Archive for June, 2010
Crest 3D White Strips
Posted by Snowy in product tests on June 24th, 2010
Quick little post here. I got a free sample of Crest 3D Whitestripes in the mail a few days ago from Walmart.com. They only sent me two strips, one for my top row of teeth, and one for my bottom row. I’ve never really thought that a little strip of plastic could really whiten your teeth, so I would have never purchased these for myself. Thinking that they don’t work I went ahead and tried them anyway. Directions were simple, peel, place, and forget. The strips weren’t extraordinarily comfortable but they weren’t unbearable. The directions say to have them on for 30 minutes so that’s what I did, and to my surprise after the 30 minutes, my teeth were really a brighter shade of white! Now I’ve never had really yellow teeth, but this is definitely an improvement, and it was only after one use!
I know this blog post sounds a lot like a commercial for Crest, but I would have to strongly recommend these for anyone who wants to whiten their teeth. They’re slightly pricey though at $43.97, but if a whiter smile is what you want then I would have to say these are worth it.
Google is so incredibly powerful
Posted by Snowy in Economy/Business on June 20th, 2010
So today I was looking up some books on Amazon, I want the book right away so I decide to look into the Amazon Kindle thing. I download that, try the trial version of the book, seems okay. But then I notice that I can’t print with the Amazon Kindle. This really doesn’t surprise me, but I figure that there’s away around it, so I start to google it. I come across a program that converts the kindle books to PDF and right before I click the download button, I see that they offer another program, "google books to pdf". "What?!" Google Books? Never heard of that. So now I come to find out that there’s essentailly a library right in Google. I can create my own bookshelf, etc, etc. Then I come across how my bookshelf is not compeltly ready because my profile is not fully updated and cannot be searched. So I’m updating that and I stumble upon Google Reader, which at first, I thought might be something like the Kindle. It’s not, but it still tickles me pink how big Google is yet they still do everything incredibly well. There’s Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Buzz, Google This, Google That, soon Google will be making us breakfast in bed!
I love Google, they’re probably one of my most favorite companies. The entire company has a sense of humor and isn’t afraid to interact with their customers (unlike a lot of other tech companies). I’m glad to see that they’ve done so well in the marketplace and I hope they keep on chuggin’ along.
Creatine Study
As some of you may know, I am pretty big into fitness. I like to workout, I like to run, I like to be competitive. So there’s a supplement called "creatine" that you’re suppose to take to help boost your weightlifting numbers. You’ve probably never heard of creatine and that’s okay, not a whole lot of people have. But what exactly is creatine? Well creatine is found naturally in the body, it helps supply energy to your muscles. More energy in muscles = more lifts at the gym = stronger/bigger gains. Your body naturally produces it (mainly in the liver and kidneys) but you can also get creatine from red meats. However, there isn’t much produced in the body and you only get about 1 gram per 1 pound of food in meat, so naturally taking a creatine supplement seems like a good idea.
So what I’m going to do is a simple, unscientific 60 day study of the effects of creatine. This is what I plan to find out:
- Does it really help build muscle?
- What, if any ill side effects does creatine have?
- I’ll be making sure to pay attention to my in-game performance (ice hockey; goalie)
- Looking for water-weight issues
I plan to measure my arms/legs/neck/etc weight before I get started, and remeasure at the end of 60 days. After the 60 days are up I will cycle off the creatine for about two weeks and see if I loose any weight (at this point it should be water).
I’m taking "Micronized" Creatine, which is creatine monohydrate, but a finer version so it mixes better in water. I have a hockey game Monday so just in case there’s the risk of it [negatively] affecting my performance I’m going to start this study on Tuesday. I’ll also post my starting height, weight, dimensions, lifts, etc. on that day.
Let me know if there’s something you want me to do in this study that I haven’t already thought of. I’ll hopefully post updates every two weeks or so.