Justin Germino Ramblings

Was looking at my follow bloggers trying to leverage Twitter’s “Similar To” feature to find other bloggers of interest to follow and network with and found the feature to be less than helpful.

Was checking out @TycoonBlogger and found the following recommended because they were similar to @TycoonBlogger or at least Twitter thinks so:

Now I did more experimentation too see if such oddities would be suggested with @JohnAguiar @Kikolani @Ileane @Growmap or some of the other big bloggers and social media personalities that I follow.

I didn’t find any more humorous ones, but I did find that Similar To needs to have better filtering.  For one thing, locked accounts shouldn’t show up when they aren’t public.  For another they should check to see the follower status of an existing account and if < a certain amount then they shouldn’t recommend it as an account to follow.  Seriously it is pretty easy to find useless accounts, and the Klout Chrome plugin is really helpful as you pretty much know an account with a score of 5 or under will almost always be either a new account or 99% a bot or spam account.

The other thing is just hitting page refresh re-orders the list each time and takes off the accounts you are already following or chose to follow, so you can find some good matches but you have to be thorough enough to read their bio’s and look at the user’s tweet history if you want to find/follow people based on the default Twitter Similar To feature.

-Justin Germino

So the other day a CenturyLink guy comes to my door saying that they finally upgraded the lines in the neighborhood and now are offering the CenturyLink 40M+ broadband package.  This is 40Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream and had a fantastic introductory rate for 1 year.  I was very excited even though it meant I would have to buy a DSL router and disconnect my cable modem service but the price and speed were both better than what I was currently getting with Cox Communications at the time.

I have a lot of internet heavy devices in my household, including:

• 3 laptops
• 1 Desktop PC
• 2 iPad’s
• 2 Roku XDS boxes (streaming Netflix, Hulu+ or Amazon Prime Video)
• 1 Wii
• 1 Xbox360

The computers are always on and connected to the internet and my kids are usually streaming a movie on the Nintendo or Roku when they are home (we don’t have cable TV or satellite in their rooms anymore so they exist only on internet TV content for the kids rooms).

So, needless to say I hog bandwidth and the 40mpbs was nearly double my bandwidth plan currently with Cox.

I was all set to sign up and the CenturyLink technician called his center only to find out that the 40M+ cut off about 4 houses down on my street, and that my house was only able to get the 20M with 896kbps upstream which was much lower than my current plan (upstream).  It is lame that they can have the better plan for only 1/2 of a street in the first place, but even worse is that their door to door guy didn’t know and was so excited to sell a plan only to find out it wasn’t available and lose the order.  The guy’s time wasn’t wasted, I was educated about it coming to the area but he didn’t make a sale.

Meanwhile, I am hoping the lines get upgraded and the 40M+ does become available at my house in the near future (I was told to check back monthly).  Until then I just got a tease about the CenturyLink 40M+ and was told I could have it, but alas it isn’t available at my house.  The guy even told me “The house 5 doors down is for sale, just buy that one and move in there”.  Which I didn’t think was overly funny.

-Justin Germino

One of the benefits of being a tech blogger is when I partner with companies and get tech devices to review and/or giveaway to readers in contests.  It is a great value as I get to actually test and try new products hands on without having to invest my own money to test it and the company gets a free review and publicity from the review and contest.

I wouldn’t do this for a product I didn’t stand behind, but fortunately this New Trent IMP38B Wireless keyboard was a great product to giveaway.

If you have an iPad and want a bluetooth keyboard that doubles as a durable hard cover case then this product will work very well.

Enter to win a iPad Wireless Keyboard Case now and all you have to do is share the article to get a few entries.

This is the one I am giving away in the contest!

Who has an iPad and wants a chance to win a free Bluetooth keyboard case?

-Justin Germino

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I was wondering why Amazon didn’t have a Kindle book rental service where you can simply pay a per month fee and rent/read up to X books at a time instead of having to pay for each book individually in the same way Spotify offers music for a monthly fee.

It was then that I found out Amazon.com has a textbook rental service which is geared to greatly help college students.  You basically rent a single textbook for a specified period of days for up to 80% off the price of actually buying the book.  You can access the book on any device (Kindle PC app, Tablet…etc) so you can read it anywhere and even after the book expires all your notes are saved and still accessible.

For those who don’t know about the service this could be a big time way to save money on super expensive textbooks that you would just buy only to have sit and collect dust on shelves a year later after your classes have ended.

You can also easily extend or rental or re-rent if you need to reference again.

Seriously, this could be a big way to save money.

However, let’s say you still want to buy and have a textbook.  Amazon textbooks still gives you used Textbooks at up to 90% off and 30% off new textbooks.  Amazon will even pay you 70% back when you sell the textbook you purchased back to Amazon after you are done using it.

It is sort of like a rental, you buy the physical textbook and use it as long as you need.  As long as it is in same condition you bought it, you can sell it back to Amazon for up to 70% of the price you paid for it.  Naturally there is variation here  but it is a good way to get money back to be used for the next semester of books.

If you haven’t looked at Amazon yet for ways to save on textbooks you should, and I would lean toward the Kindle eBook rental myself since it makes the device everywhere at once and you can have multiple books all fit neatly on 1 portable tablet like say the Kindle Fire or Kindle Lite!

-Justin Germino

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Over 15,000 blogs use the Livefyre commenting system now including WPBeginner.com which I think is the lowest Alexa rated site using the Livefyre system to date (somebody correct me if I am wrong).

Meanwhile, it was a slow start for commenting on DragonBlogger.com with the Livefyre system but overall comments are increasing a little as my readers become more comfortable with the system.  Only a few readers have reported problems but I do still have quite a bit of fallout from other WordPress bloggers who used to comment regularly but abandoned commenting when I switched from CommentLuv to Livefyre.

Probably what aggravated my readers the most was that my CommentLuv links for all the older 19,000+ comments were just simply lost, vanished.  Even the former comments which had their usernames lost the backlink to their pages. All that time commenting to get a link back via CommentLuv was lost.  I can understand their frustration and I do apologize for the inconvenience

The truth is I love CommentLuv and still use it on 2 of my blogs out of the 4 I administrate (I actively own and run 3, but I also do all the admin stuff for my wife’s cooking blog The Chefs Cookbook).

CommentLuv is great for building backlinks and knowing what a latest bloggers posts were all about.  The thing is, my readership wasn’t all bloggers nor should it have been.

I was hammered with SPAM and even CommentLuv, GASP, Akismet…etc couldn’t stop me from moderating SPAM.  Livefyre is vastly superior at blocking SPAM than any WordPress commenting system I have tried in the last 5 years.  The impermium either catches the spam before it posts or cleans it up after it gets through the first pass.  I only have about 2-3 hours per day that I do blogging activities and I was spending about 10% of my time just dealing with SPAM comments, not counting on the time spent engaging and replying to real readers comments.

Secondly, as I learned with the recent Pottermore articles I was getting lots of comments where no reader left a URL, just name and email.  The vast majority of readers are not bloggers and have no backlink to leave.  I also wanted a system that encouraged readers to not only share the article (I have buttons for that) but share that they commented in the article so they could bring people into their conversation.  This is what Livefyre is also good at, and I found I have enjoyed joining and being apart of other Livefyre conversations on other sites.

The conversations within comments is something I have seen with Livefyre that is better than the default WordPress commenting system, it is also something you can’t get with CommentLuv.  You can instantly pull someone into a conversation just by typing @username in the comment and you will hit up that person on Twitter or Facebook where they will be invited to directly join in your conversation.  Yes, this can be abused but this can also be a great way to get feedback or attention for something important too.

Also, you still get a DoFollow backlink to your website/blog with Livefyre, so not all is lost.  You also get a link back to your latest conversation if you comment on other Livefyre blogs which often is your own blog if you are also using Livefyre.

So after my initial 30 day review of Livefyre on DragonBlogger.com and JustinGermino.com I have decided to stick with it.  I think it will improve even more when the guest commenting feature appears which should be soon and is the only feature Disqus has currently that Livefyre does not.

-Justin Germino

Decided to churn out this poem as a dedication to parents everywhere, figured just about everyone can relate to this poem.

Your Parents

Picking you up

when you are down

instilling smiles

when stuck in frown

A comforting shoulder

when carrying a boulder

keeping you colder

when emotions smolder

When things are unfair

we will still be there

and a glaring stare

mirrors only care

Lending an ear

while you shed a tear

always holding you dear

Your parents are here

-Poem by Justin Germino

I was given yet another reason to love the New Trent IMP1000 external USB backup battery the other day when I realized I had left my Blackberry Phone Charger in California and wasn’t going to be back up there for two weeks.  I had no ability to charge my Blackberry phone and still use it until I just simply plugged the Blackberry USB cable into the IMP1000 and used it to charge my Blackberry overnight.

Seriously, this device can charge a mobile phone without breaking a sweat and stores 11,000mAh.

While on the way back from California which is a 5.5 hour drive, my kids were on my iPad 2 constantly playing games.  They actually drained the iPad to about 27% battery and I just whipped out the IMP 1000 in the car and plugged the iPad 2 into the New Trent backup battery.  While they were actively using it by the time we arrived home the iPad was up to 97% battery and the New Trent device still showed it had 2 bars of power charge left.  This is while they were actively using it non-stop to play games for 4.5 hours it still not only kept the iPad 2 alive but actually charged it from 27% to 97% all from an external USB backup battery.

Power draining on one of your portable devices like a tablet, mobile phone…etc are no longer a concern if you have one of the New Trent IMP 1000 devices with you.  You just charge it via A/C at home and bring it with you whenever you are going on a trip.  It can hold enough charge to fully recharge most mobile phones 6 times, and it seems to be able to fully charge an iPad 2 and then a phone left over on a single charge.

This would be one of my top 5 products of 2011 for sure!

-Justin Germino

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I have told bloggers numerous times the benefits of using BlogEngage to network and help join a blogging community and fast track a blog for receiving traffic, backlinks and more. 

BlogEngage has an RSS Syndication program <- (Check it Out) where automatically every link from your blogs gets submitted and indexed on 6 sites as well as giving you access to the BlogEngage community where you can network and participate to start earning Reward points.

Reward points?

Yep, by being active in BlogEngage you can earn rewards.  Rewards which include cash or featured spotlights in BlogEngage articles which gains you tens of thousands of pageviews to your PROFILE and blog. 

Example of latest Spotlight winner:

BlogEngage has been around for over 2 years now and some of the best bloggers in the blogosphere are members including Ileane from Basic Blog Tips, Hesham from Famous Bloggers, Kiesha from We Blog Better and Ana from Traffic Generation Café.  In fact, there are over 350+ bloggers signed up for BlogEngage right now and you can network with all of them in one place.

The key is you interact with their articles, vote them up, friend them, comment on their articles and in turn you can have a smaller blog gain more attention faster provided of course you write quality articles and engaging material.

Profit from BlogEngage?

Yep, not only do you get traffic and benefits for your own blog by joining BlogEngage but you can profit from joining AffiliateLights and then referring others to join the BlogEngage network.

When they join using your referral link you make a commission not only from the sale but a recurring commission for every month they stay a member of BlogEngage.  So if you refer like 100 people, you can make around $100 per month commission provided they stay members of the BlogEngage RSS Syndication service.

Do you know that I have already earned over $100 from referring people to BlogEngage RSS Syndication and every one of them finds benefit with the service.

PLUS, you can actually earn AdSense revenue on the blog articles you are automatically submitting to BlogEngage.  On some months I have earned over $3 in AdSense from BlogEngage articles, this almost pays for the monthly RSS Syndication just from having my articles submitted!  They have RSS Syndication Plans as low as $4.99 per month, but I highly recommend you get the Platinum membership at the minimum since it comes with a BlogEngage membership as well as syndicating your content.

Ask me any question you want about BlogEngage RSS Syndication and I can answer, I was one of the first BlogEngage RSS Syndication member back in December 2010 and I am have been among the top 20 active BlogEngage community members since it’s inception 2+ years ago.

Give it a test run, and remember if you post 1 article per day you will get 180 backlinks per month just from using the RSS Syndication Program, this isn’t even including all the extra votes, attention and automatic tweets from the BlogEngage Twitter account for your articles that are voted to publication!

-Justin Germino

There is a growing trend in outsourcing American scientific research.

But not to other countries. Gamers and average-guy computer users are helping the research community with some of its hardest queries. And this doesn’t necessarily mean people with connections to academia. We’re talking regular folks who are simply good observers with problem solving abilities.

The trend – where scientists have solicited help from video game enthusiasts and anyone else with a personal computer who is willing – has been building for over a decade. As research questions have become harder to answer, and the amount of data to be sorted and analyzed has grown to a nearly unmanageable volume, scientists have reached out for assistance – often with surprising success.

Research Success

A great example is the announcement in mid-September’s Journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology that teams of computer gamers – using a game specially created by researchers – were able to uncover the make-up of a class of proteins that is believed to be critical to the proliferation of the virus linked to AIDS. And they did it in three weeks. Scientists believe the break-through could lead to the protein being neutralized.

Zoran Popovic, head of the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a creator of the “Foldt” game researchers used, told the Christian Science Monitor the intent is to “engage people for an extended period of time such that they actually go from novices to experts.”

In other cases, volunteers have helped analyze reams of data from NASA’s Kepler mission – that seeks Earth-like planets orbiting stars similar to our sun – and in the process discovered two possible planets through a program called “Planet Hunters” which has been ongoing for nearly a year. Through this arrangement, volunteers have classified data that would have taken a single researcher 60 years to complete, Debra Fischer, a Yale University administrator of the Planet Hunters program, told the Christian Science Monitor.

A Growing Public Network

Another approach involves recruiting run-of-the-mill computer users to allow their systems to be accessed as part of a network of public computers powering research efforts. This type of strategy has been growing since the late 1990s when a program called “SETI@home” began. It now has 3 million computers pouring over data from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico in search of alien communications. There are currently more than three dozen similar projects in various stages of work, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Based on successes already made, economic uncertainty that continues to threaten research budgets, and growing data loads on the horizon, it appears this trend will not slow anytime soon. And with significant advances continually being made in scientific research that sounds like a benefit to everyone.

About Author

Stanley Mann loves anything science-related. If he weren’t a professional writer, Stanley would find great joy as a lab-coat wearing researcher working to solve the world’s important questions. His experience goes beyond writing, recruitment services, financial advice, job tips. He has a bit of everything.

I once read a comparison between negativity and cancer on how negativity like a cancer can spread, infect other thoughts and decay your well being over time if you let it fester untreated.  Negativity can destroy morale, eat at someone’s personality and if left untreated can literally hollow out a person’s soul.

Life is a culmination of lessons, experiences and trials.  Life is also finite and I truly believe the only way to really make it through and keep sanity intact is to find the positive in as much as possible and try to keep negativity to a minimum.  The proverbial “If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade” saying is not such a bad saying after all.

When you find yourself dwelling on difficulties, negatives, or stresses that are affecting your happiness level to the point where you are miserable it is time for a change.  A change maybe in your way of thinking or looking at the situation, standing back and taking a different point of view may be in order.

In some cases it may require changing up the situation and this could be minor changes where the sum is greater than the parts (small changes here and there) or a life altering change that dramatically shifts the landscape.

In general though I try not to dwell or let even the most negative of situations drag me down, or if they do I find a way to climb my way out as quickly as possible.  Life is too short to bury yourself with negativity and stress.

Find something, anything that you think of as a positive and share it with someone. Broadcast it on social media if you have to.

Shout “I really like that _____________________ “ and just fill in the blank and share it on your profile wall.  Tell someone what you like about them, respect about them.  Share something positive you think about someone or something.

If that doesn’t work then hit the gym, hard and work out for about 1 – 2 hours non-stop until you can barely breath and your muscles are all quivering and in pain from the working out.  Typically this makes me feel better in a few hours as a last resort.

-Justin Germino

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