Justin Germino Ramblings

This morning as I was exploring the 8th realm in Kingdom Elementals I finally reached level 48.  I had been playing this game every day for about a month and a half now, usually getting up and playing about 15 minutes at 5:30am and then another 30 minutes at 10pm at night with some scattered random checks during the day.

My goal is to level up my Polar Bearborn to level 10 and unlock it’s 60% dodge ability to help increase my odds of surviving those devastating 5 star cards that can whip up some impressive attacks.

I still have yet to get a 5 star rune and those things can make the difference in a PVP battle between win or lose.  With gaining an average of 50,000 experience a day, it will take about 7 days for me to get to level 49.  The 5 star Fire Kirin which I already have unlocks at level 50 which means I would have two of them, but right now my 2 Taiga General characters help out in a combat where the opponent doesn’t have have anchor or a way to avoid being exiled.

If you like card games on the iOS platform, then Kingdom Elementals is worth a try, it is fun and easy to pick up, it doesn’t have the depth and complexity of MTG but that is a plus and a minus if you have little time, then you can gain ground with auto resolving battles, and just jumping in when you need to.  It has manual combat control only in the story mode and dungeons, but manual control is limited merely to choosing when to play a card or hold it until more cards are available.  You don’t manually trigger card abilities like MTG, you instead merely watch the cards resolve the combat on their own, but it is a fun way to kill about an hour a day.

Recently I was invited to test the Adbeans Publisher Network and can honestly say I have been pretty happy with the platform so far, the platform definitely favors blogs with a higher PR ranking right now, PR3 or higher is most likely to get approved but I would encourage any blogger to apply if they are looking to gain some earnings by including some sponsored links in their written content.

Links were a fairly good match for content and not intrusive, payout rates were among the best out of all the blog publishing platforms I have used and can honestly say that this is one service I would recommend along with SocialSpark (which will likely eventually go away for IZEA’s new platform) and Tap Influence.

There are a ton of other platforms to try to if you are looking to make money with blogging and I encourage you to visit the Make Money Online page on DragonBlogger if you want a large list of programs to try.  I haven’t added AdBeans yet, so I need to update the page however.

Adbeans has you list your website, add details and they provide keywords and links that you either include in new articles as either in-content links or signature links.  There is a higher payment typically for in-content links that are very focused around the advertisers topic than for signature links but both will work if you have a hard time finding a way to write exactly about the sponsors content.  Adbeans has been around since 2003 which is crazy since I had been blogging since 2008 and tested dozens of other publishing platforms and never heard about Adbeans until this past month. 

Any questions about Adbeans let me know,

Nearly 18 years ago I didn’t have my driver’s license yet and biking was my primary mode of transportation.  I won’t tell you that biking is fun in Phoenix where I had to get up at 4am and bike in 99 degree temperatures at 4am to work which was 6 miles away, then bike in 115 degree temperatures at 4pm the same 6 miles back home, but it was a means of getting to and from work for a poor kid who didn’t have any other means of transportation.  The bus schedule didn’t run to get me to work at that early of a shift, so was out of the question for arriving at my 5am start time at my job.

I had gone through several bicycles in a short time span, the first was when I let my room mate borrow it one night, and he came back after crashing it into something (probably was drinking) the entire bike was ruined, frame bent, rim bent, chain broken…etc.  It is times like this I wondered if having something like bike insurance would have been beneficial.  Something like Protect Your Bubble Cycle Bike Insurance may have been a good option to go with if it existed back then and could have saved me from having to spend hundreds of dollars on a new bicycle.

This was where I wasn’t too savvy about such things as a teenager and I never even thought about different types of insurances. But this did get me thinking recently as I spent a lot of time in Encinitas, California where cycling is much more common than in Arizona as a mode of transportation every day.  Cyclists must typically get some sort of bike insurance to help cover not only the cost of the bike but the potential costs of an injury or accident I would think.  There are so many bicycle lanes and shared lanes, that I know I would be afraid to bicycle to work.  Even when I used to bicycle to work I was afraid to bike on the road, in AZ at the time there weren’t that many dedicated bike lanes and cars would double park like crazy down town so I had very narrow gaps between vehicles.  This lead me to bike on the sidewalk most of the time and I did get stopped by a cop who wrote me a ticket for riding my bicycle on the sidewalk instead of the street too.

Risks for bicycles while traveling and biking

The chances of damaging your bike increases dramatically if you take it out for an off-road trip, places where it wasn’t designed to go. I once did an some off road biking and had dozens of cactus needles puncture my tires.  I had to get that gak stuff to help close some of the little holes but in the end I wound up having to buy a new tire.

Also public places are most vulnerable to theft, even outside of a work building.  Even with a bike lock, my 2nd bike was stolen while I was at work.  Someone had used bolt cutters to just cut the bike lock and steal my bike. This happened in the middle of the day in a crowded downtown work area too. I was only 19 at the time and in the end I never did wind up getting a 3rd replacement bike until a long time later, I would up learning how to drive and getting my driver’s license and borrowing my girlfriend’s car at the time or she wound up driving me to work every day.  I later married that girl and am still married to her now 14 years later.

So I didn’t expect the outpouring of interest when I posed a question to the Dragon Blogger Facebook Fans about whether people would be interested if I gave away some of the products I reviewed already but didn’t need to keep.  I just didn’t want to have to pay shipping, and I had dozens of comments of people interested from all over the world.

This will help keep the clutter down in my office which will make the family happy, as well as give stuff people want or need without them having to purchase it and I think was a win/win scenario. 

So far mostly just hubs, a Bluetooth keyboard and a few Kindle cases were given away but more shall come and I am always getting products to review and keep and just can’t use most of them after finishing the review phase.

Meanwhile, if you want to potentially get dibs on a free accessory, follow Dragon Blogger on Facebook here and stay tuned for the posts offering stuff and 1 random person who leaves a comment is the winner.

-Justin Germino

It’s really simple actually, I hate using checks.  Despise it in fact, and I don’t’ want to have to write another check again.  This isn’t just for companies where I can use Bill Pay for when they don’t accept credit card payments online or over the phone but also applies to every local person I hire for basic services from landscaping to cleaning.

Virtually any smart phone can be made into a credit card pos machine now, you can even have full kits ordered that come with cash drawers, receipt printers and more for a decent amount.  If I had someone come to my door and offer to say trim my palm trees, if they had the ability to swipe my card in their pos card reader for iPhone, Android or whatever.  I would be much more inclined to purchase the service and they just made a sale.  I don’t even mind if individual contractors charge say 3% on top to have the convenience of paying with credit card so they don’t eat that transaction fee from their side of the earnings.

They can give the $5 discount to the cash customers, it is worth my convenience not to have to write a check honestly.  Also they don’t have to go find someplace to cash it either.  Though I imagine some individual contractors probably don’t use bank accounts and still cash check directly with no means of tracking or depositing the earnings this still could be a viable option for most of them.  Bottom line, if you have a smart phone and you offer services you should give the clients the ability to pay any way they are able to.

Now, this applies to even something so small as a neighborhood yard sale or garage sale.  How many people show up and don’t have more than a few bucks, if you had a POS system you would probably sell a lot more at your garage or yard sale!

I was installing to test the EasyAzon 3 plugin which has a completely new search functionality but unfortunately it doesn’t play nice yet with the Suffusion framework theme which is on DragonBlogger.com so I had to down grade back to EasyAzon 2.1.3.

EasyAzon is my favorite WordPress plugin for easily searching and adding Amazon affiliate linked images, info boxes and links into posts and supports localization, link cloaking and add to cart direct functionality which means the cookie will stay for over 70+ days if the user keeps the item in the cart and orders it at a later date, instead of just the 24 hour cookie when they click the link and decide to cancel or not purchase the product.

The one bummed thing is the add to cart default doesn’t work between EasyAzon 2.1.3 and EasyAzon 3.0, in EasyAzon 2.1.3 when you default add to cart, images and info boxes will send the user to the "add to cart" page, but when you upgrade to EasyAzon 3.0 the tag for add to cart functionality has changed so the user is sent to the normal product page instead of the add to cart page.  This means all my older posts will revert from add to cart to normal product page but this isn’t that big a deal once they get the theme issue fixed.

I still love and use EasyAzon all the time, and this new EasyAzon 3.0 didn’t have any issues on my Graphene themed blog, so it clearly just had an issue with Suffusion, or with some widget code in my sidebar specifically.  Meanwhile, EasyAzon 3 adds additional localization functionality like Amazon India is finally added, and you have advanced search capability with a full page search window.

I will do a full review and showcase more after this theme fix issue is resolved but I am optimistic about the plugin and the best part is the EasyAzon folks are giving you a free upgrade from 2.1.3 to 3.0, most companies only give you point release upgrades for free and charge an upgrade free for the next version so this is a good deal for existing EasyAzon customers.

EazyAzon is well worth the $47 for an unlimited license and you can use the product for all of your WordPress blogs.

Friday was my youngest son’s birthday and he turned 7 and his most wanted item this year like the past two was the latest Skylanders Swap Force game, they always come out in time for his birthday and last year it was Skylanders Giants.

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So he ended up getting the new Skylanders Swap Force game and a few extra characters, and my good friends over at Anker sent him a 2000 DPI Laser mouse as a birthday gift because they knew how much he wanted one after his older brother got to keep the one I reviewed for them earlier in the year.

The new Skylanders Swap Force game is pretty awesome and the ability to jump as well as switch upper and lower half of the Skylanders had the kids up early at 5:15am every morning this weekend playing until the last minute before they had to leave for school.

So far my son’s favorite Skylander from the new game is Magna Charge who is quite fun to use as he throws your opponents around.

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I have done a lot of computer mouse reviews over the past 12 months and this is a round up of the mice I have reviewed.  Most recently the Logitech G602 is my favorite gaming mouse but it is overkill if you don’t want a mouse with so many thumb buttons for gaming.

My kids love the Anker 2000DPI Laser Gaming Mouse and the mouse I use the most for my work machine (non-gaming) is the Anker 6 Button Wireless mouse.

If you are looking for a mouse all of these mice were good to use and for different purposes, and there is one for every budget in there too.

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Finally got the vanity URL for my Dragon Blogger Business page on Google Plus and it is none other than http://plus.google.com/+dragonblogger to compliment my http://plus.google.com/+justingermino which is my personal Google plus vanity URL.

I hope that Google doesn’t eventually start charging for using the Vanity URL’s but it is much nicer to be able to support and share the Vanity URL than the number that you had to share previously.

Many of the WordPress plugins that auto add Google +1 buttons to your sidebar or follow options will have to be updated to support both types of Google Plus URL’s many of them haven’t updated yet and some don’t play nice with the Vanity URL instead of the actual URL.

Meanwhile, I continue to leverage the IFTTT service to help bolster my Google Plus feeds with more content and try to make a more active approach to engaging on Google Plus like I do on Facebook and Twitter which have been my primary social media engagement networks for so long now.

What are your favorite things to engage fans with on Google Plus?

Lately my kids have been showing me a ton of Minecraft Parody videos of all the latest pop songs on the radio and they are so fun to watch, clever wordplay that once could only be found with Weird Al and others is now being done by everyone and for almost every niche.

So the Imagine Dragons song Demons, I actually heard the Where My Diamonds Hide parody before the song, and I swear now when I hear the original song I think of this Minecraft video where poor Steve is trying to keep his diamonds away from robbers by setting traps for them.  It is super clever and really shows the ingenuity of these CGI artists who combine a popular game with CGI with a song parody and it makes for some entertainment gold.

1.6 million views is nothing to laugh at, and I tell you I am hooked on watching these Minecraft CGI parodies, I like them all!