Justin Germino Ramblings

Few things in life are more rewarding or more challenging than being in a committed relationship. You are no longer just in it for yourself, (at least hopefully) and you now have to think about and consider your partner in all your choices and actions.

This can lead for some sticky situations in relationships where one person really does not want to partake in the same activity as the other or just does not want to. Don’t fret however, relationships are about compromise and you choose to do some things that you don’t feel like in exchange for the reverse.

In most activities you can find some common ground that both of you can enjoy, and I encourage people to spend some time engaged in activities their partner wants to do, or you could be insensitive at best or an insensitive jerk at worst.

Likewise there should be no problem at all if you both have a few separate activities and some alone time which is also healthy for the relationship. Remember, relationships are about compromise, give and take, you should give as much as you would expect for the relationship to be equal and not one sided.

-Justin Germino

This past weekend my wife and I spent the weekend in Vegas with some family friends. We attended Crue Fest 2 on Saturday night which was our main reason for the trip.

Crue Fest was an incredible show and it opened with Charm City Devils followed by Drowning Pool. Theory of a Deadman played just after drowning poor but sounded terrible due to the lead singers voice being almost completely hoarse.

By far the star of the show was Godsmack who I had never seen live before. They have tremendous energy and do the best dual drum kit drum solo I have ever seen. The lead singer is so incredibly talented, not only being proficient at guitar while he sings but he also goes toe to toe in the drum solo.

Motley Crue closed the show with a tribute to their Doctor Feel Good album plus a few tracks from other albums, the stage props were so 80’s dressed up it made you really miss how much flare bands used to put into stage sets.

The show was great and the Hard Rock Cafe in Vegas has a nice theater in The Joint which holds a massive amount of people on the floor.

Meanwhile, after two nights of being up until 1am and getting five hours of sleep, I come home and am right back to work for the week. You know what they say, “No rest for the weary”.

-Justin Germino

Went up to Las Vegas this weekend to see CruFest and spend some time with family friends who have a condo there. Had a good time playing some roulette and kicking back with my wife without the kids. We try to have a little kid free weekend getaway a few times a year to keep things shaking a little bit. Next and last planned family vacation is our Disney Cruise with the kids at the end of August which we are looking forward to as it will be our first Disney cruise.

-Justin Germino

Life is too short to spend it being unhappy and I want to give some good advice to people who are young enough in their lives that they have not yet been tied down with commitments such as families to feed, children to support, and things that would make the advice I am about to give more difficult to follow.

LOVE WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING

Plain and simple, don’t  spend your time pursing something that your parents wanted you to become or go into a career or profession solely for money or because you think that there is job security or more jobs available.  The key is to do what you love doing and you will find that you will stand out from the others who don’t love doing it.  Dreams can only become reality if you go full throttle and pursue them right from the start.  It only becomes harder to pursue those dreams if you put them off and then get tied down with other responsibilities that may make it harder to pursue them.

I happen to be blessed not only with a great day job, but I really enjoy working with technology and applications.  I am a techie by nature, and I also happen to really enjoy blogging on nights and weekends on the side.  I spend far more days engaged in the work I do and feeling good when I solve customer problems, help design new technical solutions and implement them.

I know many people who are trapped in jobs for years or decades and they have been doing something that they just aren’t happy doing, life wasted just working for the sake of providing for the family, only to get older and realize that they missed out on truly enjoying life and all those years spent droning away at some career or job just to make ends meet, they could instead had rearranged and adjusted their life from the start to adapt to doing what they loved to do.

If your dream job happens to be a low paying field, then adjust your lifestyle so it doesn’t encroach as much, find places where that job has more advantages and continue to pursue it.  This is especially true for artists and entertainers who have the most varied spectrum of income, some artists and entertainers are breakout successes and make fortunes.   But the vast majority live in borderline poverty playing music and barely making rent at the end of the month, yet they love doing it and do it for the love of doing it.

At the end of your life you want to say that you lived your dreams and shot for the stars, for if at the end of your life you are on your last few breaths and you say “I wish I would have done this, that and the other thing”, then you have squandered your one life and missed the whole point of the journey.

-Justin Germino

I have been so busy with my day job these last few weeks and I don’t see it letting up that my blogging (which is a hobby) is going to have to take a distant back seat. I just am running out of energy to be able to stay up each night just to queue posts on 4 or 5 blogs for the following morning. Even my random twitter poetry game is getting very hard to accomplish as my lunch breaks are virtually non-existent lately.

For sanity sake it is important to remember the beauty about blogging, it is not how often you update that matters most, it is the quality of your content. So you can still be a successful blog if you post every day, every three days or once a week. Granted the more posts you have indexed on Google the wider your blog reach is, but don’t feel ashamed or guilty if you have to slow down and pace yourself a little.

Don’t let family time suffer because you fell compelled to update your blogs each and every day. I know I did start feeling a little guilty and have a desire to leave no day devoid of a post, but in the end I am starting to be slightly more apathetic. For me blogging is a hobby and something I enjoy doing, I shouldn’t have to feel pressured to write on my blogs, that is for people who make a full time income out of blogging and it IS their primary job.

-Justin Germino

Someone on twitter sent out a link to a posting on Acid Cow called Animals that never existed this has some amazing digital photo manipulations showing combinations of animal heads with different parts, some of them so realistic you wouldn’t be able to tell it was a digital alteration if you didn’t know better.

Really funny stuff, I like the Alligator Fly, and if you liked these you should check out all 48 of them at the site.

-Justin Germino

In South Carolina, there is a chimpanzee named Anjana who lives at The Institute of Greatly Endangered Species (TIGERS) which is a great acronym. Anjana helps as an acting foster mother for the facility and loves to take care of baby animals of a wide variety of species. She has helped nurture leopards, tigers, and orangutans and helps play and feed them with bottles.

I stumbled across Vet Locator website with these pictures, and these are just two of the many pictures on the site, if you enjoyed looking at these two pictures, you should check out where they came from.

-Justin Germino

Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a disease that is more prevalent in women than men, yet many men still suffer from the disease and I am one of those people.    All you can do is try to figure out what “triggers” cause the intestinal discomfort, pain and try to minimize your exposure to the conditions that cause the symptoms.

I have severe intestinal pain almost every time I eat highly acidic foods, alcohol of any kind, chocolate, sugar, milk/dairy products and sugary foods.  This makes it difficult for me to eat out at restaurants as I tend to have pain and suffering after eating almost anything I eat at a restaurant with the exception of very bland foods.

I have had embarrassing situations in some cases, and in others I just simply ignored the causes and ate what I felt like knowing I would pay for it later.  When my family goes out to Cold Stone for ice cream several times a week for a treat, I can only partake in the sorbet (which they have very limited choices) and can only enjoy the smells and sights of the flavored ice creams.

I also have intestinal pain and stomach problems when I get stressed or suffer from anxiety, severe anxiety and stress can cause me to have high stomach pains which lead to vomiting, or intestinal cramping which can leave me in misery and trapped in the bathroom for hours.

It is easier to control food triggers as those are things I can choose to eat or not to eat, but it is much harder to keep my stress and anxiety under control.  Meditation helps, music therapy, and I find that working out very heavily helps though not at first.  I find that sometimes because a mental state can trigger irritable bowel syndrome, a heavy workout can distract me from the state and therefore ease my stomach pains.

In the past six months I have had fewer problems than in previous years, but I did suffer some problems with traveling for work.  I actually almost always have stomach and intestinal problems when traveling anywhere at all, and this has sometimes made vacations with my wife or children a little less enjoyable that I had wished.

There is no real treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, there were several medications prescribed for it over the past years and most of them have been recalled and pulled from the market for side effects, which is why you don’t see commercials for Zelnorme and other medications anymore.  Some dietitians and medical experts say Fiber can help alleviate irritable bowel, others say increasing probiotics and other supplements can, but I have tried them all to no avail.

All you can do is try and isolate your triggers and do your best to avoid them, the same can be said about Migraine sufferers and people with certain other headaches.

In my personal and professional life I pride myself in being someone who has a wide range of knowledge. I have found that I have a natural curiosity and desire to learn about as much as I can about anything related to technology, science and a few other categories. As a child I used to read the entire encyclopedia volumes from A – Z and even spent some time reading the entire Webster’s Dictionary including every single word and meaning.

Unfortunately, I am also cursed with having a odd sense of memory. I have a fantastic memory for some things, but a terrible memory for others. I don’t seem to have the ability to pick and choose what information “burns” into my mind and what information does not, as a result I may read an obscure fact about a fish species six months ago and be able to recall that information instantly, but last week I could had an entire conversation with someone and barely be able to recall what we talked about.

Science and Technology of all sorts and categories are one of the items that tend to stay lodged in my brain, music lyrics however are very difficult, I could listen to most rock music songs twenty times and still never be able to remember the lyrics. I also have a very poor memory for things I listen to, but a much better memory for things that I read or watch.

One of the funniest things about my poor memory, is I can tell you that Celery is the only negative calorie food item on the planet, that lightning travels at 186,000 miles per second, and almost every line from the movie “Tombstone”, but if you asked me to recite any one of the 300 poems I wrote in the past year I could not recite a single one, all I would remember is the topics of a few of them, maybe a few words.

So I find it funny that I sometimes browse my own poetry blog and see poems I have written that I didn’t remember I had wrote until after reading it again months later. Perhaps this is a side effect from churning out so many poems, I heard that some song writers and musicians actually have a hard time remembering their own lyrics until they rehearse them dozens of times over and over, so maybe it isn’t that uncommon.

I am a firm believer in knowledge is power and the more you information you know the better off you are, life is too short to squander it in ignorance. I try to read and learn as many new things every single day in my life and I visit Wikipedia and news sites often to try and learn something. I read popular science magazines and such every time I use the restroom and actually do almost all of my “non computer” reading in the restroom on bio breaks.

My coworkers sometimes refer to me as Google Justin, or Wiki Justin in my ability to recall some facts and obscure information in so many topics ranges. I just enjoy learning and spreading my information and I think more people should spend time expanding their knowledge; you never know when you may be in a social situation where that information could come in handy.

-Justin Germino