Justin Germino Ramblings

My interview with Smart Boy Designs went live yesterday and was one of the best interviews I have done I think based on the questions asked of me by the site owner Christian Hollingsworth.

Here in this interview I share my inspirations, biggest blogging failures and how blogging as a hobby affects my personal life and I fit it into an already busy schedule.

Thanks to Christian for the interview and I hope my fans and friends enjoy learning a little more about my online adventure in blogging and running DragonBlogger.com

Read my interview on smart boy designs and share your thoughts, stop by and say high to Christian while you are there.  This is a blog you should be following.

-Justin Germino

I really enjoy the hour or so I get to play Runes of Magic with my 7 year old while we join a party together and go complete some levels or quests.  It is in good fun when we are strolling through towns like Logar looking for some quests or beset upon by goblin thieves who happened to outnumber my son’s character and take him down.

This is a screenshot of the two of us while we were deciding where to go next and I was re-organizing my inventory.

My character is a rogue / archer and my son’s is a warrior but I am thinking I should have been a healer or we need to have one in the party as dying and respawning a town away is a real pain sometimes.

Runes of Magic is a free MMO game similar to World of Warcraft and is one of the best free MMO’s on the web in my opinion.  Easy to learn, easy to play for just 15-30 minute intervals at a time you don’t have to pay anything to get the full experience of the game yet you can purchase upgrades and items if you want to invest in it further.

-Justin Germino

Normally I don’t talk about my day job much on my personal blog for reasons of potential conflict, but tonight I am attending an award dinner where I have received one of the top recognitions for IT staff in the company.  This is the first time I have won this particular award, but I had won others in previous years and I was excited to win as it came as a complete surprise to me.

There is a dinner to be held in our honor at The Phoenician in Scottsdale, followed by an award ceremony.  This will unfortunately be the first time that your “spouse” or “partner” wasn’t invited or allowed to attend the award event as a guest which is the only thing I am a little bummed.

My previous awards which involved flying out for events they always included me to bring a “guest” and my wife was always proudly at my side, this event which is merely a 60 mile drive north of my house and I have to attend the event alone which makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.

Companies in general should make sure when employees are rewarded (and they should be when they provide exceptional service and go above and beyond) that the partner is often the one who loses at the expense of going above and beyond and it is a nice gesture to include them in such recognition events, after all most people have a partner who helps them cope with stressful days and put up with the busy days that require extra 4-10 hours.

-Justin Germino

FreeRice.com has been around for quite a few years and I try to take the time to play it on a regular basis as the game not only helps build your vocabulary and word understanding but each question you answer donates 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme to help end hunger.

My last round I played on a lunch break until I was able to donate 740 grains of rice and reached level 25.  I usually don’t have more time to play than to reach about level 25 but this was a good stopping point. There are only 60 levels in the game and the words get increasingly more challenging.

The game is simple, you are provided with a word and you have to pick the synonym that matches.  It starts off very easy but gets increasingly more difficult (you of course can cheat and just google the words, or use dictionary.com but that would defeat the purpose).

So go to Free Rice and help give some free rice by donating some of your time to play the game.

-Justin Germino

Okay this is it, May is the final month of the BlogEngage Guest Contest #2 and I am really driving to win this one.  I am busy writing articles showcasing the sponsor sites and trying to drive as much traffic and interaction to the site as possible.

Help me win the first place prize by visiting http://www.blogengage.com/blogger/blogging-to-forge-a-connection-with-readers/ and leaving a comment sharing who your top bloggers are or what tips you use to connect with your readership.

I am going to give away 1/2 the prize money I win to one of my readers in a contest at some point in the future.

Like, Share, Retweet the article as the number of FB Likes, LinkedIn Likes, Retweets and Stumbles as well as number of comments will help drive who wins the contest here and traffic/exposure is key to winning.

-Justin Germino

Fluffykins is my son’s pet rabbit but I would swear that my wife loves the bunny even more than my son does.  The bunny has nearly grown by 50% in the last month and consumes copious amounts of vegetation.  The great news is we often had lettuce that would wilt or go to waste, but now that we have a bunny we don’t have to worry about rotting leafy greens anymore.

I was testing my Flip Video Camcorder and took a little video footage of Fluffykins and uploaded to YouTube:

[youtube width="550" height="339"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0pVx_Bvds[/youtube]

This bunny has some great personality and is able to withstand a four year and seven hear old man handling him, screaming at each other and he will still hop over and nuzzle his soft little twitching nose for affection and attention.

The bunny even licks like a cat at your hands and arms, but oddly only licks my wife and sometimes my son.  The bunny has never licked my hands but only nuzzles her nose against my hand.

Her nails are like little razor blades and though I try to use the pedipaws every week (the bunny detests it) they still grow fast and are sharp. 

-Justin Germino

This past week particularly I have felt time slipping away from me as I have been so busy between work, home life, blogging that every minute blurs into hours and though I get up at 6am, by the time I lay my head in bed at around 10:30 or 11pm I feel like the day flew by and I still have so much to do.

There were far too many house chores piling up so I have taken to doing some in the early morning hours or later hours to try and not have a mountain to do on the weekend.  Meanwhile today I am volunteering for half a day at my son’s school which finally allows us to meet the minimum 12 hours of volunteer time that Legacy Traditional School requires.  My son really appreciates it when I volunteer and mentions how excited he is to have me stand by him in the back of class or see him and I enjoy seeing him thrive.

He made it on the Principal’s pride again for having straight A’s in every subject which was a close call because at the previous progress report he had like 4 B’s.

Might take the family to see Hoodwinked Too also on Friday night, not that I particularly want to see the movie but its good to get out of the house and we do enjoy our theater time as a family (kind of like a family tradition to see movies at the theater on weekends).

I am however looking forward to taking the family to see Thor next weekend which looks fantastic and I hope is as good as Iron Man was.

Here is the preview for those who haven’t seen it yet:

[youtube width=”550″ height=”339″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOddp-nlNvQ[/youtube]

-Justin Germino

After seeing a fellow blogger promote one of my article links on Facebook and realizing it was to my feed on YouSayToo instead of my main blog I realized I needed to yank all my blog feeds importing into YouSayToo.com.  The AdSense revenue sharing was just crap at less than $2 per month and yet my full feeds were imported which both caused duplicate content online which is frowned upon by Google (Especially after the Panda update) and also it would allow people to read my articles on a site other than my own which defeats the purpose of having readers come to my site DragonBlogger.com.

If YouSayToo would force and import only partial feeds say the Title, Description and maybe first 50 words then I would have still allowed my feeds to be imported but as it stands right now it causes more harm than good to allow my feeds to be imported into YouSayToo and I have had it that way for around a year so far.

Overall YouSayToo account for a measly 8 visits in 30 days to my site, this makes the network negligible and not worth investing any more time in at this point.

If you are a blogger and have your RSS feeds importing into YouSayToo still then I suggest you pull them unless you see the network giving you hundreds of visits per month or at least $10 or more a month in AdSense sharing.  If you only have a partial RSS feed then maybe there is some value using the site, but currently it probably already took more visits away from DragonBlogger.com than the 8 it brought to my site in the last 30 days.

-Justin Germino

Today is Administrative Professionals day and this is a chance to take time to recognize and show support for the Administrative Professionals who are crucial to helping coordinate communications throughout businesses and so much more.  This is also known as "Secretaries Day" though that term isn’t used as often anymore it would seem.

From large corporations who rely on Admin assistants to facilitate day to day information dissemination to receptionists who handle the barrage of customer phone calls, inquiries and more I hope you all have a great day and are recognized for your hard work.

-Justin Germino

This is a compensated post written by me on behalf of Walgreens. All opinions are 100% mine.

So recently I received a pack of adhesive bandages from Walgreens Brand Health & Wellness Products to compare and use for the family.  As a parent of two boys under 10 years old I can tell you that we use around a half dozen band-aids per week in my house so an extra box will be put to good use quickly.

The Walgreens Brand Plastic Adhesive Bandages are comparable to name brand Band-Aids but save you money and this is especially true when you buy them in two or more at a time.  They work as you would expect and have a pretty strong adhesive on them.  I lost more than a few arm hairs trying to remove these babies while testing them on myself.

Note that Walgreens brand products have a 100% satisfaction guarantee and are virtual identical in every way to the name brand equivalent of products.  There is no reason not to use trusted Walgreens Brand Health & Wellness Products if you want to save some money and still make sure you get a quality product.

With every purchase of Walgreens Brand Health & Wellness Products there is a donation made to the Walgreens Way to Well Fund™ which helps provide free health tests, services and education to local communities.

With Healthcare costs rising and many uninsured many people are turning to over the counter medications that are prescription equivalent or can provide relief for their symptoms.  Walgreens pharmacists have been trusting and endorsing their Walgreens Brand Health & Wellness Products for years as being just as effective and safe as the name brand medication.

So next time you are shopping for anything over the counter at Walgreens, check and see if there is a Walgreen’s brand version of the product you want and save yourself some money.

-Justin Germino