Justin Germino Ramblings

For the first time in almost three years I was able to break $200 in a single month of Google AdSense earnings.

Now these earnings are from about 5 different URL sources, but DragonBlogger.com accounts for about $178 of the earnings by itself for the month with my baby sites only making up the last $22 or so. 

Site traffic has been up about 20% steady for the past several months in a row, but I found that AdSense earnings outpaced the site traffic growth percentage wise.  I think this is due to so much of my site traffic being based on Organic Search which is the most likely traffic to click on a Google Ad as they may not have found what they were looking for on your site.

AdSense is probably the easiest form of passive income for me as I don’t really do anything besides let it collect and pay out.  I will say that my site is not optimized for AdSense clicks and the best CPC ratio’s.  I can’t show exact metrics without violating AdSense ToS but let’s say that my average CPC was under 50 cents and the number of clicks seems a bit low even for AdSense ads.

This is in part because my site is such a large portal that target ad placement/keywords used may not match the best paying keywords.  There are some bloggers who will research the best paying AdSense keywords and then write articles around those keywords/similarities and collect better performance and payout on their AdSense earnings.  I don’t do any of this, I really don’t have the time for that fine level of detail and research and would rather focus on writing articles that I want to write rather than focusing on keywords to optimize AdSense return on those articles. 

Still, I have run across several sites with 1/4th the traffic I have that earn more from AdSense monthly because of such optimizations so if you want to get serious about AdSense earnings it is something to consider.

One thing as a blogger and person who tries to make money online, do not put all your eggs in one basket.  I have heard of people being banned from AdSense with little warning and their income sources vanishes.  Diversify your online income sources to make sure if you lose a revenue stream you aren’t impacted too harshly and can find an alternative.

-Justin Germino

My wife was sharing pictures from years past with my son on the weekend and I couldn’t help but remember the time when I had more hair and looked so youthful.  However I did notice that I actually weigh less now at 33 years old than I did when I was 20 and am quite surprised that I let myself get so heavy 5+ years ago.

I was always someone who had little portion control and when eating I would consume as many plates in front of me as possible, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to tell you that when I first moved to Arizona and ordered at Jack in the Box I could eat 2 Jumbo Jacks, 2 Tacos and a large fries in one sitting.  Sure enough this food consumption did catch up with me but it was slow and subtle and took years to add on.

I did lose most of the weight almost three years ago when I had reached my heaviest at 207 pounds and was wearing a size 40 waist pants.  I did wind up losing about 50 pounds over the next 48 months and was a trim 158 pounds a year and half ago.

Then I started neglecting my portion control again and started eating more than I should, 6 weeks ago I was up to 185 so decided to add my membership to the LA Fitness here in Casa Grande, and I also started working out more at home and trying to keep my calories to no more than 2000 per day while adding more lean protein and less carbohydrates and fat.  Fat accounts for 8 calories per gram, so fatty content always has more calories than protein and grain based foods.

Photo back in 2005

Photo in February 2011

The good thing is by 5 weeks later, I weighed in at 174 pounds and probably only about 9 pounds away from reaching my target goal of 165.  I was a little too bony at 158 (what my wife says) and wanted to put on more lean muscle mass figuring 165 would be about right.

It requires constant effort to lose weight and make sure I don’t consume too much food, I enjoyed eating and live for eating.  I haven’t had pepperoni in about 5 weeks which is something I used to snack on at least 3x per week.  To further assist with my fitness goals and focus I started up Weight Loss Belts blog where I was putting The Flex Belt to a trial as I was sent one to review by the company.

The belt is actually really good at tightening ab muscles and combined with diet and exercise I really feel my stomach stronger just after 1 week of using it consistently and you can read my journal about it over there.

One thing I am intent on is trying to make sure my kids don’t develop and adopt bad eating habits and translate that into adult hood, it is important as parents to make sure we set examples for children and obesity is an epidemic in this country and contributes to much of the health care costs and expenses in this Nation.  I know from experience how hard it is to have willpower and force yourself to leave food on your plate when eating out at a restaurant instead of feeling compelled to eat everything on the plate and I still don’t make good choices, but I try to offset them by order a side of broccoli instead of fries if I order a burger.

-Justin Germino

After spending the last year being woken up at least 1 and sometimes 2 times a night to have to go let the dogs out in the back to use the restroom. We decided to get a doggy door and install it on the back patio sliding door.  I didn’t want something that would involve cutting a hole in my wall because it would be harder to undo later on.

It wasn’t too much trouble to setup, but we finally got it installed and Donut the oldest Boston Terrier figured out how to use it in 5 minutes.  Porky on the other hand was afraid to push the dog door open with his head and would only go through it if you held it open for him.  By the 2nd day he was able to follow Donut out if she already opened it ahead of him and before it closed and finally he was able to open it to go out but for some reason was afraid to push on it to come back in.  As it turns out by the end of the 2nd day he figured it out but now he goes outside so often just to bark at random noises, I think the doggy door only exacerbates his paranoia. 

Donut

Porky

We love Porky, but honestly sometimes I think of him as the Patrick Starfish of Boston Terriers.

-Justin Germino

Really it was poor timing for my wife and I to come down sick at the start of a 3 day weekend, though I came down with a bad cold on Friday night my wife had caught it by Saturday evening.

Sore throats, chills, headaches and nasal problems didn’t stop us from getting a few chores done like organizing the garage and attic and getting stuff ready for a yard sale as well as taking the boys to see Kung-Fu Panda 2 on Sunday.

I installed a Clothesline in the yard finally after getting some decent stucco anchors from Home Depot, but didn’t have the oomph to cut the dead branches off of my Jacaranda tree which looks like it has skeletal fingers poking into the sky don’t you think?

Will have to catch up on the yard work next weekend when feeling a bit better, meanwhile I always feel it is a waste to get sick on your days off of work because that is your only real time to enjoy yourself and have fun.  Spending them sick is like being cheated out of some relaxation and fun time and I can’t

On Friday I migrated this site and my poetry blog over to my new custom VPS hosting provided by MyHosting.com and they have been very pleasant to work with in making the transition by helping me move my files/databases and even helping me optimize my PHP and SQL engines for best performance possible.

I feel the support I have received is among the best out of any hosting provider and the technical proficiency of the engineer I worked with was outstanding.  This wasn’t any first level help desk support, but an actual WordPress export who had experience with migrating and optimizing hundreds of WordPress installs.

I wasn’t disappointed with HostMonster it’s just that I noticed my site traffic started causing the shared hosting to throttle my cpu utilization which was impacting performance and pageload times on my site.

It was time to migrate to VPS hosting that can grow with RAM, CPU and Bandwidth usage as my sites grow and MyHosting with custom flexible packages and their exceptional support convinced me they were worth taking a chance on.

-Justin Germino

My youngest is asking for his own computer recently and has just started testing the waters of playing games like Runes of Magic and other games online.  I am going to have to configure a third computer station in my office at some point so both kids can come up and just plugin and the three of us can all game side by side together online.

Right now my oldest is having fun with Nickelodeon’s MonkeyQuest when we aren’t playing Warcraft III or Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II.  Maybe Santa will give my youngest a new laptop this Christmas or he will get lucky on his birthday but I am just not sure if he would use it as much as his older brother who has always preferred the PC to console games.

My youngest is just as happy playing Xbox360 or Wii as long as he is playing with somebody whereas my oldest prefers gaming to involve a keyboard and mouse combination and does not like any other method of gaming.

Pretty interesting how early on their gaming preferences come out and start to display.  I would tend to agree with my oldest that I prefer the Keyboard/Mouse for gaming vs the gamepad.  I am finding that even with an Xbox360 I prefer my PC for gaming a bit more and should be upgrading it shortly.

I am considering upgrading my PC then putting together some of the older components in a new case for my Son and having him use that PC as his new one while giving the laptop to my youngest.  Figure I could get 3 workable PC’s for about $800 which would be like 2 new ones plus the existing laptop.  Definitely something to save up for, and my PC needs are quite expensive as I want the latest MoBo and an Intel i7 with no less than a GeForce 570 video card.

-Justin Germino

Po the Kung-Fu Panda which is probably one of my favorite Jack Black characters came out in theaters and I will be taking my family to see it this weekend.  I wonder if he will once again perform the Wushi Finger Hold or other martial arts feat against his foes.

[youtube width=”550″ height=”343″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdaMGcOyfjM[/youtube]

I am avoiding the reviews like the plague so I go into the movie open minded and untainted by other’s details and opinions.  Meanwhile, we are ready for the pure awesomeness of Jack Black in Kung-Fu Panda 2 as he faces his old enemy (Stairs) yet again.

-Justin Germino

You firmly believe that no man is an island, so whenever you find yourself alone in the confines of your apartment, you feel restless and get the feeling that insanity is slowly creeping up on you.  A solution to this dilemma is, no, not to get your ex-husband’s mother to live with you, but to get yourself a pet cockatiel.  Among the gamut of small pets, cockatiels are birds which are pretty easy to care for and train to talk.  It can be the perfect companion for you, once you are able to get it to talk.  So, how do you do that?

Before you can get any bird to talk, you have to tame it first.  It is a common misconception that you can both train and tame a bird at the same time.  If you need a hand in taming your pet cockatiel, you can ask your vet or a pet store owner to help you out, as they are more experienced in this aspect.

Just like other animals (and yes, even your ex-husband), your cockatiel learns through repetition.  Set aside maybe four 10-minute sessions a day to teaching your cockatiel to talk.  Begin by saying a monosyllabic word to your bird over and over again.  If the word is a noun, for instance, show your cockatiel the object it refers to.  If it’s an action word, act it out as you say it.  This helps increase the bird’s comprehension of the word.   Don’t be slumped over your lounge chair as you teach your bird the word “jump”.

Give your pet a treat every time he says the word correctly. This motivates your cockatiel to listen to you and look at your lip-movements more intently.

Don’t talk while your bird talks. Be sure it is silent before you say anything, because it may not be learning what you’re trying to teach it if it is busy talking at the same time you are.

While teaching your pet bird to talk, take it out of its cage and hold it. This reduces distractions around him.  It also helps to talk in a high-pitched or sing-song tone of voice.  This makes it more interesting for them, enough to hold their attention.

Don’t expect your pet cockatiel to outtalk David Letterman at his first attempts.  Initially, your pet’s speech may be garbled, but that’s alright.  Just keep practicing and encouraging your cockatiel.  Don’t scold it if it doesn’t seem to get things right.  Patience is the key here.

Jessy lives a frugal life, loves her children and lovely pets. She blogs on cat weight loss as well as the variety of health topics including sudden weight loss.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by jinterwas

Why is the world in such a hurry that someone must become completely rude and disrespectful if they don’t get immediate actions.  I was livid when my wife was telling me how the other week she was driving into a drive through bank to deposit some money and she just pulled up and started putting together information for the deposit when somebody behind her pulled up and started honking then cursing loudly for her to hurry up.

Seriously, I mean at a bank drive through line which is a fairly professional establishment does it seem okay to display this kind of tact or lack thereof?

Just a few weeks before that my wife and I were leaving WalMart with our kids and a lady driving a car wasn’t going to stop and yield to pedestrians.  We saw the car and stopped our family and the car finally stopped, but some woman passerby yelled at the driving woman to stop that there were kids present.  Sure enough the male passenger got out and started threatening the woman and a whole scene of people came over and got involved. 

Luckily I just walked my kids and family to the car and the fighting never escalated beyond some foul language and yelling before the people drove off but it could have been a violent situation and this is a prime example about courtesy and respect lacking in the vast majority of people nowadays.

Simply put everyone should pretend that they are on a job interview all the time whenever interfacing with other customers.  Your job is to make sure you are remembered for having outstanding character and professionalism at all times.  This should be especially true now that security camera’s are everywhere and at any time in any public location you are on camera.  The next time you think about public hostility, assault or being a punk remember your appearance might end up on YouTube or as evidence to policy should you actually commit a crime.

It is a wonder why so many people fear "Big Brother" and having no privacy, people seem to have no ability to control the way they act in public and have lost all sense of decency.  This seems to be worse in larger cities, I still see evidence of more respect and community from smaller towns and suburbs.  But alas, I still believe there is more good in this world than evil and more people are inherently polite and respectful but subscribe to the theory that the "bad events" stand out in your head more which makes it seem there is more by contrast.

-Justin Germino

So yesterday my lovely wife gives me an iPad 2 as a present and I am overjoyed, happy and excited.  She knew when I got her an iPad 2 several weeks ago how much I wanted one and I am sure when she saw me drooling over hers or walking past it while it lie sleeping on her desk gazing at it like a child wanting forbidden cake she knew how much I wanted one.

Turns out that right after I got her one, she turned around and did the same for me.  It arrived and I have been scouring the best free applications for it as soon as I had it on the network.

The Netflix movie quality is just amazing and Toy Story 3 looked beautiful on the iPad 2 screen.

One of my favorite news apps was BBC news which was free and works very well on the iPad.

Hootsuite is the winner for my favorite Twitter client for the iPad and allows you to scroll through all your columns and accounts with ease.  It is a little bit tricky to select which account you want to tweet from when you have sausage fingers like me though and that would be my only caveat.

An the other day I tested the WordPress iPad app and wrote a post on the fly publishing it when done.  Typing on the iPad while it is in landscape mode is fairly easy and I can get 3 fingers from each hand working the Qwerty keyboard, I can type fairly fast though there is a bit higher rate of error due to not being able to feel the keys and my fingers will still need time to memorize the layout and positions which will improve my accuracy and speed.

The WordPress app is great for moderating and responding to comments and typing up quick blog posts but lacks fine options for formatting.  You can insert pictures/video but lack many of the formatting buttons or access to many of the custom WordPress plugins.  The WordPress iPad app does let you write posts in Draft mode and save them locally on the iPad allowing you to publish or schedule them when you finally get back to a Wi-Fi network.

Angry Birds Rio was the first free game app I downloaded, I have tons more to download and I am really excited to finally be able to start reviewing iPad apps on my technology blog.

-Justin Germino