Justin Germino Ramblings

Ironically I have been battling the pains that come with a blog growing faster than I can spent to build up the infrastructure and when my blog took 9k+ pageviews a day and averaged over 4k for several days in a row I had to quickly switch to a Content Delivery Network or CDN to help serve my images faster and reduce the load on my shared web hosting account.

I had tried Amazon S3, but without Cloudfront and a subdomain corporate proxies were blocking all loads from amazon.com which ruined my site layout.  I tried setting up Cloudfront and had all settings configured exactly like I saw on several sites but my .css and other files just wouldn’t load from the CDN properly.  In sheer frustration I decided to try MaxCDN which I heard was fantastic from Tuan Do over at Techwalls and I was amazed at how fast and easy it was to setup.

The performance was also better than Cloudflare or Amazon S3 according to pingdom tests and I am doing a post about it all on DragonBlogger.com in a few days to explain all the experimentation and how to setup MaxCDN with a WordPress blog and W3 Total Cache.

In the end my technology blog is now running MaxCDN to host all my CDN files and it is running far faster than it was previously.  I even used the code “wpbeginner” and got $10 off my payment of $39 to make it $29 for the first year plus usage.  MaxCDN is cheaper anyway than Amazon S3 + Cloudfront combination so I am probably going to save money in the long run.

-Justin Germino

This post is a while in the making and I am normally not judgmental especially in how people raise their children.  Raising a child is beyond difficult and there is so many difficult choices and decisions and ways to handle the countless scenario’s that come with child rearing.

That being said, I do seem to think there is a decay of common sense on what parents should and should not do.

Again, here I don’t know if I am being unfairly judgmental but when going to a movie theater to see a rated R film I would think twice about bringing kids between the ages of 2 and 8 years old with me.

My wife and I went to see Horrible Bosses a few weeks ago which is an R rated comedy, while in the theater some family had brought a baby and a little girl maybe 3 years old.  She was uncomfortable and even the preview for “Contagion” scared her so much she visible hid her eyes and said something about it.  When the movie started there was an enormous amount of foul language, and adult content in the film.  The girl was constantly covering her eyes at certain scenes and even asked her parents to leave at some point.

I felt uncomfortable in the theater watching the movie with my wife while a 3 year old little girl was there and clearly miserable while her parents were just laughing and enjoying the film as if her kids weren’t there.  Maybe the baby is too young to know anything, but I would have at least turned the baby so it can’t see the screen.

Regardless, I think if you want to take your companion out to an R rated movie, find the time to have a sitter, or if you can’t wait for the movie to come out on DVD and watch it when the little ones are sleeping.  I may be old fashioned but it seems just purely wrong to subject the youngest of kids to such movies.  I can see 13+ years old, I mean when I was a young teen I snuck into horror movies and we watched Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elmstreet…etc.

Do you think I am just being too picky and judgmental here?

-Justin Germino

I have been using Tweet Old Post to random display reposts from articles but it may be more trouble than it’s worth.  I don’t have my blog setup in a way to allow only articles useful several months later to retweet and there is no point to repost a breaking news type of article 3 months later.

I wish Tweet Old Post could let you set date ranges for each category instead of only for all tweets in your reposted categories.  As my traffic from twitter isn’t very high anyway in comparison to my blog as a whole, I am considering removing Tweet Old Post from my blogs entirely and just using Dlvr.it to send my feed out no more than 3x per day (every 8 hours) to make sure everyone in all time zones can see it.  Then not reposting any old articles automatically except using Twaitter to repost contests for duration of contest or a few of my profitable review articles which sometimes lead to an affiliate sale.

I am going to make the final decision by the end of the week to either remove Tweet Old Post altogether, for now I trimmed it back to tweeting no articles older than 30 days and no more than 1x every 12 hours.

-Justin Germino

I feel like I am constantly running a thousand paces as of late as so many aspects of our lives become busy as many people.  It is often too easy to preach for people to take life slow and enjoy the moments yet much harder to practice this in actuality.

[easyazon-image-link asin=”B005CRF9JI” alt=”Cubist Headaches Giclee Poster Print, 24×32″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51H1MwMr4lL._SL160_.jpg” align=”left” width=”120″ height=”160″]One thing I can say to all the people out there who aren’t parents yet is enjoy the free time you have because once you really succumb to parenthood your free time is completely consumed.  I used to wonder why a friend of mine had no free time until my kids started becoming old enough to have their own “activities” and need to be taken to places.  This combined with my wife and my own hectic lives we spend some weekdays running at frantic paces.

I remember the days when we slept in until 8am and noon on Saturday/Sunday but those are distant memories of over a decade ago now.  All I can do is steal moments in an hour here, or hour there to spend time with the kids before starting the next thing or trying to catch some talk time with the wife before collapsing on the couch exhausted after a long day.

Life will put everyone through a thousand paces and at some point you have take back time before it is lost or you are run ragged.

-Justin Germino

Accents are unique to our cultures as anything and even in the U.S. accents can vary strongly depending on which region of the Country you live in.  I never actually thought about needing accent training in my life until I moved to Arizona from New York about 16 years ago.  My accent and speaking style were so fast that when I first arrived many people would ask me to slow down or repeat what I was saying.

In my corporate career during my first few years my speaking style actually came up in my performance reviews where one of my action items was to speak slower during conference calls.  After living in Arizona for 16 years my speaking pace slowed down a bit and my accent grew less thick with time but I still occasionally call into a phone line like I did a few months ago and am instantly recognized as having a NY Accent.

I even called into a support line and had an operator ask me immediately if I was a “Goomba” right off the bat before I even gave him my name.

For those who don’t know, Goomba is a slang term for an Italian American, and only an Italian America, and generally is from either NY, NJ, PA…etc.

I swear, I felt like people thought I should have went to some ESL in NJ courses before moving to the west just to drop my accent sometimes.

So my question for readers who stumble across this article is this:

Have you ever had an incident where your accent caused you embarrassment, confusion or have you been in a situation where you were interacting with someone and their accent caused a communication situation?  It can be something funny, something that may have lead to problems or even frustration.

Share your story here my fellow Goomba’s.

-Justin Germino

Okay this post is inspired by a blogging contest running on Bloggers Compete and honestly the title is what made me participate in this contest.  I wanted to compare blogging to something I had seen it done on many other sites and wanted to try my hand at it.

So I was thinking about what to compare blogging to and after recently fishing in an upstate lake with no results I decided to see how blogging compares to fishing.

So here are 5 ways fishing is like blogging

#1 It’s Called Fishing not Catching

When fishing people tell you to not expect to catch anything on your first cast or even maybe in the first hour, you can fish for a hours or even a full day and not catch a fish.  Maybe you didn’t use the right bait, or maybe you didn’t hit the right time or season.  Who knows, but blogging compares to fishing except you are trying to catch readers or an audience and instead of catching them one at a time you are trying to catch schools of readers at once.

#2 When Fishing Blogging Use the Right Bait

Hey, when fishing if you use the wrong bait for the fish you are trying to catch then you will end up catching nothing or the wrong type of fish (if lucky).  When blogging you have to target your article or even your whole site to a specific audience.  Know which readers you are trying to catch and make sure you write for those fish.  After all you aren’t trying to catch a technology readers with a celebrity article?

[easyazon-image-link asin=”B000G68JSI” alt=”Sunset Fisherman Dog Boat Fishing River Print POSTER – 13×19″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FeQURHGML.jpg” align=”center” width=”400″ height=”400″]

#3 Reel Slowly When Fish Reader is Hooked

So your fish reader has just bitten and clicked on the link, now you want to make sure you draw and keep their attention by slowly reeling them in.  Draw them into your first paragraph and each subsequent paragraph with fresh quality content.  If you cut in too short with a useless short article or scare them off with a splash page or big ad in their face they will cut and run.

#4 Aim for the Big Fish

In some cases you aren’t interested in catching small fish that are barely legal limit, this is nothing to be proud of and won’t put enough food on the table.  In blogging sometimes you want to attract a bigger fish, this could mean a larger crowd or even someone who has more notoriety and status and therefore if they enjoyed the article they may share it and cause it to reach an audience far wider than you would have been able to reach on your own.

So find a big fish in your niche and write something about them, their site.  Then share the article with them, bug them about it and maybe they will enjoy it and share it to a much larger audience which could get some readers.

#5 Don’t Quit Fishing Blogging

Fishermen don’t quit if they don’t catch anything after a few hours or even if they don’t catch anything the whole day.  They keep coming back next time to keep trying to fish, trying different baits, lures, times of day, lakes…etc.  There are always new tactics, niches, ways to try and attract readership and one size does not fit all.

Never stop trying and if you find you have a passion for blogging don’t stop experimenting with new ways to attract fish because once the schools start coming you will find they will gradually keep building up into long time readers.

There, what did you think of my 5 comparisons of fishing to blogging?  Share your feedback and help me win the contest.

Bloggers Compete is always looking for bloggers who want to create contests and get more participants.  It is a useful site if you want coordinate your blogging contests in one location and keep track of everyone who enters.  With Bloggers Compete you get to engage with bloggers by setting contests where they have to write posts or blog entries to participate and this in turn puts you in touch with other bloggers and helps build your social networking in addition to gaining quality backlinks from other blogs for hosting a contest.

This is my second entry into a Bloggers Compete contest, and I am looking to start a contest of my own soon there.

Leave a comment, Retweet and Share this article if you enjoyed it!

-Justin Germino

It was a good day the other night when my kids watched me finally beat [easyazon-link asin=”B000ZKA0J6″]Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty[/easyazon-link] in normal mode.  They watched as I held my defenses against the never ending onslaught of Zerg including the Zerg Queen herself trying to destroy the Xel Naga artifact.

The final mission called “All In” in Starcraft 2 is a tower defense type mission where all the decisions, tech tree paths chosen all boil down to whether you can survive long enough to claim victory.

I must say that Starcraft 2 was every bit as enjoyable as the original Starcraft series and I cannot wait until [easyazon-link asin=”B002I0KP4G”]StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm[/easyazon-link] is released where you get to play as the Zerg and specifically Kerrigan as the queen of blades.

I will be doing a follow up article on Dragonblogger.com where I pose the questions on what happened to Kerrigan, where will Jim Raynor leave off in Heart of the Swarm and guess what comes next in the story.

-Justin Germino

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Last weekend in an attempt to cut the #1 Arizona Music Blog website over to a new WordPress theme I ran into some challenges I hadn’t anticipated.  The first being that the theme was using an apycom Jquery header menu and the theme was giving a “backlink not found” error at the top of the page. 

This I determined was from the Theme developer using an apycom menu, but for some reason the source code wasn’t recognizing the backlink.  The code is obfuscated to the point where I can’t figure out where the backlink is or I would add it myself.

So needless to say we had to back out the theme transition on Saturday night until I can either futz with it to make it work without issue or have the Theme developer fix it.  This was a theme that was purchased through ThemeTiger so I am hoping it can be fixed and works.

If not, then it’s off to find a different them instead for AZ Music Connect.

-Justin Germino

Spent Sunday enjoying an escape from the 111 degree’s it has been lately to spend time up in Northern Arizona at Woods Canyon Lake where it is about 90 instead.

Though we didn’t catch any fish we did witness an eagle swoop down and grab a fish right out of the water.  I did manage to even take some pictures of a bald eagle and her eaglets in a pine tree on the other side of the lake.

Meanwhile we took the dogs up with us and they had a grand time exploring the woods and Donut went swimming in the lake.

Some crayfish, grasshoppers and a worm or two were the only things caught that day.

Though it is hard for me to tear away from technology, sometimes it is good just to get out in nature and take a day to relax and soak in some sun while being around the forest.

-Justin Germino

Seriously, I am not joking when I say that I have gotten a little more impatient and lazy as a result of my Keurig machine that I have had for over a year.  Now when I am out of K-Cups I actually groan with disgust, even though I have coffee grinds and have a filter K-Cup which can brew me as much coffee as I want I dislike the time it takes to clean out the filter (10 seconds), put grinds in filter (10 seconds) and slap it all together (10 seconds).  I am literally annoyed by the 30 extra seconds it takes to prepare a cup of coffee when I am out of K-Cups.

[easyazon-image-link asin=”B000AQPMHA” alt=”Keurig B-40 B40 Elite Gourmet Single-Cup Home-Brewing System” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41GEG0c4n6L.jpg” align=”center” width=”400″ ]

Like I said, LAZY pure and simple.  Who would complain about this?  Me, I would because once I got hooked on the simplicity of “pop out”, “pop new one in”, “press brew” I simply get annoyed when making coffee takes more time than that.

I just wish I could hookup the Keurig machine to my faucet so that I didn’t even have to pre-fill up a cup a water and pour it into the machine first.  The Keurig cup at my old office you just pop in the K-Cup, put a mug under it and press start without needing to prefill any water in it.

Speaking of K-Cups I have experimented with several new varieties lately and these are my current TOP favorite ones.

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-Justin Germino