Justin Germino Ramblings

So I was watching National Geographic the other day about unusual animal friendships and they showcased this older clip from 1999 about a Kitten and Crow who had become friends for four years together. The cat and crow would play with each other, taunt each other and pal around the yard of this family home. It totally baffled crow experts at the time on how two species so vastly different and opposed (since cats can eat baby crows) would somehow make a connection that causes them to enjoy each others company and interact like they truly had a friendship. If you somehow haven’t seen this YouTube Video which has more than 6 million views, then watch this you won’t believe your eyes how this Kitten and Crow interact with each other:

This had me thinking that under the right conditions even animals in the animal world can befriend and “care” about each other enough to refrain from the instinctual urge to kill each other. I have seen a Lion befriend a Deer (must have never starved) and other animals that would befriend completely different species. I have seen dogs and cats befriend each other where both were raised since puppies and kittens in the same household, but never saw the odd variety of wild animals become friends I have seen in this show.

It makes you wonder why a species like Humans as advanced as we are can’t put aside cultural and ideological differences and be friends without ignorance, bigotry and hatred running rampant in this world.

There just isn’t enough friendship in life, treasure your friends no matter what race or species they are and open your mind to accepting anyone as a friend.

-Justin Germino

Okay, thanks to Blogs With Wings having a post about the author “avatarizing” herself I thought it would be pretty funny to see how one of my profile photo’s would look like after being “avatarized”.

The Avatarize Yourself website is actually from McDonalds and I just actually saw it for the first time a few days ago, which is ironic because I am sure it has been around for quite awhile.

Here is the photo I uploaded to be Avatarized:

Here is what I look like as an angry Na’vi:

Pretty funny, the Happy expression has my eyes too widespread apart, my face looks like my Boston Terriers where I am a Na’vi with Fishbowl eyes.

-Justin Germino

Hybrid cars are known for being silent under twenty miles per hour and virtually undetectable by audio means under five miles per hour.  This is why according to the governments auto safety agency that in 2009 Hybrid cars are twice as likely to be involved in pedestrian collisions at speeds under twenty miles per hour than non-hybrid cars.  Hybrids also are a bane to the blind or visually impaired as they rely on audio cues to help determine if cars are nearby on the road.

Automakers all seem to be taking this seriously and already you can start finding some Hybrid cars like the Nissan Leaf having an artificial whirring sound on the vehicles to help people hear when the car is approaching.  General Motors, Toyota and other companies are following suit before the Government makes it a requirement that all Hybrid or Electric cars produce an audible noise that can make people aware of their presence.  I think this is a good idea and that the companies should be on top of it.

We all want cars to be quieter, but if cars were completely silent they will clearly pose more of a risk, especially to children and others who cross the road and might not always be so aware of looking all the time but the sound of a car is enough to warn them.  My three year old for instance walks down the side of a road and when he hears a car or a truck he immediately speeds up toward his mother or me and lets us know that a car or truck is coming and he doesn’t want to get “crushed” and this is a prime example of a kid hearing the car coming from behind and knowing it is approaching before he sees it.

So remember if driving one of the older model Hybrids that are nearly silent at lower speeds to be double aware of pedestrians and see if they are making eye contact and notice your car visually, they probably will not hear the car coming if you are going under 20 miles per hour.

-Justin Germino

I have been a Firefox user for many years to the point where I don’t ever open an Internet Explorer Browser lately, but with Firefox having more and more problems with Flash, Javascript and other websites causing the browser to render slowly or crash I find myself using Google Chrome more and more often for casual surfing and turning to Firefox only for the Firebug and other addons that offer debug and advanced functionality.  Google Chrome however is nearly caught up in addons and I compared a few addons that were identical between Firefox and Chrome and found the same addons cause worse performance problems with Firefox than they do with Chrome.  In addition I grew tired of my Firefox browser consuming over 700mb of RAM if I leave it open for more than five hours and just do a casual amount of surfing and work on the browser.

So I decided to try and make a full switch to Google Chrome by setting it as the default browser, and I found that my instinct is to Open Firefox.  For some reason I still find the simplistic Chrome interface a little foreign and the browser is outside of my “comfort zone”.  I do notice that everything works faster in WordPress (Editor mode), Uploading images…etc are all faster in Google Chrome than with Firefox 3.6 and I am trying to retrain my instincts to open Firefox to instead focus on using Chrome exclusively.

So far I haven’t run into anything that has caused me trouble in Google Chrome and other than the extra addons I had like Alexa Bar, FireBug, YSlow and such for Firefox, I am exclusively using Google Chrome.  I even installed the StumbleUpon Toolbar for Chrome and the SEOQuake Toolbar which runs much faster on Chrome than on Firefox.

My initial testing of Firefox 4 Beta 1 showed the browser to be highly unstable and not ready for public release, but I am hoping that Mozilla can catch up and improve its speed and performance with Firefox 4 and regain some of its internet glory that it lost to Opera and Chrome over the past few years.  In case you didn’t know, all the major sites are touting that Chrome and Opera are the fastest browsers on the web right now and in my own tests you can surf faster with Chrome and Opera.

I actually have five browsers installed on my machine (Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10.6, FireFox 3.6, Google Chrome, and Gecko).  I use all of these browsers to test how my sites render on various browsers, but I also use them to handle multiple sessions.  I need to be logged into 2 Google Analytics or Google AdSense accounts at the same time, or 2 separate Twitter accounts.  Because all applications set 1 cookie only, you can’t have multiple user sessions in the same browser space to the same application so this forces me to work with multiple browsers at the same time at night when I am doing a variety of administrative work for my own blogs and my wife’s blogs at the same time.

In the end I really think the Google Chrome browser is pretty fantastic.  What is your favorite browser and why?

-Justin Germino

So my wife and I had split up our tasks the other evening and she had to drive from Casa Grande to the valley to do some business for her company Rock Along Productions, while I drove the kids downtown to take them to swim lessons. She called me 1/2 way into swim lessons that the rear passenger tire blew out on the I-10 going 75mph and she barely made it to the side of the road safely. It would have taken me almost an hour and a half to get to her position, so I suggested she call the roadside assistance.

Unfortunately road side assistance was at least an hour out but a nice bystander pulled off the freeway and changed her tire for her. It is always a decent thing when somebody does an act of kindness and there are far too few incidents where people lend a hand anymore. She and I were appreciative and thanks to a full sized spare my wife was able to get back to Casa Grande where we looked at local tire companies and finally decided to take our tires in.

This was the condition of the tire that blew out, scary stuff having this happen on a freeway:

Meanwhile, our car was 8 years old and the tires were at least 4-5 years old so we decided to replace all four tires since the tread was worn down on the other 3. Instead of 2 star rating tires we decided to get much higher quality tires with 100,000 mile warranty and lifespan.

Hopefully we won’t deal with tire blowouts for a while.

Thanks to the unknown dude who pulled over on the I-10 to help my wife and change her tire.

-Justin Germino

So a family was giving Donut who is a seven year old Boston Terrier female up and we decided to open our home and foster her before we determine if we want to keep her with our family. She gets along very well with the kids and is already housebroken and has a great and loving personality. Porky who is our two year old male Boston Terrier wasn’t aggressive but did start getting a little rough with her as they started checking each other out and determining the pecking order.

Donut now makes our household a two Boston Terrier household for the first time since Gouda our first Boston Terrier had to be put to sleep in November 2009 for having violent seizures.

Here are some pictures of Donut joining the family (I think she will work out fine):

She has some funny behaviors like trying to nurse on your arm when you sit on the couch with her, she nuzzles her mouth in the inside of your elbow and you do have to keep reminding her not to do it. I haven’t seen a dog with this behavior before but have seen nursing instincts with cats. She also sits on command and is able to open doors with latches by herself by jumping up on the handle and pulling at the same time. I wound up sleeping downstairs on the couch last night while my wife and Porky slept in the bedroom upstairs while we got her acclimated to her new environment.

-Justin Germino

I enjoy two types of PC games mostly and those are Real Time Strategy (RTS) Games and Role Playing Games (RPG) games. I have not purchased a PC game in about two years for my computer (not since Guild Wars and the expansion packs). I did purchase Starcraft Gold Box for my son and play with him over the LAN, but I don’t consider that purchase for myself (I did purchase and play Starcraft I and Brood Wars back in the late 90’s, ironic that I had to buy the same game again 14 years later).

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty will likely be the next PC Game I purchase when it releases on July 27th 2010. I am such a fan of Blizzard and the teaser trailers have been so amazing that I am looking forward to delving into the Real Time Strategy game series that set the bar so high over a decade ago. I have heard some negative things about the Battle.NET 2 and how it works, I also don’t even know if it will support playing my son over our local LAN without Battle.NET like the original did. But I don’t really care very much either way, unlike most people who play RTS games I play them for the Single Player Story mode. I don’t really have the time to do constant WAN battles with other live players. I enjoy games where I can join, play for thirty minutes then save it and continue where I left off at a later date.

So I will likely play Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty just for its single player mode and storyline, but unlike with StarCraft 1 where I took an entire week vacation to play the game. I will likely only be able to play StarCraft II on nights and weekends (I am just too busy at work to take vacation just to play a game during the day). Though I miss the days when I could take time off to do just such trivial things.

Who else is looking forward to StarCraft II and do you think the hype and the legendary Blizzard Entertainment will have another winner?

-Justin Germino

Finally we took our new Tracker V14 Guide boat to Woods Canyon Lake in Northern Arizona yesterday to do a little fishing for trout. We love to fish in the Rim country and the weather in Northern Arizona is about 25 degrees cooler than it is down in the Southern part of the state. The smell of fresh pine trees and the lake is always a pleasant experience. My kids were outfitted with brand new life jackets and we even brought my dog Porky on the boat with us.

We arrived at Woods Canyon Lake after about a three and a half hour drive from Casa Grande and had a little trouble backing the boat trailer into the water, funny thing trying to reverse a boat trailer from a Truck and it is pretty tricky as the trailer bends and turns in ways you don’t want it to. After about five minutes however we were able to get the boat into the water and released from the trailer. We were all loaded and in taking off with our battery powered motor.


Unfortunately, you see those darkening clouds behind me?

We were on the water not more than two hours when a massive thunderstorm started rolling in on top of us, I managed to snap these photos of the incoming storm before I had to put my camera away before it would get wet and be ruined.

The storm came down fast and furious, at first we just docked the boat at the shore and tied it to a tree hoping the storm would abate. After an hour the storm only intensified and the lightning and thunder was booming so loud that my dog was whimpering when the rain drops fell on him. We had to hitch the boat up in the pouring rain and I had to jump into the lake up to my waist getting my sneakers, socks, pants and shirt completely soaked.

We all rode back in the truck to Phoenix stopping for some hot coffee at Jack in the Box in Payson (which unfortunately had no fresh coffee left and some older cold coffee they just heated in a microwave). As we were driving to Payson though the storm grew so severe that hail the size of moth balls were slamming into the truck and the boat for about ten minutes. I swear the temperature was in the high fifties and with me being completely soaked I was so cold I had to have the heat turned up in the car with the dog laying on my lap so I could absorb some of his body heat.

All in all it was an adventure that was spend with 6 hours of driving and only two hours on the water. The kids had a good time even though we caught no fish and most of the time was spent weathering a savage thunderstorm. This was one heck of a first time to bring the new boat up to Woods Canyon Lake.

-Justin Germino

Blogging and Social Media Safety is a topic that I have seen come up on Twitter several times before and I always find it a little scary when people will broadcast something that may compromise the safety of themselves or their family. One rule of thumb is that when running a blog or social media account that is tied in any way to your real identity you do not want to broadcast that your entire family will be going out of town for a week ahead of time.

It is all too easy for someone to lookup where you live and especially for people who may follow you in the same city and state by looking up your location on Twitter, Foursquare or any other social media service where you may attach your location to. By broadcasting your absence you can potentially open your home up to invasion as people take advantage of those “vacations” to know you won’t be home.

This is a little less risky if you are leaving somebody to tend to your home when traveling and if you do broadcast your trip on your blog you should always mention that someone will be watching or staying at your place while you are gone.

For some cases it is part of your job to broadcast where you are going, such as for a business trip or to an industry trade show…etc. These are more reasons why I think people who have public personalities should consider having alarm systems and security measures in their home. As criminals get more wise to Social Media (besides the affiliate selling spammers) you may find poachers just looking to find out who is away from their house on FourSquare and take advantage of poaching their home while they are away.

Realistic or is this just paranoia, what are your thoughts?

-Justin Germino

I have been far busier these past few weeks at work than I was previously. As I have taken on a new role my challenges lie in making the transition to learn my new position while delegating and letting go of some of the work I did in my former position.

Life is a constant transition and I believe if your are not challenging yourself to learn, achieve and develop new goals on a regular basis you risk becoming complacent and stagnating in skills and life experiences. Remember that whenever you are confronted with something new to do and no matter how daunting the task at hand may seem the experience of what you are doing will be worth it.

Life is a series of challenges, you can’t hide from trying new things.

-Justin Germino