Justin Germino Ramblings

People need to pay attention to the articles that pepper the news about how companies are becoming more adept at screening and monitoring their own employees actions on various social networks like Twitter, Facebook and more. Even with freedom of speech and that you have the right to share anything and everything about your life online doesn’t mean that you should.

Like it or not every single employee of a company is a representative of that company and you are discovered saying something that may deface or devalue the companies image or brand then you are going to negatively impact the company even if you are speaking from your own personal experience and not representing the company officially in your own personal accounts.

Unless you are your own business and have full control over your employment and future you will want to be cautious about the breadcrumbs you leave about your life in the public domain of the internet. Teenagers who say things out of expression can have their words come back to haunt when they are in their twenties and looking for a job fresh from college.

People have been rejected from disability for posting about vacations on their Facebook, others have been fire for slandering or posting social media of themselves being improper on corporate property (they rightly deserve to be fired).

Bottom line, It is fun and can even be helpful and therapeutic to engage in social media and online conversations, but watch what you share with the world. Even though you have freedom of speech, use discretion (you never know who might read what you said later).

-Justin Germino

I took the day off of work to volunteer to help chaperon my son’s first grade glass at the Phoenix Zoo today. I was all to happy to volunteer and enjoy the opportunity to go with my six year old son on his 2nd field trip so far. I was thinking that it is ironic that spending a day assisting with chaperoning 20+ first graders at the Phoenix Zoo is more relaxing than work, that is how hectic my work has been lately folks.

I am not bringing my camera this time as I am focused on my duties as a volunteer (don’t want to get distracted from watching and herding the kids). Wish me luck!

I did take some pictures from the Phoenix Zoo the last time I visited which was back sometime last March if you want to see pictures from the Phoenix Zoo.

-Justin Germino

I rented Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for the Nintendo Wii the other day and I must say it feels like a Final Fantasy game. The rendering and handling is among the best games I have played on the Nintendo Wii and the story and character interaction is fun and entertainment. It feels a little more like you are part of an interactive movie and story than an actual game as there are so many cut scenes where you play a minor action in them, but this is all the more engaging.

One thing I don’t like as much is the battle sequences however, I miss the traditional turn based combat as seen in Final Fantasy X, VII, and older FF series games. In this game you don’t swing a sword or even fight like you do with Final Fantasy XII (at least in the beginning you don’t) but you instead use your powers to toss your opponents by locking on to them and holding B and flinging them back, or by locking onto objects and throwing them into your opponents. So far I am only about an hour into the game and I miss the various weapon and attack combinations that you don’t appear to get with Crystal Chronicles.

That being said the story and artwork are incredible, the music is astounding and I am immensely enjoying the game as a nice “snack” before Final Fantasy XIII comes out for the PS3 and XBox360 in the next few weeks. If you are a fan of the Final Fantasy series and you own the Nintendo Wii, I highly recommend you take a look at Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.

-Justin Germino

When I first moved to Arizona back in 1995 I was only eighteen and desperate for work at the time. I had a meager $4.25 an hour job at the local video store and supplemented my job with being a house cleaner on weekends. Now at eighteen years of age and before I had any internet access, I did the best I could at house cleaning but was not very efficient. It was when I first learned and was told by one of my employers that “newspaper” makes a better surface cleaner for Glass Windows and Mirrors than Paper Towels or Teri Cloths. You use Vinegar and/or Ammonia (I personally like the Windex Multi-Surface vinegar cleaner) and newspaper instead of the paper towels or other types of towel.

At first I was very skeptical I mean how could something containing a ton of black ink which rubs off on your fingers be efficient at cleaning glass and mirrors? I was amazed at how well the trick worked though, and none of the “lint” residue gets left behind on mirrors or glass when you use good old fashioned newspaper crunched up into a ball shape. I still use this tip and method to clean windows and mirrors in my own home 15 years later and it saves you money on Paper Towel products.

-Justin Germino

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Tony’s Pizza. All opinions are 100% mine.

I enjoy frozen pizza’s sometimes as a late night snack with my wife or even with my kids on the weekend we will often pop in a frozen pizza in the oven as a quick meal that can feed the family. Tony’s Pizza makes very affordable and good tasting pizza’s for the fact that they are frozen. I can honestly say we have purchased and eaten eight Tony’s pizzas in the past month in the family and my favorite by far is the Supreme Pizza.

My kids like the pepperoni and plain cheese the most, but prefer larger slices of pepperoni to having the little cubes. The cubes give pepperoni flavor, they just like peeling the pepperoni slices off to eat them separately and its messier to do that with the little cubes. The pizza’s also have a slightly faster baking time than most frozen pizza being done in about 15 minutes.

For those who are curious about what a frozen Tony’s Pizza tastes like you are in luck. I will be giving away 2 Tony’s Pizza coupons to one of my readers who comments on this blog. All you have to do is leave a comment and let me know which of the 3 flavors interests you the most (Cheese, Pepperoni or Supreme) and I will select one winner at random on Friday March 5th 2010.

I will need a valid email left because I will need to contact you to know where to mail the coupons to.

For now, go out and enjoy a Tony’s pizza they are inexpensive and taste almost as good as a delivery pizza for a fraction of the cost. Seriously, you can buy 8-10 Tony’s pizzas for the price of one delivery pizza and honestly, the fact that you can get 4-5 meals for the same price as one tastes better to me.

So leave me a comment and tell me why you want to try Tony’s Pizza for free.
Update: The Contest is closed and the winner has been notified.  I will post the winner once they accept the prize.

-Justin Germino

Last month I had to make the tough decision to discontinue two of my blogs (World of Prandria) and (Tried A Product) one was going to be my blog devoted to role playing games, Dungeons and Dragons and was meant to be a hobby blog with no real monetization at all except AdSense. The other was a product review site that was supposed to feature reviews and information about products that were actually tested and wouldn’t do any promo’s for untested products.

I had some interest and garnered about five to twenty visits per day average to my World of Prandria blog but under ten per day to tried a product which was a failed experiment in my opinion. So in order to keep my focus on my three primary blogs I decided to shut the blogs down cold turkey, this involved decommissioning the Domain Name, pulling the domain from my hosting provider and just letting the blogs vanish into obscurity with nothing but the occasional broken Google Link that hasn’t caught up yet.

5 blogs was just too much for me to keep track of and I have a lot of respect for these bloggers who run seven or more niche blogs and are able to keep up with each of them and grow them to where they reach a certain level of success. All my spare time (which is very little) is focused on DragonBlogger.com where I am still hoping to grow it and reach my 50,000 unique visits per month by the end of 2010.

-Justin Germino

Like I do several times a week I took my two boys to the playground with about half a dozen Nerf foam weapons in tow.  We have the Nerf Marauder longsword, two axes and three normal N-Force swords but two of them were highly damaged from my dog porky chewing all of the foam off of the handle and part of the blade.  I just duct taped the chewed parts and figured why waste the money and throw the sword away, but I paid the price for doing this finally.

While at the playground and in the midst of intense sword battles, exuberant kids can sometimes launch their swords as spears or javelins.  I discourage this but kids will be kids and sometimes they just don’t listen (since they aren’t my kids and no parent is around, I don’t have much influence).  I was the target of one of these javelin attacks and the foam sword where the handle was damaged struck me in the back side of my head, the hard plastic tube inside the sword was jagged enough that it gauged a several millimeter hole into my scalp and curled up a chunk of my skin under my hair.

Blood flowed freely and I had to quickly collect the weapons and go home and assess the damage, my wife told me I should have gotten a stitch or two but I just kept telling her to unfold the curled up flap of skin and put pressure on it.  I figured it will heal properly if the flap can lay back on top of the hole and scab over.  Meanwhile, if it doesn’t heal properly I will probably have a flap of skin hanging off the back of my scalp that I may need to go to a doctor to cut off, so I am hoping it heals properly.

Let this be a lesson to anyone who thinks about jury rigging a repaired toy, if it becomes unsafe by losing its protective foam coating don’t assume taping over it will be good enough, throw the damn thing away and don’t try to be a cheapskate like me.

-Justin Germino

Casa Grande has been hit by rainstorm after rainstorm these past few months and this has led to so many weeds growing up through my landscaping rock that I cannot keep on top of them by pulling them alone.

I decided to purchase weed killer concentrate and mixer that attaches to your hose so that I can poison large swaths of landscaping area and hope that I can succeed at killing the weeds while they are small and still hand sized. However it is due to rain again and I have to wait until a clear few days so the rain doesn’t dilute the poison and make my efforts wasted.

Here in the desert if left unmanaged weeds can quickly grow to 3 or 4 feet tall and the tumbleweeds are the worst. Thorny when green and growing they become even more so when the wind tears them from the ground and they dry out rolling down the streets and collecting against common area walls. I have see tumbleweeds that were 6 feet I diameter, one smashed into our car while driving at 40mph once and a spray of thorns and twig shrapnel got embedded in every crevice of the car.

Wish me luck in my battle against the ever expanding weed army.

By the way, I found a really handy Guide to Arizona Weeds, has descriptions and illustrations of all weed types.

-Justin Germino

I had never run into this issue before so thought I would share it with my readers. My wife was hired to do a blog review for a company and as we bloggers do, she sent the client a PayPal invoice for the job.

As it turns out the client only had a corporate American Express card and Paypal only accepts personal Amex not corporate Amex cards as methods of payment.

You can even see this statement in the Paypal user agreement:

Spending Limits and Verification

U.S. Users. You need to have a credit card or confirmed bank account with PayPal before you can send any payments. American Express has decided to decline PayPal credit card transactions that are funded with an American Express Corporate Card. As a result, any attempts to register or use an American Express Corporate Card will be denied.

So let this be a lesson to bloggers out there, when working with advertisers directly. Make sure you disclose what methods of payment you can accept and find out how your advertisers will pay you for your efforts. This is one thing that should be straightened out before you do a job and find there is difficulty receiving payment after.

I don’t suppose anyone knows of a service that allows you to receive Amex Corporate Card as a method of payment?

-Justin Germino

For the past several weeks my day job has consumed so much of my time that I have been spending most of my night and weekend hours working on SiteMinder for this project rather than keeping up with my blogging.  I am nearly at the point where I may need to take a hiatus from blogging temporarily until I can finish this project.

I am still able to write posts on Sunday and queue them for the whole week and have managed to keep doing a twitter poem on my lunch break, but my visiting, commenting and dropping on other blogs has become next to non-existent.  I don’t mean to be rude and hope my fellow bloggers don’t get offended, I just am so tired after spending 14 hours in a row staring at my computer that I just can’t find the energy to do my blog visiting and socializing.

This project will last for a few months and I don’t see the rush slowing down until possibly the end of April, so in the meantime I am doing the best I can not to become a “bad blogger” as I mentioned in yesterday’s article.