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!