Justin Germino Ramblings

Heading back to Arizona today after spending time in California, it is about a 5.5 hour drive and expect to arrive in afternoon sometime.  I have a very busy week and needed the rest before hand.  I do wish there were a way to make the trip a little shorter either by teleporter, bullet train or allowing the speed limit to be 120mph on the Interstate sometimes.

Meanwhile, I pick the Winner for the Video Game Giveaway sometime tonight when I get back and I know the readers are all excited to find out who won.  I had such a success with the video game giveaway that I intend to do one every month now on DragonBlogger.com so will be kicking off the next one on March 1st.

Finding that some of my blogging time at night has been going to the addicting Star Wars: The Old Republic which I am finding quite enjoyable lately.  This is one MMO game that is worth the money if you want to adventure in the Star Wars universe and help the Republic battle the evil Sith Imperials.  It is also kid friendly enough that my 8 year old and 5 year old boys sit with me and watch me play for an hour before bed at night as kind of like a ritual which helps me get an extra game hour in.

-Justin Germino

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Taking my wife on a Prime Rib Dinner cruise out of the San Diego Harbor tonight, spending all weekend on a getaway while Grandma watches the kids back at our place.  As a married couple with children it is imperative to take some time away from the kids to connect without the pressures of day to day life.

We do make a point of taking at least 1 weekend every few months and around two weeks in the summer to just enjoy having some alone time together without having to worry about the kids.  We are very blessed and fortunate to have my wife’s mother in our life who always watches the kids while we are away, had we not had family so close by we would be unable to take as many vacation retreats.

I know my wife and I would never trust a service or anybody outside the closest family members to watch our kids overnight, we have never hired a baby sitter in the 8 years since we had our first child thanks to having grandma close by.

-Justin Germino

Spending the Post Valentine’s Day weekend on vacation up in Encinitas, CA where my wife and I will be enjoying the beach, dining and each others company for a few days away from our busy AZ lives.

Recharging the batteries as there is a very hectic few weeks coming up back to back and I don’t foresee another slow down until Spring break in mid-march for the kids where we are going on a family road trip to Las Vegas and then California.

In the meantime, I hope to actually sleep in past 5:30am this weekend for 3 days in a row which is almost unheard of in my household where my kids getup between 5am and 5:30am every morning for the past 7 years.

-Justin Germino

Netflix unfortunately finds itself in a tough spot trying to get support for allowing their Facebook app in the United States which would allow members to share their recently played movie history to their Facebook timelines.  This app is available in the U.K. and some other countries but is blocked in the U.S. as a result of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act which prohibits the storage and sharing of video rental history.

Mashable covered this story previously http://mashable.com/2012/02/01/netflix-on-facebook/ but I hadn’t actually known about it until I read a CNN article where Netflix had to pay a fine related to not purging former members video history which is required by the same act.

With nearly every other entertainment platform allowing you to share your interests, listens with friends and family should Netflix be excluded from this option?

I think congress should pass a bill to allow for opt-in sharing subscriptions, simply offering a “watch and share” button as was mentioned in the Mashable article seems like a perfectly good solution because it is basically putting the rights in the hands of the member and they can choose not to share, and/or remove it from their timeline at any time. 

What do you think about sharing your recent movie history from Netflix in a timeline on Facebook?

In my case, this would be useless because my kids pretty much just watch Disney, Nickelodeon shows on my Netflix membership so I would look like a kid using Netflix

-Justin Germino

A couple of months ago I had made an unsuccessful attempt to replace one of the lighting fixtures in our Encinitas place with one that fit the theme of the home better.  It turned out to be far more of a complicated job than I thought and in the end completely unsuccessful as a result of the odd wiring setup.

My wife and I had gone down to the local hardware store and selected one of the contemporary chandeliers that we thought would fit the living area.  The bulbs had to be dimmer bulbs as there was a dimmer switch on the wall, but I learned the hard way that LCD bulbs do not function as dimmer bulbs, and on top of it the way the wiring was tied into two separate circuits made it impossible for me to figure out how to replace the dimmer switch on the wall.

We wanted to replace the Dimmer switch with a simple on and off switch, but I could not figure out how to do this and even with consulting various guides online I was not able to get the wiring to work where the fixture could simply be on or off.

In the end I wound up reverting everything back to the original dimmer switch, though we kept the newer light fixture and just put in dimmer bulbs instead of the LCD bulbs we originally were going to use.

I may have to call an electrician to assist if I want to replace that dimmer switch again in the future.

-Justin Germino

Was happy with the Dragon Blogger Tech fanpage milestone of reaching 2,000 fans this past weekend.

Contests were the sole driving factor in gathering this many fans in such a short time frame, and the good thing is the drop off rate seems to be faring well.  The fans stay and seem to like various articles though commenting is a little lower than I want on my fan page, I am hoping to boost up interaction a bit more.

The latest video game giveaway is a huge success, and in many ways is a great success than the Kindle Fire Giveaways because it drew in a huge number (nearly 1/2) the amount of entries as the Kindle Fire Giveaway and yet cost only about 1/4 the price of the Kindle Fire.  I also was able to bring in some of the gaming crowd I have been trying to draw to DragonBlogger.com and with us doing no less than 2 video game reviews per week I was hoping to expand my gaming audience.

I am still looking to add more video game reviews to the YouTube channel though these take a lot of time to develop and I may end up having to hire additional content creators for this in the future.

I have seen the amount of traffic Facebook drives to my blog increasing dramatically over the last few months, some of this comes from the Fanpage and I am hoping to continue to see that trend.

-Justin Germino

I spent a lot of time working nights and a few hours on the weekend developing some of the longest and most complicated Formidable Pro forms I have done to date.  These forms included dozens of entries including some that spanned multiple pages which you can do with Formidable Pro.

I had customized the HTML in the forms to allow for special horizontal rules, formatting and some other text to break up sections of the forms.  In addition I had customized the email output on some of these forms so that they would allow for perfect importing when I replaced out some legacy form systems.

I gained newfound respect for Formidable Pro and I have always loved the plugin with it’s Mailchimp and Paypal integration but after customizing the output email forms so much I appreciate it’s flexibility even more now.

I did upgrade to the unlimited site license and now pretty much use it on all of my blogs and recommended Formidable Pro to all my blogging peers and anybody else looking for a WordPress form solution and needing the power of a professional form plugin.  One that allows for custom redirects, saving form post data between pages, allowing editing of forms after submission and allowing instant integration with Paypal where amount is prefilled on Paypal order screen.  These are only samples of what Formidable Pro can do for WordPress and I highly recommend you check it out for yourself.

-Justin Germino

As my wife and I both had to work on Valentines day we are doing a smaller celebration today and actually going to celebrate this upcoming weekend with a getaway in Encinitas as our “big celebration”.

Still, this old dog has a few tricks up his sleeve and is hoping to have some surprises in store for tonight.  This is the 15th Valentine’s Day that my wife and I will be celebrating together and I intend it to be one that isn’t forgotten.

In the previous Valentine’s days we had made traditions to going to places like The Melting Pot, McCormick & Schmicks or some other fancy restaurant and even spent Valentine’s Day in Las Vegas a few years.

Tonight though, home cooked Lobster Tails, Chocolate covered strawberries and maybe curling up on the couch and watching a rom-com should be some fun.

Meanwhile I still have several items to pick up in preparation for the weekend, errands to run one of these few days remaining.

If you wind up reading this, Happy Valentines Day My Love.

-Justin Germino

Spent the weekend seeing both Journey 2 on Friday night and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in 3D on Saturday.  My kids enjoyed both movies and I really enjoyed Journey 2 The Mysterious Island.

Right now my 5 year old idolizes The Rock and pretends to be him every time we wrestle.  His near monstrous physique plus his family friendly charm and charisma are just about perfect for a family film and not since Hulk Hogan starred in a few cheesy 90’s movies has a wrestler done such a great crossover into an actor (Remember Suburban Commando or Mr. Nanny anyone?).

Meanwhile my kids enjoyed Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace as it came out before both of my kids were born.  The 3D wasn’t phenomenal as movies tooled to be 3D often come out flat and only really with 2 planes but it worked okay.

The 3D in Journey 2 however was well implemented and my sons literally jumped when a three dimensional centipede crawled out in one scene and bust out laughing as berries were popping off of The Rock’s pecks in another scene.

Overall it was a fun weekend, did several hours of bike riding, play ground battles and even bought Star Wars: The Old Republic for the PC with my kids convincing me to create a Sith Warrior Zabrak in the likes of Darth Maul.

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-Justin Germino

If the idea of pinning information you find online to a clipboard sounds familiar to you, it should.  This method of tracking information online and categorizing it is becoming the next replacement for browser bookmark services because if it’s feature rich functionality and social media integration capabilities.

clipix is an incredible tool that allows you to categorize, store and keep track of the information you want online and share it to only those you want to share it with.  Clipix lets you clip any webpage and turn it into a clip in one of your organized clipboards.

In my above example you can see that I have several clipboards created and named appropriately.  By default Clipix will have some clipboards created for you when you create an account, but you can rename these and create new ones on the fly to fit your clipping needs.

Clipix offers a bookmarklet you just drag and drop to your browser favorites or bookmark bar, then when you visit a page you want to keep and organize you simply click the Clip button and you are presented with options on how you want to organize that website.

You can create new Clipboards on the fly as I have mentioned, you can also choose only to allow friends to see your clips or make them completely private.  You can also share your clipped items on Facebook with a single click.

Add a Clip Button

Bloggers!  Clipix offers a javascript button you can include on your site and encourage readers to clip your webpage or homepage.  Early statistics seem to indicate that users who clip pages are more likely to return.

This code is simple to get and you can easily install it into a WordPress plugin like Sharebar or Digg Digg with ease.

Clipix also has Syncboards which are like clipboards except you share these with friends and family.  When somebody clips information to the syncboard it instantly updates in real time for all parties sharing the syncboard.  This is a great way to share family photos.

In addition to Clipboards and Syncboards Clipix also allows Multiboards which are groupings of clipboards so you can keep your clipboards organized even further.  Keeping track of family vacations, gifts, wish lists and so much more is easy leveraging multiboards.

Clipix also has an iOS application that lets you take your clips with you on the go wherever you are, you can still access Clipix from any mobile browser as well.

Watch this video on Clipix to see more:

-Justin Germino

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