PRODUCT REVIEW: colgate max fresh with mini breath strips

In today's post, I would like to focus on Colgate's "Max Fresh With Mini Breath Strips" brand toothpaste. But first, I would like to give a shout out to Paul Lukas' zine "Beer Frame - The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption" which inspired my attention to product packaging detail and the marketing behind it. You can find Paul Lukas' current writings at Uniwatch Blog - although its unrelated to Beer Frame, it still deals with obsessive attention to details (in this case, athletic uniforms)... and he writes for ESPN as well now.


As it were, I find the fact that they are marketing a toothpaste with "mini-breath strips" to be a little counter-intuitive to the whole "neo-modern fresh breath / anti-halitosis" movement. Because breath strips work largely unaided, save for placing the product on your tongue, their mere inclusion makes it seem as if the toothpaste might do all the work by itself as well. Also, aren't the minty, fruity and cinnamony flavors of old-style toothpaste supposed to freshen your breath in addition to cleaning your teeth? This smells like a marketing gimmick to me. I'd like to see some studies that actually prove that this toothpaste freshens breath better than its non-breathstrip encrusted cousins. The only reason i took notice of this toothpaste is not because the box was flashy (because all major-label brand boxes seem to be flashy), but rather we had a tube of this at home. The only reason we have the tube is that after coupons and ad-matches at meijer's, we had our pick of any of the colgate toothpastes for about a dollar. This one stuck out as new, so we decided to try it.

So what's the verdict? After having used the Cool Mint flavor of "Colgate Max Fresh With Mini Breath Strips" brand toothpaste, I will say that it is minty... about as minty as other varieties of Colgate and Crest, but not overpowering like AquaFresh and the taste is pleasant, but unremarkable. To be perfectly honest, as far as i can tell the breath strips are no more than eye candy as i couldn't detect any "extra refreshment" or anything of that sort. Of course, my point of reference are the listerine breath mint strips, which for the uninitiated, make your mouth feel like its on the bad end of a fight with a 50-foot herculean mint leaf for a minute or two. Like before, this hasn't swayed my toothpaste loyalty, which is still whatever's on sale and have coupons for it.

mini-mabus ridin' tha go kart

sorry for the crappy quality (this was shot on my cell phone LOL)
but here is mini-mabus rockin' the go-kart goodness

my neighborhood is weird

The other day I saw a guy with no shirt just riding a unicycle down my street... he was reading a book too. twas a strange sight indeed.

then, this morning, mrs. mabus was at home as the garbage truck came by for its weekly waste removal rounds. that, by itself, is not very strange... however, as mrs. mabus was watching out the window, the garbage dude made eye contact with her as she just watched him dump the can into the truck. So now we are missing a garbage can, and according to the city, they have had multiple complaints like this recently. what a crock of shit. i hope that they can at least credit us twenty bucks on our garbage bill to compensate. we're supposed to find out tomorrow.

yes, my neighborhood is weird.

funny how life changes so much sometimes

Its funny how sometimes your life changes, sometimes drastically, and you don't even realize it until you look back in retrospect.

Case in point... i never thought i'd be married, and yet my 8th anniversary is less than a week away. i also once thought it desirable to chase fame and fortune, i now tend to shun these things by seeing people for their hearts, thoughts and actions and not by the length of their yacht. Also, my degree is in computer science to become a computer programmer, yet i have never worked as a programmer - in fact, the closest thing to programming i did for a living was i worked as a software QA engineer for Lucent back in the day. I've also worked as a pc support tech, a unix administrator (which saw me doing lots of bourne shell scripting - so sorta programmerish i guess) and now i am a network admin with a strong focus in windows server operating systems.

Also, i once was a hothead ready to fight people, and i'm now a pacifist. I once stuffed my face with all things beef only to have given up eating beef and pork since 2001. Incidentally, I was also once nearly 230 pounds of pure lard, and am now 165. I also espoused the sedentary lifestyle, but now walk on a track 4 or 5 days a week and own a home so i'm constantly landscaping among other physically demanding tasks.

I also grew up being nearly deathly allergic to cats, but am owned by three of them.

The kicker is that i also have two kids, and while i always wanted a kid or two, i never saw myself as being capable of being a responsible parent. And yes, I'd rather go to cub scouts with the oldest than waste an evening at a bar.

What happened to me? Am I simply mabus evolved? Or have I turned myself into the anti-mabus.

Heck, even my previously conservative viewpoints on politics and society has evolved into something far more progressive after years of becoming more and more disgusted with the status quo.

Some things have stayed the same though.. I'm still a geek through and through with a passion for understanding the logical principals that drive today's technologies, and I'm still a music geek that appreciates everything from ambient, shoegazing and electropop to twee, hyphy, industrial, trance, IDM and post-modern lounge.

So, as the old saying goes: "where ever you go, there you are"

hddvd encryption cracked

here is the hardware key for decrypting all hddvd's:

09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:41:56:C5:63:56:88:C0

i'm only putting it here to see if i can get one of those nifty DMCA cease and desist "takedown" letters asking me to remove this key. the creators of AACS (the encryption system used on HDDVD and blu-ray discs) don't want this key published because its knowledge by the public allow anyone to write software to playback and copy HDDVD's by decrypting them without first either obtaining a license for AACS or permission from the movie studios. from what i understand this key is not valid for decrypting blu-ray discs.

score one for fair use kids!

i was on a national game show and won!

I played GSN's phone-in game 100 winners overnight and i answered the question correctly and won $160!!! Sure, i didn't find the jackpot in the vault, but winning any amount of money rocks!

HAPPY APRIL 15TH!!!

It's quite rare to see snow this late in the year, even up here in the northern midwestern treasure trove that is Fort Wayne, Indiana

Everyone else seems annoyed by this, but I don't mind so much. However, the cold weather cut short mrs. mabus' cub scout leader training camping trip this weekend as she was supposed to arrive home today, however they decided to cram all the rest of the training in on saturday and leave late at night to come home so they wouldn't have to sleep out in the sub-freezing temperatures for another night. wimps. :P

nearly electrocuted

On wednesday, I was tasked with installing some servers at our hosting site in indianapolis. this is a pretty routine task, however this time we had a new model of server that so happened to come with rails that were longer than previous models. further complicating matters is that the racks at this data center are not deep at all and so happen to have very thich rear-mounted vertically aligned power strips. Not paying any attention at all to this, as i was struggling with trying to get this rail kit installed for one of the servers, it so happened to wedge its rear metal hook between a plug's conductor blade and the power strip. I didn't notice this until after i mentioned to the lady from the contracting firm from whom we buy the rack space and said "i feel juice".

i don't think she quite understood what i was trying to say, and as i stepped away, the rail tipped down a bit in front and sparks flew from the area where i was holding the rail. it was quite a light show i tell you. needless to say, it tripped the breaker on the power strip (mind you, this is a large 20A strip meant to power half of an entire computer rack). fortunately though we have alot of redundant equipment with redundant power supplies plugged into different circuits. so, none of our website or site-to-site WAN links went down. this certainly was a helluva way to QA our redundancy, but in the end management was pleased that our past planning paid off.

now, why didn't i get fully electrocuted? well, i believe that the electricity never left my hand as i was wearing rubber soled shoes and the floor in there is an insulator. I was touching this rail with my left hand, and if i would have contacted metal elsewhere to complete the circuit like a foot or my right hand, the current likely would have coursed through my heart and i likely could have died.

ultimately, we did get the servers installed, but unable to put them in the nice rails, we had to set them on a shelf at the bottom of the rack, which will make future maintenance on those boxen a pain in the arse, but was necessary.

yargh.

bad bad brunch on a nice easter sunday

As I was visiting my parents for Easter Sunday this weekend, they invited my family to go with them to a reception hall known as "Long Island Sound" in the bustling metropolis of Aurora, Illinois for a brunch buffet. And, for nearly eighteen bucks a head, one would expect some darn great service and impeccable fare. Well our experience was anything but.

Even though we had reservations, we still had to wait nearly a half an hour in a crowded hall for an available table. Once we finally had a table, we had to ask no less than 4 different waitstaff to get us water, and the coffee took nearly 15 minutes to arrive, and cold no less. They ran out of orange juice before any of us had an opportunity to grab a glass, and when they finally did bring out more glasses of it, it wasn't actually orange juice but rather it was something that resembled a hybrid of tang and rancid sunny delight. What's worse, is that when my parents confronted them about the juice, the owners wouldn't even admit to the faux paus. Making matters worse was that the potato pancakes were, according to my dad, the same kind that come in large frozen cases at sam's club and hardly something you'd expect to find at an expensive buffet. The only shining star was the fact that they offered custom-made omelettes, which were actually decent, and the only food that was served hot - which is a stark contrast to the belgian waffles served ICE COLD.

Also, in this same exact reception hall, the local YMCA was hosting a fundraiser of some sort and making ample use of the extraordinarily loud PA system. We were subjected to people singing horrible songs ridiculously offkey and was so bad that even the American Idol reject show would not torment the viewing public with their wails. Suffice it to say, no one mentioned this co-event to my mother when she called to book the reservations a few weeks ago.

In the end, we all agreed that IHOP would have best served our Easter dining needs instead. And we ask anyone in the area to NEVER book an event at Long Island Sound in Aurora. You have been warned!!!!

$500 million dollars might sound like alot to spend on school buildings

Why oh why must people raise a stink about the future for our children? I ask this because there is currently alot of opposition to a plan for Fort Wayne Community Schools to spend $500 Million on upgrading their crumbling and decrepit facilities. A good background on the issue is found at this article in the Journal-Gazette. And while that may seem like alot of money, especially when property taxes will likely jump $330 per $100,000 of assessed value for homeowners you must remember that FWCS has nearly 50 schools serving well over 30,000 students as well as two transportation hubs and other administrative facilities. So in doing the math this breaks down to roughly $10 million per school. This is the second largest school district in the state and many of the school buildings date back to the 1960's or earlier and as a result they require some much needed repairs and upgrades to bring them into compliance with current building and safety codes.

I have one child in first grade currently and one that is 14 months old who will in a few years use these schools himself, so honestly, $330 extra per year seems like it would be beneficial to them. Of course, there is alot of opposition and it is organized and a remonstrance has either been filed or soon will be to derail this plan. The way I see it, is that if we don't act now to fix these buildings, the costs of doing so in the future will only continue to escalate and likely at a higher rate than that of base inflation due to additional repairs and upgrades that will be needed then but not now.

I only wish that the district would have done something about this sooner... like 10 years ago as i believe that the financial impact to taxpayers would have been much less, however past school boards were ineffective and haven't had the will or the perseverance to ask the taxpayers for money to do this in the past, and by playing the waiting game the stakes have already been raised to a level that more people are finding unacceptable. Better late than never though, I guess.

While I do support this plan, I would like the school board to also consider the possibility of just simply raising some of the older building that are more expensive to maintain on an ongoing basis and just build anew. This might mean higher upfront costs, but lower operating expenses in the years ahead. Again though, forward thinking seems to be something that can't be accomplished by the school board because they can't get the public to wrap their heads around such a simple concept here to sell it to the tax base who vote for the members of the school board.

Please Fort Wayne, lets make our schools something we can all be proud of and a model admired by educators and administrators worldwide.

feeling guilty for being right

i almost feel guilty now for having been right years ago. back when it was unpopular i did things such as criticizing the patriot act for selling our freedoms for security (for which the fbi was recently chastised for because they took liberties in issuing national security letters which skirt the procedural necessities of obtaining warrants for its investigations), calling karl rove a bad seed (alleged mastermind of the US states attorney firings), and disagreeing with the iraq war (which has cost taxpayers billions, benefited contracting firms like halliburton, and in a recent survey of iraqis only 41% believe that they are better off than before the fall of saddam)

now, maybe like the bush administration suggests and persists, i really don't see the bigger picture and am myopic to the bigger picture, but i do tend to think that the administration has never had the best interests of americans or iraqis at the forefront of their motives. its the pocketbooks of the beneficiaries of wartime spending thats really what motivated the administration all along.

while i was right, rather than a feeling of wanting to say "i told you so" to the public, i instead feel a great sense of pity for the american public and (gasp) congress for finally realizing this. i do think that my mother country is finally seeing its mistake and that our idealism will correct this problem as it will be written into the annals of our history, but i still lament america's shortsightedness to realize this early on in the game and i can only hope that the dirtiest players are dealt justice accordingly, although i doubt it will happen.

if you too are starting to wake up and see the injustices incurred by our country as a result of our administration's calculated ineptitude, i urge you to raise awareness by talking about it or even recommending criminal proceedings for those that misled and misguided us to those in government that have the ability to do something about it. even something as simple as newspaper op-eds can have an impact.

please help to crumble bush's house of cards, you owe it to yourself, your family, and your fellow americans to expose their crimes.

my tax dollars are paying for THIS?!?!

Being a champion of social programs, I don't normally sweat government funding unless it is an egregious waste of money that could be used for more helpful things, with examples being the bridge to nowhere, halliburton, or the fact that the government is even considering ending net neutrality.

But i've found something that really just boiled my oats recently. As you're all aware, the government funding anti-drug campaigns is nothing new, and has been a fact of life since Nancy Reagan first told us to "Just Say No" back in the mid-80's, and school children have been fed propagandist lies and disinformation as well by the D.A.R.E. program. Well, what's got me all hot and bothered is a new series of ads created for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign (also known as "Above the Influence") and is sponsored by the govnerment-funded Office of National Drug Control Policy. These ads focus on a supposed teen-fad known as "SLOMming" - where SLOM stands for Sticking Leeches On Myself. Yes, you heard me right, LEECHES. While it is well known that leeches do suck blood from their host, I can't see how you could really, truly get high from this. If you've ever had an injury that involved blood loss, or you donated blood, you are well aware of what the effects would be as compared to SLOMming - light-headedness and minor delerium. This is hardly a high comparable to getting drunk, smoking marijuana or drugs like LSD and PCP that pretty much rearrange your perception of reality into that which is incomprehensible when sober.

If teens are out there SLOMming repeatedly, i feel a sad, sad pity for them, and if this not much of a trend, I shame our government for sensationalizing something so wickedly absurd. And to the teens that are actually doing this: has the thought ever occurred to you that its not that had to find alcohol instead? (Not that i would condone underage drinking) And certainly most teens also know that mom and dad's medicine chest, when pilfered, often yields great treasure? (again, don't do this - its illegal, immoral and wrong). I ask these ridiculous questions because something must seriously be wrong for an individual to even consider the leeches at all.

Anyways, I hereby admonish uncle sam for allowing these ads to air, and am formally asking my legislators to implore the ONDCP to take them off the air.

Here is one of the ads for your viewing displeasure:

Wii sports bowling 300 perfect game

This is what happens when you can't sleep and you are bored with a nintendo Wii.

snow job

Wow. I am amazed at how much snow we got in such a short time! There is over a foot and a half on my porch in the back of the house, and in areas its worse as there are drifts fueled by up to 30mph wind gusts. Not only did the county declare a level II emergency, but my work closed at 11am! This is the first time that has ever happened so i'm guessing chicken little must have delivered the weather forecast. It probably worked out okay as we have alot of people that commute from far-outlying counties as well as out-of-state. Plus, Fort Wayne Community Schools has been closed more than its been open lately, so mini-mabus has been quite enthralled despite parental disdain. Eh well, Mrs. mabus gives him lessons during these off days to make up for it so that he isn't watching sponge bob and plyaing Wii all day.

Although I'm up early, I still see alot of snow and there's no sign of it stopping, school is already closed and i wonder if my work will shut down again... i guess it all depends on whether or not they are able to keep the roads cleared enough.

Stay warm everyone!

bruce campbell and old spice

hands down the best non-super bowl commercial to appear so far this year! Bruce Campbell describes what you might need for old spice.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Happy new year to you and your family from ours!

Here's what too much partying can do to you: