Justin Germino Ramblings

After doing over 70+ video’s for YouTube I find that I still have a problem when doing audio recording that I tend to fill a silent gap with “umm” which is unprofessional.  Ironically I don’t do this on conference calls or when speaking over the phone, but it happens primarily when recording my voice on a microphone.  My mind takes a moment to process what I want to say next and fills the silent space with an umm.

Fortunately I use post video editing with Camtasia Studio to remove these but it means more editing time for my video’s.  I actually wasn’t even aware that I was doing it, until I listen to my own recording and find out how many times I actually say um when recording a presentation.

I need to train myself to remove these audible pauses so that it saves time on video editing or I probably just need to write and read from a script more often which I don’t really like doing but probably should start to.

I have seen many video’s by other bloggers which need post editing, but too many directly feed the webcam recording or video cam recording directly to YouTube.  Sometimes they are audio background feedback issues, other times they are just minor audio or visual issues like pauses when someone is searching for something or primarily when I see people demo’ing something and wait far to long for a website to load and you are just stuck there waiting in silence.

It is important if you do video demonstrations to review them and make video/audio edits where you can to improve the quality and professionalism of the recording.  This is especially true if you are trying to establish yourself as an authority in your field and building a reputation.

-Justin Germino

On Friday I will be flying out to Las Vegas on Veterans day in preparation for attending CA World starting Sunday the 13th through the 17th of November 2011.  Though I won’t be speaking this year (I presented at the last 2 CA World expo’s) I do make a point to attend as many sessions as possible from both a learning perspective on the software as well as the networking potential.

I actually am pretty terrified of public speaking and even though I have spoken twice I still get very uncomfortable.  I was considering finding a local place that allows for amateur poetry reads and just getting used to standing up in front of crowds by reading some of the hundreds of poems I have written on Wanderer Thoughts Poetry but I never can find the time and don’t know if any places exist within 50 miles of where I live honestly.

My goals are to become more comfortable with public speaking as I see it as part of a natural progression of where I am going with my primary career and even my secondary hobbies honestly.

-Justin Germino

It is amazing how ironic it is when driving down the street and actually seeing people carrying signs that say “Repent” or “The end is near” or “Give your life to Jesus”…etc.

I completely and utterly respect everyone’s beliefs and right to believe whatever they will, I just think that when it comes to blatant pandering or proselytizing one should at least be considerate of others. 

I often tell my wife “The crazy don’t realize their crazy” and it really is true.  There is far too much hatred, anger and intolerance in this world and I don’t mean for crooked companies, governments that overcommit and spend our tax dollars but for each other as human beings.

I would pay no more disrespect to another human being than I would to my own family, we are all a living sentient race on this Earth and deserve to be recognized as such.  The fact that genocide occurs in Africa, religious intolerance and hatred in the Middle East predominately but everywhere really is absurd.

The fact that even in America people would trash talk a presidential candidate because he is a Mormon is insane.  I don’t practice religion but I can damn well tell you that religion and churches have done good things for people and communities.

Sure, doesn’t matter if you believe in god or not.  I have seen Mormon communities help each other in times of need.  I have seen the way communities stick together and form that friendship of helping fellow brothers or sisters out.

You see this same community in all religions to some extent, but I just use Mormon as an example because in Arizona and particularly in Mesa and Casa Grande I have personally seen more Mormon communities lately.

There is no room for intolerance in a civilized world, humanity must be better than that.

-Justin Germino

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The Logitech HD Webcam C310 has 4.5 star rating with over 221 customer reviews so you know this is a popular and widely used webcam.  It comes with a 5’ usb cable and allows 1 click upload to YouTube or Facebook.

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It is the perfect webcam for fast vlog entries or chatting with friends or family over Skype.

Jump on yours quick if you want to get the Logitech HD Webcam C310 for $23.99 which is 52% off the original price of $50.

-Justin Germino

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This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of American Family Insurance. All opinions are 100% mine.

My kids enjoy seeing many comedians in movies, but they are too young to ever watch  most of them do a Stand Up comedy routine.  You find that Stand Up is very much adult oriented and there are few stand up comedy shows that are designed for the whole family anymore.

Don’t believe me, just browse the comedy section on Netflix and you will find very very few Stand Up shows in the last 3 years that aren’t riddled with vulgar language that probably shouldn’t be heard by anyone under the age of 17.

American Family Insurance is all about family and protecting your family, this is why they also helped put together a comedy program that the whole family can enjoy without having to worry about what will be said and how inappropriate the content may be.

It is called Stand Up For Family and many of the skits remind me of the original Bill Cosby material which I used to love and listen to on cassette tapes for hours as a kid.  Check out the Bill Bellamy skit about “Still Free” and how kids back in the day had such great imagination that they could just play Freeze Tag and stay still all day until unfrozen.  Very funny stuff!

AmFam reminds everyone that family is important and honestly and seriously I have been an American Family Insurance customer for over 10 years myself.  When I first signed up with them I thought they had very helpful agents and they check in with you regularly to see if you have everything you need for your family.

So take a few minutes and watch some funny stand up comedy, let me know what your favorite stand up bit was.  Most bits are only a few minute so you can take some time to watch them and get a few chuckles in.

-Justin Germino

Seriously folks, I have been incredibly busy these last few days and with my neck being injured and being tired I haven’t been staying up at night to catch up on blogging.

Even my rule of having some blog posts for rainy days ran dry here on my personal blog and I just don’t have time to blog as much so am going to have to cut back for a bit until I can play catch up.

With me also going out of town to attend CA World in Las Vegas in less than 2 weeks I will be even busier and I may just have to find guest posters to cover slots on my blog for a few days or leave them blank.

I just don’t like leaving “no posts” for days at a time, for some reason it makes me think of dust collecting on old furniture or a TV set.  I feel a blog should always be in motion and when my blog is void it appears as if nobody is listening or broadcasting.

Hence I wrote a post about not being able to do posts, ironic huh?

-Justin Germino

96 emails this morning I had to manually moderate on my blog using CommentLuv Premium, in every case the user was trying to simply embed a stupid word “loan”, “loans”, or “mortgage loan”.

All the comments were left from manual commenters so they bypass the GASP javascript check, and every one required me to manually flag as spam or trash.  CommentLuv premium for all it’s greatness doesn’t unfortunately have any SPAM check against manual spam being left by people hired to type and leave comments on blogs.

The stupid thing is they probably would have gotten the backlink they wanted had they just left username@loans and put in a decent comment.  Then they would have been allowed to keep the comment and it would have likely been approved.

The fact that all these generic comments are on poems and have nothing to do even close to the topic of poetry is another annoying factor.

CommentLuv Premium (Specifically the GASP module) needs to have additional spam filter options.

Options for CommentLuv SPAM Filtering

1. Strip hyperlink out of the comment code, so if somebody puts a hyperlink in, just simply remove the http code from the comment.  This way hyperlinked words become normal words and someone who leaves a full URL you can still see the URL and go to it if you want, just not get the hyperlink.
2. Ability to mark comments as SPAM if hyperlink is recorded in comment.
3. Ability to create SPAM Filter blacklist and any comment you mark as SPAM, the email and/or IP gets added to the blacklist automatically spamming all future comments.  In the case of the 91 spam comments, they all came from the same IP and the same website was the target URL.

Out of all the incredible features of CommentLuv, the only one I find that needs improvement is the GASP spam blocking module, there is just still too much manual spam making it through to my moderation queue.

Note, this blog uses Livefyre since it is much more effective at blocking SPAM as it uses Impermium to check the comment before it publishes and again it re-validates after the comment publishes.  I have only seen about 3 comments out of 200 not be caught by the Livefyre spam filter.  In reverse, only 2 out of 9 comments on my poetry blog with CommentLuv Premium are valid, 7 out of 9 comments are SPAM and make it to my moderation queue.

-Justin Germino

Have had a stiff neck all weekend and am going to desperately try to get a Chiropractic appointment in today if I can.  Also ate some food which upset my stomach yesterday so had to sleep on floor last night and feeling generally miserable all around.

I am hoping to feel better to take the kids trick or treating this afternoon as I promised to hit as many houses as possible.  Not only do they want the treats (we don’t let them keep that many), but a local Dental office is giving $1 per pound of candy that is brought in from kids.  My kids are hoping to collect 5-10 pounds of candy each so they can get the $5 – $10 from the Dentist office.

They care more about trading the candy in for some cash than the candy itself which is kind of funny.  Meanwhile, I don’t eat too much candy myself though my weakness is Twizzlers and I tend to keep and consume every Twizzler that collects in any trick or treat bags.

Anyway, though the weekend in Encinitas was great (minus my stiff neck) came back already needing recovery.  Here’s to hoping the adjustment fixes my neck problems (which I think I hurt working out last week).

-Justin Germino

Another great article on BloggerJet last week when Tim compiled a list of the top 99 best blogs to guest post on, particularly if you are in the blogging / seo / social media categories.  The list included metrics including PageRank, Alexa rank, # of RSS Subscribers and sorted all blogs by lowest Alexa rank (most popular) to highest.

My technology and entertainment blog DragonBlogger.com made #54 in the top 100 blogs which included such giants as SEOMoz, Problogger and Social Media Examiner.

Not only are these excellent blogs to consider some of your best guest post article writing for, but because these are top blogs as far as traffic, readership and fans they are excellent blogs to regularly comment on.  As readers get familiar with your name and comments you may be able to establish yourself and even possibly bring a following back to your site.

I wound up getting several hundred referral visits back to my site from Problogger.net a few months ago from a single comment I made on one article.  Imagine multiplying this across four or five articles across 40+ sites, this could be thousands of referral visits just from commenting and engaging with others on blogs.

I highly recommend you get the list of Top 99 Blogs to Guest Post On from Tim Soulo and remember to Tweet it which gives you an excel spreadsheet you can download and instantly cut/paste the URL’s from or sort however you like.

BTW, though Tim Soulo has a relatively new blog with BloggerJet, I can honestly tell you I have seen some of the highest quality articles on his site that I have ever read.  Each article does a great job informing as well as entertaining it’s readers and even though some of the content may be already known by experienced bloggers the refreshing approach and depth of information Tim brings to his blog are top notch. 

-Justin Germino

I just couldn’t justify paying nearly $100 per month for satellite TV service to 3 TV’s in my house anymore so I was looking for a better and alternative way to still get to watch a ton of content (Movies and TV Shows) while reducing my overall monthly expenses.

I had already owned 2 Roku XDS boxes, and had the Netflix service but I found if I added Hulu+ as well then I had access to much more immediate TV Shows and Seasons than you could find on Netflix.  So here is how I worked my plan.

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I stripped out almost my entire TV package down to only my bare minimum channels, and removed service from 2 of the 3 TV’s in my house.  I now use Netflix / Hulu Plus only for the Kid’s television and they can get all the kid’s shows and movies they want and aren’t affected much.  With Hulu Plus channel coming to the Nintendo Wii soon they can even get easier access to the Hulu Plus TV shows as well.

So, with Netflix and Hulu Plus I am paying about $19 per month or so for those two services, but I also reduced my satellite bill by over $60 by reducing the number of streams and channel packages.  This gave me a net savings of about $40 every month just by making this arrangement.

I did find that I couldn’t replace satellite completely, the lack of LIVE TV on Roku makes it impossible for CNN junkies like my wife and I to watch real time news if I were to cut my satellite completely.  But I was able to save quite a bit and every little bit helps.

So live news and local channels (I can’t pick anything up with HD Antenna for some reason) are the only reason I really am keeping a Satellite TV subscription at this time.

-Justin Germino

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