with Blockbuster Total Access, so I have live streaming content and pay less per month than I was paying.

One thing, it does seem that Blockbuster Online had a slightly better movie search listing as you can sort movies by # per page, but Netflix claims to have a much larger selection.  I also see that Blockbuster also has some deals with movie studio’s and sometimes gets some movies 30 days before Netflix or Redbox but if it was a movie you wanted to see that badly, chances are you already saw it in theaters or would just buy it.

Blockbuster Total Access does offer Console Game rentals now at no extra cost which does actually give it a slight edge of Netflix, as I am using Gamefly + Netflix to cover my Game and DVD rentals.  With Blockbuster offering game console rentals, you can actually use just a Blockbuster Total Access membership for movies plus games which could save you money if you are using Gamefly.  I do love Gamefly and was using them before Blockbuster Total Access offered game rentals, and still was using them even after Blockbuster offered game rentals.

Who else is on board with Netflix and who has yet to try this service that gives you thousands of movies on demand so you don’t have to wait for one to arrive in the mail or drive out to your local video store anymore?

-Justin Germino

Today my youngest kid turns four years old and I can’t believe I am the father of a seven and four year old already.  Time really does fly when you have children and they grow faster than you can account for.  At four years old my youngest is every bit his brother isn’t.  Headstrong, stubborn, reckless and fearless he is a warrior at heart who loves to wrestle, fight, play Nerf Guns and adores all things Super Mario.  He is even watching the entire Super Mario Bros Show seasons on Hulu lately when his brother is in school.

We enjoy playing the Nintendo Wii together and my son loves Lego Indiana Jones and even loves the real movies with Indiana and the Crystal Skull being his favorite next to Temple of Doom.  We are waiting for the new Kirby’s Epic Yarn game to arrive from Gamefly which I know he is looking forward too.

For his birthday I got him a Wolverine game for the Leapster 2 (even though he wants a Didj like his brother), mostly he probably would want a Nintendo DS just to play Mario on it.  My sons mean the world to me and there is something special about each one.  I cherish the time I have with them and my youngest boy really is a different experience than raising my oldest, both love to play with their dad but their outlook on life and the world is so different and they each have their unique personalities.

Happy 4th Birthday to my youngest son,

-Justin Germino

I was pondering that if I had never started my blogs and all I did was write content for AssociatedContent.com how much money could I have made over the past two years with over 3,000 article submitted to AssociatedContent instead?  AssociatedContent offers me on average $2.50 – $3.00 for each article I submit for up front payment, so even if 50% of my articles qualified for upfront payment this would have been about $1,500 in up front payments plus probably an estimated $500 in performance payments over two years.  So lets say about $2,000 over two years would have been what I would make had I written exclusively for AssociatedContent.com instead of blogging.

This isn’t bad considering there are no web hosting fees at all, and you don’t have to worry about plugins, SEO or much anything else.  You can still promote on your usual channels and I highly recommend sites like Helium and AssociatedContent if you want to get paid for freelance writing but don’t want the hassle and extra effort of hosting and running your own blogs.  That being said, I did make over $5,500 from my blogs over the same period of time which is a bit more than double and even with my hosting fee’s of $300 bucks and some advertising costs here and there, it is more profitable to run blogs though there is a lot more work than just writing articles when you run your own blog.

When sponsored blog opps dipped a little bit in October, I turned to Associated Content and wrote 4 articles for them each earning just over $3 in up front payments to bring in some extra dough.  I can churn out an article at about one in 15-20 minutes and I figure if I wrote and submitted four articles an hours and did 5 hours per week I could make about $240 per month just in up front payments from AssociatedContent.  Of course if I were to generate this much content for AssociatedContent I would not have any ability to generate content for my own blogs unfortunately, plus there is no guarantee every article will pay for up front.

Helium seems to offer better pay per performance, but lacks the free up front submission and payments as AssociatedContent.  Combining both networks and even using the same articles on one as the other can still yield some benefits, I suspect a very prolific writer could make in excess of $400 per month by leveraging both Helium and AssociatedContent by only writing about 20 hours per week.  If they did this full time and churned out 10-12 articles per day they might even be able to make a lot more.

This is a fairly good option to make some extra money for SAHD and SAHM who want to augment the family income a little bit without wanting to invest the time and effort into running your own website or blog.  Simply write articles and make some money from them its as simple as that.

Some others write content for sites like Hubpages, Redbubble and others but these are pure commission based on pageviews/affiliate sales and you don’t have the option to earn up front or win prizes for best article like you can with Helium or A/C.

-Justin Germino

More than anything I hope that I can instill some of my experience and advice on what mistakes not to make when they first become adults and start carving their way into this world. I intend to spend the next decade or so drilling lessons I have learned into their heads in the hopes they don’t repeat the same mistakes many of us have made or continue to make.

Such as not saving enough of your paycheck for emergencies or purchasing items on credit because you can afford the monthly payment. The lessons not only are financial ones, but life lessons as well. Though my wife and I have been together since we were teenagers and we married after I turned twenty one years of age we wouldn’t recommend anyone marrying at such a young age due to the difficulties you will likely encounter from not being mature enough or living on your own first.

Still, more lessons would be to make sure you do something that makes you happy above all else and to never give up, but try your hardest and keep on trying to do whatever you want.  Never let people tell you you can’t make it, or can’t do it.   Live life to the fullest and enjoy each day, don’t spent too much time dwelling on mistakes, failures which are just learning experiences but do spend some time learning so that you can improve and do better next time.

Never stop reading, never stop learning and never stop being kind, generous and as helpful as possible in life.  Set an example for how you want the world to be and you wish people would be and be that example.

If only I can instill this in my children so that they take a good portion of it and live by these rules they may have a better start on life as an adult than I had.

-Justin Germino

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

You read about it in the paper and see it in the news regularly lately about how an explorer, hiker or camper went out for an adventure and hasn’t been heard of in several days requiring a rescue to be mounted.  With the latest mobile technology there are still vast dead areas in the wild and this is where you need to have something like the SPOT Satellite GPS messenger to make sure you will always have contact with friends and family no matter what your location is on the planet.

The SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger allows you to send and receive messages including simple 1 touch button to send a check in letting your family know you are all right and doing fine.  The 

See how the Check OK and Check In buttons work with this video:

Not only can you send messages anytime, but you can have friends and family check in and track your adventure in real time with the SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger which allows you to setup live map widgets and post your location to Facebook or Twitter.

Right now if you buy the SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger you will receive a bonus adventure kit which includes the following:

• 15% Service Discount Coupon
• Flotation Case for those who kayak or explore the seas
• Micro LED Flashlight
• Safety Whistle
• Carabiner Keychain
• Lanyard to hang your SPOT from your neck for easy access
• Safety Tips Bandanna with dozens of SPOT tips

Whether you are a camper, backbacker, sailor, hunter, climber or kayaker it is important you make sure you can safely communicate with your closest relatives from any spot on the globe if you should run into trouble. The SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger will help keep you safe and keep your friends and family updated with your location on your adventures.

-Dragon Blogger

I have loved the 1982 Tron movie since I was a kid and it has always been a habit to watch it at least once every few years for nostalgia sake. The preview and hype surrounding the new Tron: Legacy film has me hopeful that the movie will not just be a poor sequel but actually be something worth watching, owning and talking about. I really like that Jeff Bridges is a part of the sequel and reprising his role as Kevin Flynn albeit much older.

I also really enjoyed playing the Tron game back on the Commodore Amiga computer when it release. This movie brings back memories and it is funny to see Tron action figures decorating the toy aisles at Walmart lately.