Justin Germino Ramblings

I have decided to start using Windows Live Writer as my primary tool for writing blog posts in an effort to better keep track of posts and minimize the amount of editing time I have to do on them.

Previously I would just type a post in text pad or some other generic text editor, then I would have to copy/paste into the WordPress editor and manually make any font style changes, add images…etc.   I had to write all of my posts in HTML format which means manually typing in all the <a href> code for links, tables and other stuff.

Windows Live Writer directly connects and publishes to your WordPress blog but appears to have one limitation (Post Scheduling is missing).  I do like that you can hit F2 and get access to your Slug, Schedule Post Date, Excerpt and so much more.  I even found a plugin for Live Writer that allows it to include the SEO tags for All in One SEO WordPress plugin and will be doing a post about that on my Technology Blog in a few days.

How many of my fellow bloggers are using Live Writer to do their blogging?

-Justin Germino

Who is Burton Guster?

The Wikipedia entry highlights the character Burton Guster from the USA Network TV Show Psych who is played by actor Dulé Hill.  Burton “Gus” Guster is best friend and coworker to Shawn Spencer psychic detective and together they run the agency “Psych”.

One of the funniest aspects of the show is how Shawn and Gus rib on each other like high school teenagers constantly in every episode.  Shawn also refuses to introduce Gus by his real name to clients and always uses some gag or nickname for him.

I have been looking for the list of all the nicknames that Gus has been called in the previous three Psych seasons and was happy that this was included in the Burton Guster Wikipedia entry.

This is the full list of aliases or nicknames for Burton Guster from Psych and some of the names were so hilariously outrageous like “Old Iron Stomach” or “Lemongrass Gogulope” which were two of my favorite.

Die Harder, Matt, Bighead Burton, Fingers, Homeskillet, Big Baby Burton, Burt the Billowy Bear,Curtis, Blackstar, Chocolate Columbo, Magic Head, Spellmaster, SuperSmeller or SuperSniffer, Slicks, Peter Panic, Gus T.T. Showbiz, OvaltineJenkins, Schoonie “U-Turn” Singleton, Vernest Lambert Watkins, Bud (from “The Cosby Show“), Nick Nack, Bruton Gaster, Lavender Gooms,Lemongrass Gogulope, Squirts MacIntosh, Weepy Boy Santos,Stewart Lee, Dr. Mc (random Bushmen) Took, François, GalileoHumpkins, Gus “Silly-Pants” Jackson, Shmuel Cohen,Methuselah Honeysuckle, Shutterfly Simmons, Paddy Simcox, Chesterfield McMillan (and wife), Felicia Fancybottom, Tan, Ernesto Agapito Garces con y a de Abelar, LongbranchPennywhistle, Scrooge Jones, D’Andre Pride, HummingbirdSaltalamacchia, Wally Ali, Art Vandelay, Dequan “Smallpox” Randolph, Trapezius Milkington, Sterling Cooper, Burton “Oil Can” Guster, Hollabackatcha, Jazz Hands, Gus Brown, John Slade, Detective Miles, Greg, Doughnut Holschtein, Ron Davis, Bob Adams, Harry Munroe, Rich Fingerland, Black Magic, Cheswick, Shawn, Magic Eight Ball Head, Shaggy Buddy Snap, Ghee Buttersnaps aka “The Heater,” The Vault of Secrets, Clementine Woolysocks, Pinky Guscatero, Guts, Old Iron Stomach, Bruce Lee , John Jacob Jingley-Schmidt, Santonio Holmes, Deon Richmond, EmCee Clap Yo Hands.

If you haven’t been watching USA Psych on Television yet you are missing out on an incredibly funny and clever show that lampoons pop culture in the extreme.  It makes fun of everything you loved and hated from the 80’s to now and even can be found spoofing Twitter, Facebook, as well as old movies and actors of all types.  I used to love how Shawn compared Gus to a black actor in nearly every episode like “You look just like Denzel in Glory” or you are so “Wesley Snipes right now”.

USA Psych is one of the best shows on television and I recommend you rent or purchase the seasons and start from the beginning if you haven’t been watching it.

-Justin Germino

This post is dedicated to my oldest son who is about to turn seven in three months.

My son is very conversational and talks about many topics and issues that would be found on the news and in world events.  We also speak to him about our lives, jobs, and he knows all about my blogging and why I do it as well.

My son often will tell me when he gets a little older we wants to start a website or blog and use it to raise food for charity and help children around the world.  He even said when I start my "Mason dot com" organization I will use it to help feed people and deliver meat and food to people who are hungry.

He wants to make a difference in this world, he hates pollution, littering, global warming and the oil spill.  He will be the first person to pick up trash in the street and throw it away properly and volunteers to put empty bottles in our recycle bin. 

As a computer enthusiast himself I find that he has a hard time "playing with toys" anymore, and at six years old he just wants to be playing Starcraft 2, Age of Empires III or other online RTS or Role Playing Games.  Games that are much more advanced than I would have been able to play when I was his age. 

I envision him joining Greenpeace or some other organization that donates their time to go abroad and help people or the environment.  He mentions that he wants to be in science / chemistry or medicines though he often thinks about robotics and being a doctor as well.

At six years old this boy has so much potential and his heart is so full of good, there isn’t an evil or mean bone in his body.  His only faults are laziness and lack of patience (particularly with his three year old brother) which are very normal for his age.

For the rest of my life no matter what I accomplish and manage to achieve, I already know that my sons will be my greatest accomplishments. 

-Justin Germino

Finally after winning the Nintendo Wii + Wii Fit Plus from the LeapFish 100K Cash Dash contest back in May 2010 I have received my package on Saturday.

I won not only a brand new Wii with Wii Sports Resort but also the Wii Fit Plus package with the Balance board.

So this was like a $300 prize package and combined with my Dell Inspiron laptop which was another $400 or so retail I won about $700 in prizes from this contest.

Alas, I rapidly lost my lead when some other major players joined the contest and the Apple Macbook, iPad and LCD TV were won by other players.  I am still happy with what I have won so far.

I already own both the Wii and Wii Fit plus, so my wife and I have decided to create a joint contest in early September where we will be giving away both prizes to readers.  We are working to formulate the contest so that it will involve both her blog and my blog and maybe bring in some extra buzz and traffic.

So stay tuned readers, somebody could win a Wii and Wii Fit plus just by being a fan of DragonBlogger.com and RockAlongProductions.com stay tuned!

-Justin Germino

How do you punish children properly?

This simple question has no real solution as dealing punishment is a very personal decision to each set of parents and family.  There are many books and subject matter experts who have recommendations, opinions and then there is an equal number of “experts” who refute or counter those books.  So ultimately it comes down to how each parenting unit decides they want to formulate punishments.  If there are two parents in the same household (hey, this is a new age and there are fewer traditional family units) then you need to make sure there is open communication on punishment styles and how you feel about the various punishment methods that people use to try and discipline their children.

My wife and I were on the same page from day one and that means punishments shall not involve hitting, spanking, or any form of physical or emotional damage which could be taken to far or borderline as abuse.  Now, if your child is in the middle of the street about to run into traffic, you have no choice but to grab them and pull back immediately.  This also doesn’t preclude the occasional swat as any mother Lioness or Tiger would do to their cub once in a while.

Recently our kids (who are so privileged and are completely unable to recognize it) are picking up some bad habits, particularly with each other.  This stems in part from the oldest being on summer vacation and having too much time around the youngest.  They fight like monstrosities and it is escalating to hitting each other and one of them gets hurt every time.  This is normal, I myself fought with my brother quite often growing up and don’t really see this as abnormal for the most part.

In order to try and convince the kids to evaluate the behavior we have started stripping privileged and this started with taking away the computer from the oldest and removing the Wii and Television from the youngest.  My oldest kid is so smart, funny and knows where his faults lie and what he does wrong and knows he must correct his behavior to earn privileges back.

Meanwhile, I hate having to discipline them and often don’t know if I am being too harsh or justified in trying to stop behaviors before they get worse.  My wife of course feels the same way and we go back and forth on the issue frequently.

Disciplining kids is the least fun aspect of parenting in my opinion, I hate having to punish them yet all parents to do to help get children to correct their behavior.

-Justin Germino

So was gaming Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty in campaign mode almost every night for the past few weeks doing 2 campaign solo missions per night.  I work as many bonuses as I can and am playing the "Normal" mode.  I am not that good of an SC2 player that I can do hard mode at this time.  Each mission takes about an hour or so to complete so far.

The Dig is the last mission I completed and it has you investigate a Terran mining operation that went silent.  You are sent some marines who just go into the mission and encounter some Protoss early on.

You quickly find the base after being deployed two tanks who help you fight off some incoming Protoss armies.  When taking over the base you need to build turrets and deploy tanks really fast as you have Protoss armies attacking from two sides.

The coolest thing about The Mine mission is you get control of this high powered Laser Drill which can target enemy Protoss Zealots and Archons and wipe them out quite rapidly.  Using the shift key to select multiple targets so the Drill can automatically just fire one after the other without you having to micromanage it as much is a really nice feature.

Bottom Line:

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is fantastic and one of the best PC games I have played in years.  The single player story campaign is engaging, entertaining and keeps you hooked.  I haven’t been this addicted to a game since when Guild Wars released originally.

-Justin Germino

According to an article by the Associated Press and written by Sharon Theimer that I read from the Casa Grande Dispatch newspaper, short snouted dogs are less likely to survive being transported in airplanes than their long nosed brethren.

In a report of all dog deaths since May 2005 Bulldogs with 108 purebreeds reported nearly 1/4 (25 dogs) were English Bulldogs who died during transportation.  Pugs were second with 11 deaths and French bulldogs accounted for 6 deaths.

These result from heat increases in the cargo section of a plane combined with a dogs increased panting and breathing rate due to nervousness.  Short nosed breeds have a skull formation that restricts their airways and if they can’t pass enough air they can pass out or overhead as panting is the only way they can cool off.

Though short nosed pets are more at risk of being transported on flights the overall death rate of pets flying on a plane is very low overall compared to the number of pets that are transported.  Still this is little consolation to the owner of a beloved family member who may lose a pet being transported in a plane.

-Justin Germino

I want to highlight that one of my favorite blogging networks BlogEngage has now offered out 100% AdSense revenue sharing to bloggers who are active members of the community and meet certain criteria.  How many article submission sites exist that actually share the AdSense earnings of your submitted articles with you as it is?

BlogEngage had previously a 50% AdSense share rate, but they are bumping up to 100% for bloggers who want to go the extra step and help them promote.

Read the article How to Earn 100% AdSense Revenue on BlogEngage to determine how to configure your account to setup AdSense earnings on your submitted articles as well as how to earn your way to 100% earnings.

Every blogger who writes decent articles should be submitting them to BlogEngage, we are talking about a rapidly growing article submission site that also offers networking and the ability to guest blog.  You can find and meet some of the best up and coming bloggers in a variety of niches in the BlogEngage community.  Many of these I have been following for the past six months or longer.

BlogEngage already has an Alexa rank of just over 11k and who doesn’t want their article to be indexed on a site with that good of an Alexa rating.  This site is relatively new and within a year will probably garner 2x as much traffic as it gets now.

Using BlogEngage is simple, just sign up and register for the blogger network.  This is no simple sign up and spam articles to it submission site, you need to join the community.  Proudly display your blogengage badge or actively participate as guest blogger and request an invitation from the forums.  If the quality of your blog and content are approved then you will be sent a registration invitation.  

This careful selection and screening keeps the BlogEngage Community tight and everyone gets to know each other’s work pretty quickly.  You establish yourself by voting and commenting on other bloggers articles and don’t just expect to submit content and not be involved or you will be kicked out of the system.

I love to check out the "Upcoming Blogs" most often and I really like that when you submit an article it sends you to the upcoming posts where you can find the latest blog posts and vote them up.  Articles only get "published" when they reach 10 votes.

BlogEngage is one of my favorite online article submission sites that also servers as a blogging community.  Now go out and network with other great bloggers.

-Justin Germino

After nearly three weeks of working with a websites DNS provider, Hosting provider and contacting the web administrator I have finally noticed that all of my stolen content has been purged from the offending site. This has me relieved and I owe a huge thanks to Jonathan Bailey from PlagiarismToday for helping me find the hosting provider and providing templates of DMCA Copyright infringement notices that I was able to use to send to the offending sites hosting provider.

The easiest way for content providers to steal your content is not by cutting and pasting your article as you would think. What these content poaching websites do is read in your RSS feed with wordpress plugins and then spin your entire feed into a blog post on their site. There are only a few ways to try and plug this loophole up and those include the following:

Use Summary RSS Feeds instead of Full Post Feed

This is an effective way to ensure that nobody can read in your full feed and steal 100% of your article, the bad thing is this prevents your regular readers and fans from being able to read your full content from the convenience of their email or RSS reader. So it is a trade off and one that I heavily considered and would consider in the future if I run into this situation again.

Add Copyright Information To Your Feed

Okay, this one I did myself just recently. I downloaded and installed the RSS Footer plugin for WordPress by Joost De Valk which is a fantastic plugin which allows you to add custom text, links and information to the bottom of your RSS feed. It is so simple to install and configure and anyone who reads in your full feed will have the extra task of manually having to strip out your copyright information or else they would be blatantly displaying they are stealing your content on their site.

Summary

Those are pretty much the only two mechanisms I can see to try and thwart poachers, but ultimately if they want to steal/copy your content verbatim there is nothing that prevents them from cut/pasting the text right off your site. Though this will help deter and easily find anyone who feeds your RSS into their site, this is especially true if you put a backlink to your site in the RSS Footer where you will get a pingback potentially notifying you that another site is reading in your feed.

-Justin Germino

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty was released with all this hype and so much to live up to.  I bought it the morning it came out and took the day off of work to play it with my six year old son and have to say that the game was very well done but doesn’t revolutionize the real time strategy genre, nor does it take advantage of as much as it could have.

One of the biggest strengths about Starcraft II is that it looks and feels just like the original Starcraft, but this is also one of its biggest drawbacks.  Most RTS games have evolved to let you have multiple “worker” units assist in constructing a building to allow for faster building of structures, but this isn’t in Starcraft 2.  This is however a strategic decision of course, as Protoss and Zerg don’t build facilities but warp them in or mutate into them, so having Terrans be able to combine units to build structures would give too much of an advantage to the Terran race.

I really like the Addon of the Terran Barracks which allows you to build and release multiple soldiers at the same time, this allows you to create an army of soldiers with a few barracks very quickly.  The Zerg in Starcraft 2 are even more bountiful and numerous than the first game.  Toe for Toe unless you leverage bunkers and massive amounts of soldiers and healers (which are awesome and kept from Broodwars) you won’t stand a chance repelling the Zerg armies in Hard mode.  I also really enjoyed the interactive backgrounds such as on the Lava planet where every five minutes lava would rise up from the ground and incinerate any units that weren’t moved to safer high ground.  There is also missions based on time of day where you have to wipe out enemy during the day and defend your base from onslaught at night.

Installing the game takes a very long time, the game takes 12 Gigabytes of disk space but you get to watch an overview of the original Starcraft games and listen to some audio narration during the install.

The game itself is a mammoth graphics hog and my older GeForce 7800 GT with 512mb Video Ram was barely able to play the game at 1920×1200 resolution without lagging and staggering.  I could only muster medium graphics settings and detail but the artwork was simply wonderful to look at.  The way buildings explode with a shockwave, the artistic style of the units are all very nice.

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