Justin Germino Ramblings

I was visiting a health and fitness blog (my Firefox crashed or I would post the link) and it had an article about how some people are afraid to workout and weight lift because they may get too built or look like what I call ‘Roided Mutants. The simple truth is that weight training is one of the best ways to lose weight and gain increased muscle mass at the same time.

You don’t have to take a mountain of Stimerex ES to lose weight if you can adjust your diet and exercise level by just a little bit at first and them a bit more at set milestones. Muscle burns calories faster and the more muscle you have the more calories your body burns while in “idle”.

When you work out you won’t get freakish looking bumps and muscles that look like tumors unless you are taking Steroids or other chemical enhancements for such. If you work out and lift weights while properly in-taking nothing but healthy proteins, carbohydrates and fats (healthy fats) you will see your body slim down and tone very quickly.

Even if you don’t have a bench or weights in your house you can leverage some existing home objects.

• A gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds and you can use these to curl, or raise as tricep extensions

• If you need lighter weight, use a think can of soup.

• Push ups are still among the best ways to strengthen your chest, shoulders and biceps and you should do them in as many sets as you can.

• Crunches work but are even more efficient if you jackknife which is where when you crunch your abdomen together you raise your legs at the same time. This works both your upper abdomen and lower abdomen muscles.

Get creative working out, you can find tips online to leverage leaning against a chair, wall and even your desk to improve your fitness level.

-Justin Germino

When Joanne Olivieri contacted me and offered for me to take over the poetry and creative writing typepad blog called “Ya’Sou Ezine” I was honored but had to decline as I am too busy managing a full time job and already have my hands in 11 blogs already. I had become a guest author and frequent contributor to Ya’Sou Ezine, and I was sorry to hear that the blog has been shut down. Like many people, bloggers are looking to earn income and make money to live. When you can’t bring in enough income or you need to find another source of income, your blogging which is mostly your hobby unless you are making enough income to live off of it will suffer and be put off.

I have known at least six bloggers who have retired their blogs in the past twelve months, most have jumped out of blogging to spend more time with the family while others jumped ship because they needed to find a more stable way to make a 2nd income and couldn’t spend any more time experimenting and waiting with no results from blogging.

Blogging is a very tough business, with more than 19 million blogs online this is one of the most competitive online markets right now and will only continue to get more competitive which will make it harder each year to grow. The earliest blogs from five or six years ago often already have a strong claim and thousands of indexed pages to keep them at the top, but even they are subject to being usurped if the do not continue to churn out fresh content on a regular basis.

Good luck bloggers, it is a jungle out there.

-Justin Germino

The second day of our Disney cruise we spent almost the entire day at Nassau in the Bahamas, but most of the day was spent at Atlantis on Paradise Island, which is a world class resort that boasts so many pools, lagoons and lavish suites that you can’t imagine the luxury. Atlantis is famous for the $25,000 per night penthouse made famous by Oprah and Michael Jordan who have stayed there.

Atlantis is also the home to one of the largest aquariums that is simply breath taking, as the aquarium is actually part of the hotel itself, and you can walk in an out of the hotel corridors and see the various fish and marine life swimming all around you. Take a look at this photo album that is almost exclusively all shots from Atlantis and the aquarium, truly one of the most majestic places I have ever visited.

-Justin Germino

With Starcraft 2 coming out soon, I wonder if I will need to start looking at new desktop computers. Mine still has an older Geforce 7800GT with 256MB of RAM, and I have 3GB of memory on my Dual Core Athlon X-64 cpu. I just am not sure if this is powerful enough for the peak gaming performance I seek when I start delving back into Starcraft.

I remember when Starcraft was released in 1995, I took a whole week of vacation from work to stay home and play the game every day until I beat the campaigns with Terran, Zerg and Protoss. I spent endless nights creating custom modules and playing in the dozens of creative mini games spawned from the campaign editor. I truly hope Starcraft 2 can live up to the greatest memories that I have of Starcraft and Brood Wars.

It was one of the best RTS games of its day, with original unbelievable story and along with Warcraft put Blizzard on the map to become the gaming giants they are today.

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty is one of the best RTS Games I have ever played and well worth the money, I encourage my visitors to read my review of Starcraft 2 to see more in depth analysis of the game.

Will StarCraft 2 Play On an Old PC?

The simple answer is yes, Blizzard designed the game to scale down to older machines with ancient video cards, cpu’s and lower amounts of memory.  I installed Starcraft II Wings of Liberty on my old Athlon Dual Core PC with GeForce 7800GT and it works fine at 1920×1440 resolution with medium detail. I installed on my sons Inspiron laptop and it works pretty well there too with 64 bit Windows 7 and 4gb of RAM but it uses shared video ram, not a dedicated video card and plays just fine.

You may have to reduce the shadows, and switch unit profile pics to 2d instead of 3d, but the game will play and it will be a great experience even on older PC systems.  Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty was worth every penny I paid for it, the single player campaign alone is full of rich content, cut sequences and works as a stand alone game if you never even perform a multiplayer match.

Order Starcraft II right now

Finally got around to getting some of my photo’s sorted, and decided I have enough photo’s and things to say to make my Disney Cruise expand the week. So I will do it in parts with each part covering a little more information.

First I would like to say that we took a red eye flight that left Phoenix at 10:05pm and stopped in Atlanta, GA then connected from Atlanta to Orlando, we didn’t arrive in Orlando until around 9am. This was an all night travel by air and was hard to do both children ages almost six and three. They were a little hard to get relaxed and did eventually fall asleep on the planes, but thank goodness for portable DVD players and small portable toys, they make life so much easier.

My initial experience compares the Disney cruise to the other cruises we have been on (parents only, no kids) and Disney has easily one of the fastest and most streamlined check in and boarding processes compared to Royal Caribbean and Carnival. Not that the other two cruise lines are bad, just that Disney is faster and easier and you can check in from the Airport so you don’t even have to wait in line when you arrive at the harbor. Your cruise world cards are printed at the airport and you merely arrive at the port and board the ship, no fuss at all.

The ship itself is gorgeous and decked out in Disney art and flare all over the vessel, the ship is massive in size and bigger than some of the other cruise vessels we were on. The food was very good and compared well to Carnival and Royal Caribbean. The kids were just amazed and we knew the trip was going to be great when the Disney crew welcomes you on deck wearing their giant fake Mickey hands and giving all the kids high fives.

The first evening we ate at The Animator’s Palette, which is famous for having black and white sketches all over the walls that light up throughout the dining. Unfortunately due to an overly tired toddler our dinner was cut short and we didn’t wind up even eating our entree’s, but taking them back to our hotel room. The wait staff was nice enough to hand deliver our entree trays from the restaurant to our Hotel room.

The next day we arrived at the first port in Nassau, Bahamas which is one of the smallest but most densely populated island in the Bahama’s. The location is beautiful, and the water is so crystal clear blue that it is very different from the ocean waters of Baja Mexico or the Pacific coast. The temperature was hot, but tolerable and we explored the island by bus prior to adventuring to Atlantis Hotel Aquarium which will be the topic for tomorrow’s post.

Here is a slideshow from the arrival day and the first part of arriving in Nassau in the Bahama’s:

-Justin Germino

The Disney Cruise was incredible, amazing and simply exhausting all at the same time. Returning and coming down with a red hot infectious sore throat and nose clogging head cold however was really the most unpleasant part. I don’t know who I caught the cold from, but it is a pretty bad one and I am left sleepless, tired and in recovery mode as I start work while sick. Yuck.

I will get my Disney Cruise pictures uploaded to Picasa by the end of the week and do a blog post photo gallery of some of the great clips. I highly recommend the Disney cruise, though the 3 day cruise ends so quickly you will wish you opted for a longer one. (Sort of, having two little kids throw the occasional tantrum could make you wish it was shorter too).

-Justin Germino

The online Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership offered by The Lewis University is a degree to not only help you with technical IT job skills, but also managerial and leadership skills which help your advancement in an IT based career. We are talking about some fantastic courses including Data Networking, Intrusion Detection, Response and Recover, Encryption and Authentication systems just to name a few technical courses.

Combine those with IT Governance and Compliance, Project Management and Information Security as well as Legal and Ethical Issues in Information security and you will be gaining education that will help you stand out from a purely technical counterpart. If you are interested in starting a career in IT or furthering your career in the IT Industry, it is worth checking out Lewis University Online and learning more about what their Master’s degree programs can do for you.

-Justin Germino

Today I spend in my return from the Disney cruise and in recovery mode to unpack and catch up on work, house work, and the blog emails, comments and such. I will compile a small photo collection of the Disney cruise and put it up as a blog post later in week for those who are curious and want to know what it was like.

In the meantime, one of the worst parts about vacations is the return, and often people get a mild form of depression as they try to adjust back to their daily routine.

-Justin Germino

The latest study by the U.S. Geological Survey which looked at over 300 of the Nations streams between 1998 – 2005 found that nearly 100% of the fish were contaminated with some levels of mercury, and about 35% had levels higher than the recommended limits by the EPA.  The source of the mercury is believed to be a byproduct of coal based refineries as well as mining and other operations which deposit large amounts of mercury into the water supplies which is then converted to methylmercury by the environment which is absorbed into fish and shellfish.

We all know that fish is extremely healthy but with the mercury levels rising in fish we need to make sure that we consume fish that are the safest when it comes to mercury levels, and it is important to arm yourself with the knowledge of the safer fish to eat if you are worried about mercury.

Fish with lowest levels of mercury and safest to eat (2-3 times per week):
Anchovies
Atlantic cod
Chilean Sea Bass
Farmed Catfish
Herring
King Crab
Monkfish
Orange Roughy
Pacific Flounder
Scallops
Shrimp
Striped Bass
Tilapia
Wild Pacific and Alaskan Salmon

Moderate levels of mercury, safe to eat 1x per week:
Alaskan Halibut
Black Cod
Blue Crab
Blue Mussels
Canned Light Tuna
Dungeness Crab
Eastern Oysters
Pollack (Imitation Crab)
The following fish all have moderate levels of mercury:

Fish to avoid and are known to have high POP or Mercury Levels:
Atlantic Halibut
Farmed Salmon (recommended not more than 1x per month if pregnant, eat wild caught instead)
Golden Snapper (tilefish)
King Mackerel
Oysters (Gulf Coast)
Pike
Sea Bass
Shark
Swordfish
Tuna (Albacore and canned Albacore)

With the food industry looking to carve out bigger profits there is a major shift into providing and promoting foods and beverages that are “enhanced” with a few vitamins and minerals to give the illusion they are healthy for you. This illusion leads to consumers continuing to purchase and consume too much junk food because it touts a single healthy ingredient, whether it be fiber, calcium, Omega 3 Fatty acids, or any other vitamin or mineral.

The bottom line is you need to look at the bigger picture when purchasing and consuming food for your household, soda is not going to be good for you no matter what it is enhanced with. Candies, Pastries, many energy bars and drinks are just going to cause your body more harm than any benefit you would receive from the small supplements that are added to them. When deciding what to eat or drink overall consider the top factors (calories, how many calories is it in comparison to a like product), Fat (How much fat does the product have (saturated and Trans fats), Sugars (under Carbohydrates, you need to know the sugar content of the product), Sodium (how much salt is in the product). If any of these are too high, then it doesn’t matter if the product has 30% Vitamin A or 50% Vitamin D, the trade off of the calories, sugars or fats are worse than any benefit.

Always remember natural derived food sources (vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fish, lean meats) will always be more beneficial than any artificially enhanced touted snack food. Marketing tricks are only there to get products sold, and will not provide you with proper nutrition.

-Justin Germino