Justin Germino Ramblings

I have done a review showcasing the Magicjack which talks about the benefits and advantages that the MagicJack offers to users who want to save money by using this USB device that allows you to make calls through your home computer and the Internet from your home phone.

This post will talk about some of the limitations with the MagicJack and little annoyances that can occur, though these are not showstoppers and I still think that the MagicJack is a great money saving product.

#1 – The MagicJack seems to drop calls at the exact 2 hour mark

I have been on many conference calls in several weeks where I have been on calls for hours and hours at a time. In 100% of the cases and on every single day the MagicJack loses connection at exactly 2 hours. My phone logs the length of time of the call and I see it happen every time, no exceptions. There is something in either the MagicJack software or system that must terminate connections at the two hour mark. This is annoying and they should fix this.

I opened a support request to see if there was any official word or answer about this from MagicJack, but the representative just gave vague information about calls being free but not unlimited. They did mention that the stability of the Internet and ISP are a factor and that some people drop calls in 1 hour or less. Their recommendation, just redial back in.

#2 – Periodically the MagicJack has a voice stuttering issue

One out of every four or five calls I make with the MagicJack my users complain that my voice breaks up while speaking, while this could be related to the usage of RAM/CPU on the server, my computer is idle most of the time I am on the phone with MagicJack. I think this is some sort of connection problem issue, but it goes away by hanging up and redialing most of the time and happens occasionally. The other thing to note here is that the more USB devices I have plugged into my PC at the same time, the more likely my MagicJack is to have some sort of staggering or lag on voice. This is especially true if I leave my USB Mic plugged into the PC while trying to use the MagicJack, even if not “recording” an active mic reads in input and utilizes USB bandwidth and memory/cpu which interferes with the MagicJack.

I also assume faster systems and hardware would experience less spottiness, so I am not saying this is a MagicJack issue, but that this is something noticed when using the MagicJack. My computer is pushing on 4 years old now and these issues would probably alleviate with faster motherboard/cpu/ram.

• Summary:

I have been using the MagicJack for almost two years now, and I can honestly say I have made hundreds of calls with it ranging from 17 hour long conference calls (having to reconnect every 2 hours when the drop occurs) to five to ten minute calls. The device works well overall and at a cost of $19.99 is well worth having and doing the majority of your phone calls over when you are in the home. Better than eating minutes on your Cell phone, or paying over $20 per month for a basic land line.

-Justin Germino

Disclaimer: This was a sponsored post . I was provided a copy of the eBOOK Pro SEO Blueprint for free, and compensated to write my opinions of the product. The words and opinions are mine and mine alone.

I had read the entire 40 page eBook  Pro SEO Blueprint from Kevin Chong and really thing the guy has a good set of information in this eBook.  He offers valuable advice that took me months to learn by scouring the internet and through trial and error.  Advice that ranges from how to keyword tag your website and blog posts for best rankings in Google search results to promoting your blog or website and building backlinks.

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I did honestly think that the product has valuable information and will provide value to bloggers or web site owners who are just starting out and have little to no experience with SEO right now.  You can gain a four to six week boost of information just by reading the book which saves you valuable time and in the end will reward you with knowledge and the ability to optimize your site’s SEO.

So pick up a copy of the PRO SEO Blueprint if you are looking to get a jumpstart on learning SEO and how to get better traffic and backlinks to your website, or join the affiliate program and make some money promoting this valuable eBook.

My wife had read an article in the latest Glamor magazine about a healthy 1 week Detox plan that was to help clean your digestive tract out and increase your energy and overall health. The plan claimed you can lose up to five pounds in a week, but my wife doesn’t need to lose any weight. We both eat plenty of vegetables like salads with almost every meal and eat tons of fruit, but we both also eat relatively unhealthy by consuming far to much fast food and processed foods.

This diet involves eating “closer to the Earth” meaning as fresh as possible, and she bought a huge tub of Greek Yogurt (I am going on this diet even though I have lactose intolerance) as well as twelve different types of vegetables and six different types of fruits and berries. Only having oatmeal, granola, fruit or yogurt for breakfast, followed by healthy starches and grains for lunch and a dinner than can consist of lean poultry or seafood like salmon and shrimp, but no red meat for a week.

This diet also includes a detox tea every day that is supposed to improve liver function with licorice, fennel and other herbs to help digestive function.

I can stand to lose a little weight as I had packed on about ten pounds over the last year, I am up to 170 when my lowest was 159 but this diet can be a good thing and one rule about changing your eating habits is that having a partner truly increases your odds for success.

Last night we had the following for dinner:

• Broiled Salmon with herb butter
• a whole sweet potato with spices on the side (olive oil drizzled on top)
• Lima beans and corn mixture
• Desert was Raspberries, Blueberries, Orange slices and apple slices on a little bit of Greek yogurt.

I have to be honest, this is the best tasting diet I have ever been on so far.

It helps having a wife who is a Le Cordon Bleu certified chef, she can make the worst diets among the most pleasurable of experiences. She also runs one of the best cooking blogs on the web if you didn’t know. Check out The Chef’s Cookbook for my wife’s original recipes and articles to help anyone learn to cook French cuisine or get creative cooking ideas.

-Justin Germino

This week marked a huge milestone for my personal blog. I was able to see <1000 RealRank for the first time ever as my personal blog is starting to approach 80 unique visits per day on average. This is still 1/5 as much traffic as my flagship blog, but I do ZERO promotion for my personal blog other than twitter updates and rarely submits to BlogEngage.  So this is almost 80 unique visits per day by just keyword and mostly from Google Searches, I also do some very specific Arizona articles which captures some local searches.

The reason why I am so excited about this milestone is that to qualify for many opps on SocialSpark being under the 2k, and then under the 1k mark give you access to making some decent money from your blog. Also, in addition to this milestone, my blog is now listed as the #7 out of top 100 blogs in the “Men’s Interest” category on Izearanks.

One of the reasons I started 3 blogs at the same time a year and a half ago was to help cover more topics if interest and it I am glad that my personal blog has picked up quite a reader base considering I don’t promote it often. Now that this blog is banned from PayU2Blog it comes as good timing to get some decent rankings so I can start earning some extra money from it. My next goal is to see if justingermino.com can break the 100k Alexa mark.

-Justin Germino

After having another two hour outage on my hosting provider I had enough this weekend, I was paying about $400 per year for a Virtual Private Hosting plan that was giving me between 30 minute and 2 hour outages every week, with rampant CPU usage and constant frustration. Tickets to support often went hours without resolution and there is no such thing as a phone number to call to speak with a live technician for support. As a result I have decided to switch my blogs to the same hosting provider that my wife uses which is Hostmonster.

I helped move my wife’s 3 blogs over to Hostmonster, so I knew the process and was very familiar with it. I also knew that my wife had suffered only 1 small outage in three months in comparison to my fifteen or so outages over the same length of time. I spent MLK day converting two of my three blogs over to Hostmonster and will do DragonBlogger.com probably in a few weeks when I have some time to dedicate, I am hesitant to bring my flagship over as it gets enough traffic I really can’t afford a large hiccup.

The transition was seamless and I enjoy everything about Hostmonster except that you still use FTP to upload files instead of the more secure SFTP or SCP. They should make those standard now, since there are so many free clients that support the secure file transfer protocol, there is no reason to be using the less secure FTP anymore.

-Justin Germino

Chandler police arrested Laurie Basset last week and brought charges of Embezzlement on her for embezzling $20,000 from a Chandler charter school. She had worked in the finance department for the school and was writing checks to herself and her husband claiming they were Janitorial supplies. The school noticed after an annual audit found a 300% increase in janitorial supply ordering. My question is, why did it take a year to find the problem? Schools should be doing monthly or quarterly audits of the books, and there should always be someone to check over finances, a single person should never be solely accountable for finances in a school (or a business unless it is the owner and a solely owned business).

With schools struggling for funds this is always a tragedy when people have stolen funds that could have been used for the education and care of students, this is a particularly heinous crime and the person should be punished appropriately. Her husband is also wanted for conspiracy but has disappeared and is not to be found anywhere.

It is unlikely that Dobson Academy will be able to recover the money, hopefully some sort of insurance would cover this theft.

-Justin Germino

I was pleasantly surprised to find that a new episode of USA’s White Collar starts tonight but almost missed it if it wasn’t for my trusty DVR finding all new episodes. The show was moved from Friday nights to Tuesday nights apparently and it no longer conflicts with Medium so I can watch it live without taping and watching it the next day. For those who haven’t seen White Collar it is a spectacular show about an art thief who is on work release for the FBI to help catch other white collar criminals. Neil Caffrey is the rogue and is a classy guy chasing after the mystery of what happened to his fiance while he was locked away in prison.

You can’t just dive right in tonight because the last episode was a cliff hanger, and you really should take the time to watch the first six episodes so you can get acquainted with the show before you start following it.

-Justin Germino

I am not opposed to Police doing demonstration in schools about the gear they use which includes the Taser which I think is a highly effective non-lethal weapon. Even though the Taser has killed some people and there are some risks and unique scenario’s I still think the Taser is an effective tool to disable rather than kill or permanently injure an offender who is threatening, hostile or dangerous. A Policy officer in Kankakee, Illinois performed an unauthorized Taser demonstration and used three 12 year old students as volunteers then you have to call into question the common sense thinking of the officer.

Why would you think to Taser kids at that age as a demonstration of how a Taser works, if you really wanted to do a proper demonstration you would always use an adult volunteer. Why would an officer be giving an unauthorized demonstration of the Taser to a public Junior High school?

The officer is on administrative leave, and lawsuits are being filed by the parents of the students who are also seeking to have the officer fired and criminal charges filed as well.

Seriously, where is common sense here?

-Justin Germino

So my three year old son who after one week of potty training has had very few accidents and successfully knows to “use the potty” when he has to pee did something quite original the other day. He is constantly trying to pee standing up like his six year old brother and his dad (moi) do, and in doing so he learned very quickly that he has his own personal fire hose. He was caught in the backyard with his pants down filling the dogs water dish with pee and when my wife caught him he said “Feeding Porky” (our dog’s name). Seriously, imagine the expression on someones face when you see your three year old naked form the waist down filling your dogs water dish with pee in the yard.

These are the moments you remember for life as a parent, and wait until we tell his wife or girlfriends about the time he filled the dogs dish with pee when he was little. That’s right kid, you are just creating ammunition for the embarrassing story marathon that will follow you your whole life.

I have said it four times already this week, Potty Training is one of the toughest jobs parents have to do with toddlers. Though we are mostly successful, our three year old would still rather not use the toilet for #2 which is quite disgusting and makes me gag and wretch whenever I have to deal with the aftermath.

Joys of being a father, why couldn’t I afford a full time nanny?

-Justin Germino

As a kid I always enjoyed the original Clash of the Titans, it was a campy and fun movie. When I saw the trailer for the remake of Clash of the Titans while seeing Avatar, I was floored at how awesome the movie looks. No campiness at all, but a full action flick where the monsters look meticulously crafted and the movie has a much darker and creepier tone than the original. You can see the trailer here if you haven’t yet.

What do you think? Will the Clash of the Titans remake be great, or should they have not bothered to remake a classic?

PS, the Kraken is one wicked looking beast in the new Clash of the Titans.

Bonus: Did you know the creature used in the original Clash of the Titans, was the exact claymation beast used in 10,000,000 miles to Venus (a much older film)?

-Justin Germino