Justin Germino Ramblings

We wanted to do a vacation on the East coast this year, and instead of looking at Myrtle beach vacation rentals or staying at a hotel for a few days, we decided to do something extravagant.

I am quite excited that in two weeks our family will be taking our first Disney cruise, it is a three day cruise that leaves out of Florida and tours Nassau and Disney’s private island.  I am sure the trip will go very fast, and I know my children are eager to see what being on a big luxury ship is like after hearing about our previous cruises.  Family vacations are just always something I look forward to because you get to jump outside the normal drone of everyday routine and shake things up with something fun and exciting once and a while.

-Justin Germino

I spent just under an hour playing Punch Out! on the Wii the other night and my biceps and tendons in my inner elbow are pretty sore, plus I was actually sweating from my forehead from the exertion.  See I play my Wii games the way they are meant to be played, standing up and with full motions.  Combined with the Wii balance board and Wiimote and Nunchuck, Punch Out! actually burns quite a few calories as you have to actually shift your body left or right to dodge, as well as throw punches.

I wish it had more motion recognition and allowed you to throw different kinds of punches based on the motion you made with the controllers, instead you have to hold up on the control stick to punch high and down to uppercut, this kind of took some of the realism out of it, but the game is classic, cartoonish and extremely fun.  Plus you work up a little bit of a sweat while playing.  I highly recommend Punch-Out!! for the Wii if you enjoyed the NES version of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, Black and Bruised for the Playstation 2 or any other cartoonish type boxing games.

-Justin Germino

It’s funny that companies can just market entire swaths of email addresses or consumers collected from various surveys and studies, they sell this information to advertisers who are looking for a “target” audience to sell their product to. You can buy blocks of leads for just about any service that can be offered from life insurance leads to health care leads.

Nobody actually knows what listings and distributions their information actually belongs into, your street address, name, and any other public information collected on websites like Pipl, or from any number of surveys you may have completed in your past are used to create these lists in the first place.

The next time you have a phone call or email from someone selling a product or service, stop to think about what listings or leads your name or information and how it arrived there.

-Justin Germino

I was at the Rock Along Productions Meetup Mixer on Saturday night and spent a decent portion of the evening talking with someone who works at a local Toyota dealership. He was telling me that although the Cash for Clunkers program is spurring consumers to trade in old cars and helping car buyers, it is in fact causing most dealers to lose money.

The dealership he works for lost over $60,000 last month alone and many other dealerships are in the same boat. The reason is simple, even with the additional influx of funds there is only enough money to rebate every dealership in the country 5 trade-ins, yet most of the big dealerships are applying for fifteen or twenty rebates a day. This first come first serve rebate processing means that the small dealerships with less staff and less volume are not able to get reimbursed.

To make matters worse is if the dealerships do not get the rebate by the time the older car gets sent to salvage, the dealer has to write off the loss and cannot get the rebate after the car has already been salvaged. I found this information to be quite interested and it changed my point of view on the program in several other ways.

For instance, trading an older less fuel efficient car in for a new fuel efficient car isn’t as beneficial as you think. The money and environmental damage caused by salvaging an old car and disposing of it is far more detrimental to the environment than keeping it and driving a less fuel efficient car around. So though it may save the car buyer gas money, it is actually worse for the environment to dispose of all the older cars.

-Justin Germino

Today is the first day of first grade for my oldest son, and I am amazed at how rapidly the years have gone by. He will be six in October and I am so very much impressed by all he has done and continues to do.

A true fun loving and sensitive boy, who I genuinely like not only as a parent, but would be glad to be his friend had I been a kid myself. He is truly a magnificent kid and I am so proud of him.

I hope he has a wonderful start this year in school and continues to learn and thrive as successfully as he has in Kindergarten.

-Justin Germino

I spent much of Friday and this weekend frustrated by an issue at work trying to work on a customers Windows 2008 Server with their IIS 7 install, it would seem that the IIS 7 was corrupted in some way, and I spent several hours at night and this weekend trying to research and figure out the issue so I would have something to go back to work with on Monday morning.  Alas, I just have to keep poking at the issue, I found numerous issues with similar problems on the web, but all responses involve re-installing the IIS 7 server.

So far I am not liking Windows Server 2008 at all, its lousy Vista like interface and constant popups for Administrator access (even though your account is listed as an Administrator) cause nothing but problems.

-Justin Germino

Ask yourself one simple question:

Did you WOW your partner today?

If you cannot say that you have, then think back and remember when the last time you completely surprised or amazed your spouse or loved one with a special gift, note, thought or action that took him or her by surprise.  If you have to spend more than a minute to think about when the last time was, then you obviously need to take action immediately.  Don’t fret, you don’t need to spend money if you are financially strapped, or do anything that takes a huge amount of time.

Some things you can do are the following and your spouse or loved one would be truly and pleasantly surprised.

• Leave a love letter in a place they will find it sometime during the day (on their computer keyboard, attached to the fridge) preferably somewhere they won’t run into it first thing in the morning, but sometime in the middle of the day.

• Get up a 1/2 hour before your partner and do last nights dishes or make sure the trash is taken out before they wake up.  (These simple chores do wonders and if you actually take some of your partners daily activities and complete them, they will very much notice and appreciate it)

• If your up early anyway, run out and pick up your partner’s favorite Starbucks and perhaps a small bouquet of flowers (roses, or carnations) whatever your budget allows and flower type your partner likes best.

• Draw your partner a picture (even if you can’t draw), if you draw a simple childlike doodle and have his or her as the focus of your drawing the will appreciate it and be surprised.

• Write your partner a quick poem, say anything and say it abstractly.  You don’ t need to be a writer, you don’t need to be a poem, just jot things down from the heart, nothing needs to rhyme or have form.

Bottom line is that you should make sure you take some time out of your busy schedule to take your loved one completely by surprise with a random act of love and kindness, these types of unpredictable acts keep life interesting and help make for a wonderful memory that they will likely never forget.

-Justin Germino

The combination of technological advances and globalization of the workforce has led to rapidly decreasing nine to five job.  I especially find this to be true in IT Technology where you have to support systems and staff who are on timezones from all over the country and the world.  I myself work with people from coast to coast as coworkers, customers and although I try to work between the hours of eight to five am often called in much earlier sometimes as early as six thirty because it is already past nine on the East coast.

This blur in working hours is primarily a benefit (though I do work more hours) it shows just how much the world has changed and is changing in terms of support and working across the globe.  It means that companies need to have staff operating in various countries or people working various shifts to cover the entire array of business operating hours globally.  This also further causes more and more corporations in more countries to be reliant on each other for staffing and other reasons which only futher intertwines the various countries and organizations working together.

It should be interesting to see in the future where when you want to apply for a job, you just merely contact a company in one of any number of countries and apply online, and work via Internet channels or VPN lines for most fields and functions.  You could find just as many Americans employed by companies in other countries as the reverse, and in a truly global economy the best are found and employed no matter what country they live in.

At least in theory this is how it should all work, and will eventually I am quite sure.

-Justin Germino