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Review: Special K Cracker Chips

January 28, 2013 by 1 Comment

Special K Cracker ChipsI love new snack prod­ucts — par­tic­u­larly when they are made by Pep­peridge Farm. This time, I ven­tured into new ter­ri­tory. Kellogg’s cre­ated Spe­cial K Cracker Chips to com­pete with sty­ro­foam cakes, alias rice cakes. They are much bet­ter, when that is the com­par­i­son. But when com­pared to Pep­peridge Farm’s Baked Nat­u­rals, they are a faint shadow of snack goodness.

They are nicely crunchy, but the fla­vor is a bit weird. I only tried ched­dar, but I’m not will­ing to buy the other fla­vors. The tex­ture was not out­stand­ing. I thought the price was a bit high: $3.79, which is a lot for just 4 ounces of snacks. Thus my my deci­sion to not explore fur­ther flavors.

My wife likes these two aspects — they are low calo­rie and are pretty much gluten-free.

Ver­dict? Pass.

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Review: InkJoy Pens

January 17, 2012 by 6 Comments

InkJoy penI love writ­ing. As in, tak­ing a pen out and drag­ging it across a piece of paper. It’s a dying art.

Paper­mate recently released their InkJoy series of pens. I bought a 6-pack (well, 4) and love the writ­ing plea­sure this pen pro­vides. It glides across the page unlike any­thing else I’ve tried.

It’s a ball­point, so the ink is maybe more per­ma­nent than a gel pen’s. And it just glides more smoothly than a gel pen ever could.

The only prob­lem is a bit of blob­bing. The ink is so juicy that it does leave a few blobs, but reg­u­lar pen-tip clean­ing solves that prob­lem. At the end of a few lines of writ­ing, I wipe the tip on a scrap of paper. Prob­lem solved.

Oh — my color of choice is blue. Peo­ple are more prone to believe your writ­ing is real. (This goes back to the xerox days, when black always meant a copy.)

Dis­clo­sure: I bought these with my own money. Office Depot adver­tized them, and the ad con­vinced me to give them a try. I’m glad I did.

Dis­clo­sure two: If you would like to buy these pens via Ama­zon, you’ll give my friend Jon a few cents by buy­ing them through this link. Thanks.

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Review: Rise Bar

October 11, 2011 by 3 Comments

Are you run­ning out of energy at about 10 am? Does that lull hit around 3 pm?

I found a good, healthy solu­tion — the Rise Bar.

I’ll start with my dis­clo­sure — Rise Bar was a spon­sor of Pod­Camp Den­ver, the event I led last week­end. So I had the oppor­tu­nity to try sev­eral fla­vors. Every kind I tried was tasty. (I wasn’t able to try all 12 dif­fer­ent flavors.)

Rise BarRise Bar has a unique twist on giv­ing you healthy energy — dif­fer­ent bars are designed for dif­fer­ent times of the day.

My favorite part about Rise Bars is that the ingre­di­ents are all healthy. And they’re proud enough about what’s in each bar to make the type very vis­i­ble! (See the photo.)

My wife has a gluten intol­er­ance. All of them are gluten-free.

All the ingre­di­ents are organic. I used to be skep­ti­cal about the value of organic food, but when I eat it instead of reg­u­lar food, I can actu­ally tell the dif­fer­ence in how I feel. (I’m not say­ing that I have con­verted com­pletely to eat­ing organic food; but I eat it when I can.)

My friend Tim can enjoy them with a clean con­science — the Energy+ Bars are vegan friendly.

Lest you think I am totally rav­ingly pos­i­tive about them, I have to admit that I got a few for my kids, and they didn’t like them very much. (I think their taste buds are pretty slanted toward over sweet­ness. I can’t stand the break­fast cere­als they like.)

So visit Rise Bar’s site. You can order online or they have a store loca­tor. And if there’s not a store near you, they have a let­ter you can print out to take to your gro­cery store. Then they can eas­ily stock Rise Bars!

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Quick Review: The Help Movie

September 3, 2011 by 6 Comments

The Help was great.

The movie cer­tainly was not per­fect. White ladies were all made out to be demons, except for Euge­nia “Skeeter” Phe­lan and the hurt­ing char­ac­ter, Celia Foote. The African Amer­i­can ladies were painted as almost angels.

True, the sit­u­a­tion was appalling. Peo­ple like Skeeter, Aibileen Clark, Minny Jack­son — and Mar­tin Luther King — put their lives on the line to stand up for what was right, and helped cul­ture and soci­ety change. High­light­ing that courage and strength of char­ac­ter was worth the price of admis­sion alone.

The visual tex­ture was excel­lent. Pac­ing was fine. I thought not read­ing the book was an advan­tage; the expe­ri­ence of enjoy­ing the story stood on its own. My wife had read the book and still fully enjoyed the film. But she had com­par­isons of how the film was dif­fer­ent than the book, such as how the film was softer in its treat­ment of characters.

The film chal­lenged my way of think­ing about injus­tice in the world today. Sim­i­lar con­di­tions of vir­tual (and real) slav­ery still abound. What am I doing to change things?

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Samsung Laptop Review

July 8, 2011 by 1 Comment

Trust me, this is the coolest Win­dows lap­top ever.

It’s the “Sam­sung Series 9 NP900X3A-A03 13.3-Inch Lap­top.” (Just sort of rolls off your tongue, doesn’t it?)

Any­how, I vis­ited the Microsoft Store with my wife & daugh­ter a few weeks back... you know, just to check out the enemy. And I was seri­ously impressed with this Sam­sung lap­top! Mind you, I would never think of buy­ing one. (Reg­u­lar read­ers know where my loy­al­ties lie.)

The best I can tell is that Sam­sung is attempt­ing to com­pete with the Mac­Book Air. About the only thing the Sam­sung has over the Apple is proces­sor speed. The Mac’s hard drive is twice as big as the Samsung’s. They weigh exactly the same.

For a Win­dows lap­top, the design is really not bad. They’re trying.

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Super 8 movie review

June 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

ET mixed with Aliens mixed with Juras­sic Park. Add in a lot of intel­li­gence. Then you have Super 8.

My 15-year-old son and I saw Super 8 last night. We thor­oughly enjoyed it. J.J. Abrams, the direc­tor of the TV series Lost, added that same level of sus­pense to the film — except you don’t have to wait five years to solve the mystery.

Visu­ally, it’s stun­ning. The crashes and attacks are totally in your face. The slow-moving scenes are treated with care and respect.

There is way more char­ac­ter devel­op­ment than most action movies pro­vide... a teenage romance is almost the film’s centerpiece.

The PG-13 rat­ing is appro­pri­ate. My 10-year-old daugh­ter would have been too scared. And some of the kids swear like sailors.

Ver­dict? Go, if my descrip­tion makes the film sound appeal­ing to you. It may be the best film of the summer.

Finally, here’s another wor­thy review from my brother: on Ama­zon. (Scroll down on that page.)

Still photo cour­tesy of collider.com.

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SXSW Review

March 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I have a review of the South by South­west Inter­ac­tive Fes­ti­val over at Greener Grass Media’s blog today. For those who don’t know, I am launch­ing a new ven­ture — Greener Grass Media. You’ll have to go over there to dis­cover what that’s about.

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Something useful from Skymall!

January 20, 2011 by 2 Comments

Yes, I actu­ally found some­thing that is use­ful from Sky­mall. (As faith­ful read­ers will know, I enjoy glanc­ing through Sky­mall cat­a­logs when I fly some­where: post one and post two.)

I was amazed to find a good idea dur­ing the most recent trip. How cool would it be to just pop down a lit­tle hatch to reveal your Christ­mas lights! (Alas, the setup cost a fair amount of money — but for those who hire some­one to put up and take down their lights each year, it might be worth the investment.)

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Facebook email review

December 2, 2010 by 3 Comments

Face­book rolled out their new email fea­ture recently. I got my “you have an email account now” mes­sage a few days back. So I’ve been play­ing around with it.

Refer to the pic — if you double-click on it, you can see it larger in another win­dow at actual size.

a) This is what appears at the top of the Face­book browser win­dow after you click on the “Mes­sages” link near the top of your left home page col­umn. A dif­fer­ent aspect to hav­ing this fea­ture acti­vated is that when you click on “New Mes­sage” in that win­dow or via the Mes­sages icon on your Face­book home page, you can put someone’s email in the “To” field. And even if the per­son isn’t a Face­book user, they will get your mes­sage. (That is an illus­tra­tion of how Face­book wants to be your mes­sage cen­ter. If you use Face­book con­stantly, that might be a help­ful fea­ture. I don’t, so it isn’t.)

b) This is what a sam­ple email looks like as sent from Face­book. It shows all your Face­book con­ver­sa­tions, whether they were sent through Face­book email or not. As you can tell, my wife and I do not talk much via Face­book. (Rest assured — we do talk a lot in real life.)

c) “Ser­vice Unavail­able” is what is shown when I type “f” in my Fire­fox browser address field. (That’s how I nor­mally get to Face­book.) And “ser­vice unavail­able” is my brief sum­ma­tion of Face­book email.

> The Search Mes­sages fea­ture does not work.

> There are no fold­ers or ways to orga­nize your messages.

> I did not try out the mobile mes­sag­ing aspect, so I can’t com­ment on that.

So in short, do not stress out if you haven’t received your Face­book email account yet. You are not miss­ing much. It’s a good sup­ple­men­tal thing, if you’re a heavy Face­book user, but oth­er­wise, no big deal.

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Vuka: social media success

October 15, 2010 by 2 Comments

Some of you may remem­ber back a few days when I said some neg­a­tive things about Vuka, a nat­ural energy drink.

I take back what I said! I still sort of stand by what I said about alu­minum thick­ness — but their incred­i­ble atten­tion to cus­tomers’ needs is enough to eas­ily win over this hard heart.

They read my review and left a thought­ful com­ment. Then they con­tacted me and sent a pack­age over... via courier... with t-shirts, stick­ers, and sev­eral sam­ples of the drink. So I have tried it — and it tastes great. It’s a great con­cept — the first healthy energy drink that I’ve heard of. (I have only tried one Mon­ster drink — and it was close to drink­ing cough syrup. The chem­i­cals con­tained in Mon­ster are not nec­es­sar­ily things I like flow­ing through my blood­stream... not that I’m Mr. Healthy.)

So check out Vuka. Espe­cially if you’re into energy drinks.

Filed Under: review, social media
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