Justin Germino Ramblings

Decided to change up my Taco Bell order recently and try the new Cantina Taco’s that they were advertising.  This was the first time Taco Bell actually offered a Carnitas taco that I was aware of, and the double corn tortilla with marinated meats, onion, cilantro and a lime wedge seemed to be a nice throwback to a simpler yet tasty meal.

I ordered the combo meal which comes with three street tacos and you can mix and match the flavors, plus a drink.  I decided to try one of each flavor (steak, chicken and pork (carnitas).

I did find them to be quite tasty and enjoyed all 3, particularly the carnitas which was saucier and juicier than the chicken and steak.  I would rank the steak ones second and chicken third.  The chicken had a decent marinated flavor, but was a little dry.

Overall, I found the cantina tacos from Taco bell to be on par and very similar in quality to Rubio’s Baja Fresh and other street tacos.  The flavor and style of the tacos was above what you would expect from typical fast food and I really enjoyed them.  They are pretty small though, and 3 street tacos is barely enough to fill a guy with a big appetite like me.

-Justin Germino

I was assisting my wife with her work last weekend, she runs a music production company and recently signed on to become a band manager to local Arizona rock band Tridon and I took my laptop and attended one of their band rehearsals working on various work related activities with rifle plugs in my ear while the band rehearsed their set with a new prospective bass player.

My wife has always been very artistic and her love of art in all its forms really broadens my horizons as a person.  I realize that between my day job, my blogging hobby, my gaming and my love of watching movies that 99% of my activities would involve staying at home being in front of one type of screen or another.

By contrast my wife does lots of blogging, social media and other work from home during the day but on several nights and weekends she either puts on music productions, assists with Tridon’s shows, rehearsals or attends other local music venues and concerts in order to network and keep up with the business.

So really I owe getting out of the house at all to my wife who keeps me busy running around to one venue or another on Friday nights or Saturday nights and without her I would probably be a class 5 hermit.  Meanwhile, being at a band rehearsal is something the average person does not see unless they are in the music business.  It is something very different watching bands rehearse parts of the same song over and over again, jam and sort of mesh their musical styles and artistic abilities to form something cohesive and borderline magical.

So I get to work within 3 foot proximity to a full rock band rehearsing and I must say that the 100 pack of rifle plugs that my wife bought were among the best investments as I would have blown out my ear drums for sure had I not had something to dampen the sound.  But it was kind of soothing listening to the background music while I was working, I didn’t find it a distraction at all actually, more like listen to an audio cd except it being live.

I would never have thought five years ago that I would be somehow involved in the local Arizona music scene and be involved with concerts, bands and it has definitely added to my life experience and is something very different from my regular day.  Sometimes it is good to have activities that are completely abstract or way outside your comfort zone, these things can help round you out as a person and keep you from becoming too isolated in only a handful of activities.

-Justin Germino

Can you actually run and walk better with a contoured footwear that has separate toe sleeves?

The Five Fingers footwear from Vibram USA is only one type of shoe in a list of shoes now that allow you to walk in a traditional barefoot style.  These shoes claim to reduce impact on the knees, ankles and ball of your foot as they allow you to walk the way nature intended.  When people walk barefoot they walk with the pads of their feet striking the ground first, but shoes have trained humans to walk with the ball of your foot striking the ground first.  This causes more impact to your joints and is not optimum for natural walking patterns.

The new Five Fingers shoes allow you to walk in natural rhythm while still offering support and protection for your feet from the ground.  They are for hiking, walking, running and just about any other outdoor activity where you need a more natural step with less impact.

I haven’t actually worn these shoes myself but the thought of them really intrigues me, I find myself wondering when I am running how much differently it would feel with one of these shoes.  I myself don’t like striking the heel of my foot to the ground first and I am curious to test this pair of shoes out someday.

Have you ever tried a pair of Vibram Five Fingers KSO shoes?  Do you know anybody who has?

I have read dozens of positive reviews on the shoes with there being only two more or less negative ones.  One being that they are uncomfortable to wear in the summer and can cause your feet to get hot, sweaty and stinky more than a normal shoe due to wrapping each toe.  The other is that some of the soles can be slippery on wet surfaces, but they have good traction for just about all other dry surfaces.

The hot and sweaty foot thing is something to consider when you live in the Arizona desert.

-Justin Germino

This gives new meaning to the joke parents tell kids like "don’t swallow watermelon seeds or you will grow a watermelon in your stomach".

A man named Ron Sveden had been coughing for months with lung problems and doctors were unable to find the issue.  Being elderly the man assumed he was developing lung cancer, and it was when one of his lungs collapsed that doctors made an unusual discovery.

A pea plant had started growing inside the mans lung and actually grew to be 1 1/2 inches long causing the lung to collapse.  The man who eats peas on a regular basis recalled possibly inhaling a pea down the wrong pipe in previous months while eating dinner.

The pea travelled down his windpipe and settled into his lung where it started growing roots and establishing itself.  Apparently a live human lung provides enough moisture and oxygen for a plant to get established.

This article was picked up by every major news outlet including the NY Post.

So watch out when eating your food, and when you choke and food goes down the wrong pipe, there is a slim chance it could just take root in your lung!

-Justin Germino

I recently wrote a guest article on Evoire.com about Optimizing SEO for SERP which laid out some of the best SEO tips I have garnered from the Internet and blogging over the past two years.

In this article I focus on ways to sculpt your website or blog articles to capitalize on SEO and all of the methods and tweaks that you should follow to help ensure the best SERP listing possible for your targeted keywords.  I didn’t focus on anything external like building backlinks, article submissions, Social Media…etc because It is all about focusing on the content and optimizing the content first.

Speaking of optimizing content, a few months ago I purchase Dave Doolin’s eBook "Blog Post Engineering" and I have to tell you that I have never seen a single book more dedicated to writing a single blog post.  This is one of the few eBooks I highly recommend and think is so valuable that I thought it worth sharing with my readers.  Even after blogging for two years I found a fountain of information and inspiration from reading Blog Post Engineering.

I particularly liked his table of context and how he explained the eBook worked and what each colored link meant.  He has a great chapter break out and this is one of the most professional eBooks I have ever read and I think looks and is far better than my own eBook I am working.  Because of this I have decided to focus on promoting David Doolin’s eBook instead of producing my own eBook and will use my eBook as a pure free giveaway instead.  I can’t create a better eBook myself and this is the eBook I am standing behind.

David is so confident you will like his eBook that he promises a complete and total refund if you are not satisfied within 90 days of purchasing the eBook.  Most wouldn’t even bother to offer a refund but to extend one to 90 days from purchase is uncanny.

So go ahead and purchase Blog Post Engineering and tell David Doolin that I sent you, let me know if you find the eBook as beneficial as I did.

If you are an experienced blogger, new blogger or someone who is thinking about starting a blog then I highly recommend you purchase this eBook. If I had this eBook two years ago when I first started blogging I would be shaved off at least a 6 month learning curve and be further along than I am now with my own blogging endeavors.

-Justin Germino

I am not tooting my own horn or anything, but when the original Starcraft came out I was such a devoted player that I ranked fairly well and had a better win to loss ratio than most players in the game. So imagine my surprise when delving into Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty to play some 1VS1 or 2VS2 battles I was not expecting to be literally obliterated at virtually all of the ten matches I have played. I did not win a single multiplayer vs game except for the one where it was me vs my six year old.

The good thing about Starcraft II is you can invite friends from Facebook, email or if they provide you with their "Starcraft User Number" you can add them as a friend with just their Starcraft user number. This is how I was able to add my son’s SC2 account (which is using one of the guest account cards provided with the game) I don’t want my son to have a Facebook account and he doesn’t have an email (he is only 6) so we were able to add each other by SC2 User Number only.

It seems that despite my strategies being fairly competent for the single player campaign, I just don’t have the speed or smarts to match many of these SC2 players online. Whats worse is that after ten losing battles (6 ranked) I would think that the Battle.NET system would pit me with players who were less experienced or had less wins, yet I am still pitted against players far superior to my skill level. I can tell by the profile pictures they have unlocked which take lots of points and therefore the player must be very experienced.

Note that the 2 Wins were from my six year old playing multiplayer while I was working.  He uses my account while I work during the day, I didn’t actually win a single match but my son managed to online.

Alas, nothing like a demoralizing string of losses in multiplayer to realize that you just aren’t that skilled at a game no matter how easy and fun the single player campaign appears to be.

From my own SC2 Multiplayer Battles I can tell you the following:

• Zerg rushes are dominant and early on can quickly take the game, this is no different than Starcraft 1.
• Protoss have some wicked air attacks and if they dominate the air then there is little defense against it.
• Terrans have two major methods of winning early, Ghosts with a Nuke strike against your base or a small army of Viking ships which can fly behind your SCV’s then convert to ground units and blast your resource gathers to kingdom come.

What I really like about Starcraft II is it shows the "Build Order" of your opponents, so after you lose you can see exactly what units and structures the person build and in what order. This allows you to hone your own strategies to see what you are doing wrong, or how slow you are compared to your opponent.

I find that in 2VS2 battles, you have 0 chance of winning if you aren’t paired with a person who is strong in multiplayer, one person has no way to carry a weaker player in the game.

-Justin Germino

There is nothing like being able to capitalize on popular or trending topics on the Internet for surges in traffic to your website or blog.  An example of this is my latest inclusion of articles about the Starcraft II videogame on this personal blog of mine. 

My blog was getting an average of 3,000 visits in the past thirty days which is only about 1/7th as much as my flagship blog DragonBlogger.com but the moment Starcraft II released and I was among the first to publish my review and some follow up posts my traffic surged.

We are talking about an 87% increase in traffic over the past thirty days as a result of my recent Starcraft II activity.  My personal blog received over 6500+ unique visits which is the highest amount of traffic in one month it has received in history.

Unfortunately as my blog is a personal blog once users read the Starcraft posts they are likely not to become regular visitors as my blog isn’t a gaming niche blog, and my wide varying topics make the blog only suited for people who want to follow my rants, ravings and whatever I talk about.  It is however good to get some traffic from getting in on something popular once in a while and I had done a post about Starcraft II back in September 2009 and that post received over 1500 pageviews in 30 days now in July 2010.

Bottom Line:

Blogging about current or breaking events and trending topics can bring you surges in traffic, but unless your blog is in the right niche for the topic this traffic surge will fizzle as your other content is unrelated and not likely to turn a reader into a subscriber unless they were so impressed by your writing and personality they want to follow you no matter what you write.

-Justin Germino

Stumbled across the movie trailer for Sucker Punch which comes out in 2011 and this is another Zach Snyder film (300, Watchmen) and so you know it is going to have a blend of CGI / Live action and be highly stylized. The film just looks like a cross between a video game and a live action movie with a female cast of heroines trying to battle their way out of a mental institution.

The dragon and enormous creature wielding a sort of mini-gun look incredible and the animation and artistic style are just breathtaking.

-Justin Germino

My Starcraft II account is only used by myself and my son from the same network in the same house.  Therefore I should always have the same public IP (unless my broadband provider sends me new IP address during DHCP renewal). 

So when I received this email from Blizzard about an unauthorized access to my account:

Due to suspicious activity, the Battle.net account contactme@dragonblogger.com has been locked. You logged into your account successfully at 12:57:20 on 2010-8-6 from the 175.242.12.5, but our system shows this IP isn’t your registered IP. We are concerned about whether your account has been stolen.

I became very concerned that my Starcraft II Battle.net account had been hacked, this IP address did not resolve on a reverse DNS lookup and I did a search on Arin Whois for the subnet and learned that it appeared to be a subnet owned by APNIC which clearly wasn’t my hosting provider.

OrgName:    Asia Pacific Network Information Centre 
OrgID:      APNIC
Address:    PO Box 2131
City:       Milton
StateProv:  QLD
PostalCode: 4064
Country:    AU

ReferralServer: whois://whois.apnic.net

NetRange:   175.0.0.0 - 175.255.255.255 
CIDR:       175.0.0.0/8 
NetName:    APNIC-175
NetHandle:  NET-175-0-0-0-0
Parent:     
NetType:    Allocated to APNIC
NameServer: NS1.APNIC.NET
NameServer: NS3.APNIC.NET
NameServer: NS4.APNIC.NET
NameServer: TINNIE.ARIN.NET
NameServer: NS2.LACNIC.NET
NameServer: SEC1.AUTHDNS.RIPE.NET
Comment:    
RegDate:    2009-08-03
Updated:    2010-07-30

I followed the suggestions by Blizzard and proceeded to reset my password to something even more secure, I was concerned that my license key may have been compromised or something.  In the meantime I am going to be on the lookout to see if it happens again and if it does I will contact Blizzard to investigate the matter further.

-Justin Germino

In reading some online studies and articles in the paper recently, it was theorized and speculated that people are so much more tied to their careers and work that families and relationships are suffering as a result more than they were three decades ago.

There aren’t many 8-5 jobs left out there and most people carry work home with them or work more than ten hours per day.  Still even more carry the dreaded leashes known as Blackberries tied to a corporate email system that keeps them plugged in 24×7 where they can often be bombarded with emails nights and weekends.

This makes it more important than ever to set aside some family time and it doesn’t matter if you have kids or not.  Make sure you carve out at least six to ten hours per week of “fun time” with your loved one or your children as these are the moments that will carry you through your life.  If you slave over work 60 hours per week while your children grow up and move out without so much as stopping to enjoy spending time with them, you will regret it and never be able to gain that time back.

I will share with my readers how I try to carve out some family time in my own busy schedule so that I set an example.  I don’t know if what I am doing is right or wrong, and even I feel guilty I don’t spend as much time with my wife and kids as I should, but I do the best I can.

Consider this:

I work about 55 hours per week at my day job, this is a steady 10 hours per day average plus another five hours spread out at nights/weekends.

I spend another 10-15 hours per week working on my blogs in the form of two hours per night and four hours on Sundays or so.  This totals to writing about 60+ blog articles per month and 30+ original poems per month every month for the past two years.

I also help my wife with her production company, blogs and self owned business about 5-10 hours per week.  This mostly involves graphic design, WordPress or internet work but occasionally involves helping her run shows in bars/venues which keeps me up until 3am on some nights.

How I carve out family time:

Weekdays:  I get up every morning about 5:30 or 6am and hang out with my kids before school/work.  I usually fix them breakfast and make some tea for my wife who usually gets up at around 7 – 7:30am.  I start work and seldom take a lunch break (when I do it is just to write my twitter poem).  I clock out of work at around 5pm – 7pm ish to always have a sit down dinner with my wife, we talk about news, our jobs and anything else that is pressing and shouldn’t wait for the evening.  This is also the time to help my son with any homework from school and engage in some activities with them for a while.

Kids get setup with a bed time movie at around 7pm and most of the time I will sit and watch with them for a while, or sometimes I have to go get some work done.  At this point my wife and I usually bring her laptop into my office and we work side by side for an hour or two listening to music together while we work almost shoulder to shoulder.

After kids are asleep and wife and I are done with working for the day by around 9pm, we unwind on the couch and I rub her feet/legs while we watch some DVR’d TV Shows or a rented movie.  Our favorite shows include: The Closer, White Collar, House, Deadliest Catch, Whale Wars and Psych (my favorite more than hers).

After about two hours of TV its off to bed, where every other night I will stay up and work on my blogs or some leftover work from my day job while she goes to sleep.  I will usually work until midnight or 1am before calling it a night.

Weekends:  This is where I get up at 6:30am and start doing as much yard work and housework as possible.  I usually do weeding, mow grass and every other landscaping chore before it becomes over 110 degrees out by 10am.  After about three hours of housework I bounce back and forth between spending the entire rest of the day playing with my kids.  I will do activities like wrestling with them, playing Nintendo Wii (we do this a lot), or playing PC with my six year old.  We also play some board games and occasionally watch a movie.  In the fall/winter when it isn’t 115 degrees out I will take them to the park, but I often take them for bug hunts in the early morning hours with nets and containers to catch spiders, crickets, cicadas, beetles and occasionally lizards.

We all have lunch together as a family and dinner together as a family and most Saturday or Sunday nights we will rent a family movie to watch together.  Twice a month we will go to see a family movie at the theater in the early Saturday morning or Friday evening hours.

On weekend nights my wife and I repeat the same schedule as weekdays where we work a little bit after the kids go to bed and then unwind in front of some TV together.

Somewhere in all of this hectic schedule I find time to workout 3 days a week for 30 minutes lifting weights, but I don’t work out enough to compensate for my eating habits.  I need to have better portion control and work out more often.

Summary

This was basically an example of how my life runs, it is very methodic and clockwork for the most part, every day and weekend playing out the same.  The exceptions are when we decide to take an improvised boat trip to the lake up north, or my wife and I have our family vacation and alone vacations a few times per year.  During vacation time there is no work and we just try to enjoy time with each other as a family or alone (my wife and I).

I don’t know if this is the best home/work balance but this routine works for me as best as possible.  My wife and I are both busy but we both have the luxury of working from home most of the time, so even when we are working we are in the vicinity of our kids and can keep tabs on them.

-Justin Germino