Smoked Salmon Pizza at Pizza Nova

Honestly, I now make it my routine after having the Pizza Nova several times at Pizza Nova. This is a smoked salmon topped pizza that also has red onions, capers, fontina cheese and more. The flavor is just unlike anything I have tasted in a Pizza before and the crust is also very good.

My wife loves the Gluten Free crust at Pizza Nova, but I don’t get Gluten Free pizza’s myself, she says it is one of the best if not the best gluten free pizza crust she has ever tasted. If you happen to be near Solana Beach in California and want to try a unique or great tasting Pizza, I encourage you to stop by Pizza Nova and give them a try.

-Justin Germino

Encinitas Weather is Perfect

Man, to get out of the 112 degree weather yesterday and drive to lovely Encinitas, which is only 5.5 hours away and every day this week the temperatures are between 65 and 70 degrees.  This is literally the perfect temperature I could live in all year (maybe a little warmer to swim in the ocean) but still.

Encinitas Beach

This was the first time traveling with our 8 week old puppy and lugging 3 dogs to our CA pad.  We are staying for a full week and I am not taking any time off of work, so I had to lug a ton of gear this time.

No air conditioning needed and will just enjoy the rest of the weekend before I work again on Monday.  Should be a nice time with some good food and beautiful weather.

-Justin Germino

Testing Fraps for Video Game Recording

I have been wanting to do higher quality video game recordings and finally decided to buy Fraps a few weeks ago since I was having trouble getting Overwolf to record a high enough quality for my liking.

Fraps is well worth the price however, but I had shock at how large even the smallest video files are by default and realize you really need to convert them if you want to get them onto YouTube.

I used uRex Video Converter which the company had given me a license to review the product last year and it worked pretty well converting the .avi file to .mp4 and keeping most of the quality intact (shrinking the file size to manageable portions.).

Here are some sample video files of Wizard 101 which is the game I am playing the most lately with my kids.



I haven’t gotten a chance to test the audio record since my kids are so noisy when we game I can’t record any audio without background noise, but that will come when I start doing my reviews of The Secret World and other games later.

What do you think of the video/sound quality?

-Justin Germino

Pup Pup and Away

This puppy has definitely added some additional overhead in the house since we got him last week.  It feels like we had a 3rd child due to the needs of this little one and at only 8 weeks of age he is just too young to be left alone for more than a few minutes or we risk adding a new piddle spot to the carpet.

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Gluten is devilishly cute however and will integrate well once he can be more independent.  He just loves harassing the other dogs to play with him, and ironically finds more joy in playing with a cat toy these last few days than any of his dog toys.  We don’t have a cat, but bought a cat toy with a mouse at the top of a springy pole that sits on top of a puzzle with a jingle ball in it and he just loves leaping at the mouse, dragging it all around the room.

I want to take some video if it and post it.

-Justin Germino

Keeping Life Balance in an Age of Social Media

Ping, ping, ping, there goes your tweetdeck alarm, ping, your phone, a text message, ping, your email, ping, a comment on your blog.  All day long the bells are ringing, calling for your attention, asking you to read here, check that, what about this.  And of course you can’t forget to actually produce content for your site, research, brainstorm.  Finally you sit down to write that idea that’s been brewing in the back of your mind when your son walks up to you, can we please play?  And so goes modern life for connected individuals, those of us with active social media profiles, blogs, smart phones, and active life.

Crazy angry asian man yelling at phone

Any given day you can be pulled in not just a 100 but a 1000 different directions.  Where do you invest your time?  Do you make time for your children, as they’ll be grown and gone before you know it?  What about the business that you need to grow in order to feed the children that will be grown and gone?  All of the possible connections you can make any given day by socializing through social media channels?

 
It is the era of balance.  It is essential to keep all of these aspects of modern life in balance with each other, all of them advancing slowly, but surely.  Investing too much in one to the detriment of another can lead to more chaos.

So how to keep it all balanced?  Here are some suggestions:

  1. Every morning, before you start your day, spend 10 minutes clearing your mind.  Meditation, or pray, or just breathe.  Bring some space into your mind and a positive spin to your day.
  2. Write down a todo list for the day.  Everything that you have pending, for all of the different aspects of your day.  Need to write a blog post?  Check.  Need to take the kids to a doctor’s appointment?  Check.  Need to pick up groceries? Check.  Need to check your tweeter messages?  Check.  Write it all down.
  3. Prioritize everything and try to break the day down into sections.  Schedule it all out so you can plan on hitting all of the most important things on your list.
  4. User your smart phone to set up a series of alarms.  As your time is up for each given task, respect the alarm, and move on to the next step.
  5. At the end of the day, spend a few minutes visualizing your future.  Don’t limit yourself, dream big.  What goals do you have in your interactions with your children?  How do you want to see your business grow?  Utilize the power of positive thinking.

It is no easy feat to survive in today’s Ping-oriented society.  Learning balance is key to staying afloat, above and beyond the alarms of our phones, computers, and jobs.

About the Author

Marcela De Vivo is a writer and internet marketer blogging at MarcelaDeVivo.com  She has been an internet marketing consultant since1999 and has learned to balance children, SEO, social media, and life.

Designing a T-Shirt for Blog

I wanted to giveaway DragonBlogger.com T-Shirts for various milestones in contests and was working on some of my logo’s recently.

tshirt-front

I have the logo for the front of the shirt looking good, but still have some issues with the back logo having a clear coat that seems to add shine over the whole logo.

tshirt-back

I am working to touch up the logo and see if I can remove that clear/shiny that shows up around the dragon on the back of the shirt.  I am hoping to have it finished and my final prototype shirt done in June sometime.

Meanwhile, I will kick off a test contest giving one away with a new plugin I am testing for WordPress called Contest Domination which can do some things that Rafflecopter can’t like let you pick a winner based on who collected the most entries as well as integrate a mailing list signup as a contest entry method.

Of course I am wondering, will anyone want a Dragon Blogger Technology T-Shirt?  Or is this just a waste of time and useless prize?

-Justin Germino

The Best Banana Chips Ever

It isn’t every day that I find a new snack product that I just rave about, but when my wife purchased these air dried banana chips the other day and I tasted one I couldn’t believe how much flavor they had.

They are the Chiquita Fruit Chips and literally I have never tasted a dried fruit snack that was so incredible. They are not dehydrated and hard like banana chips are, they is no frying, no oil and they are just pure banana slices that are never freeze dried and air crisped (whatever that means).

bananachips

They taste just like fresh ripe banana but they have a crunchiness to them that is not as hard as a dehydrated banana chip.  Even better is if you look at the ingredient label you will see the only ingredient for the entire bag is “1 banana” nothing else, NOTHING else for ingredients.  No added anything.

The tropical mix is next on my list to try and is the only bulk pack you can get on Amazon.com.  These make the ultimate snack for being on the road or late night where you want to eat something sweet but not have the guilt or extra sugar.

[az_easel item=”B0071OT1KI”]

-Justin Germino

Issues with WordPress Schedule Post Date Missed

So I was wondering why here on my personal blog I was intermittently having scheduled post dates missed and just never publish my articles which were scheduled.  After doing research I found the problem was related to Cloudflare and that WordPress waits to publish a scheduled post until the next time a valid user accesses the website, so it kind of publishes after the scheduled date the next time a user actually hits the site.  Well since Cloudflare caches all older pages and my site doesn’t get hit overly frequently this was causing my posts to miss their scheduled times since no actual calls were hitting the site itself triggering the publish mechanism in place.

The solution was simple enough, install WP-Cron Control and then add a manual cron statement that will run 1x per day and make sure your scheduled posts get published.  The cool thing is WP-Cron Control tells you what statement to put in your cron, and if you use any hosting provider that uses CPanel (Hostmonster, Bluehost…etc) you should be able to find the "cron jobs" function and just add job cutting and pasting the custom line provided.

Here is a video tutorial on how to do this:

-Justin Germino

Metro: Last Light Teaser Trailer

The Moscow Metro. A monumental feat of Soviet engineering, with a dark secondary purpose – to serve as a refuge in the event of an atomic attack. As the Cold War thawed and the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed to fade, this purpose was forgotten – except by a few, waiting for the signal, ready to open the vaults… the last refuge for the remnants of mankind.

This is one game that teases us with what is to come when it releases in 2013.

-Justin Germino