Bobbie Conti

Doubling Down on Facebook

February 20, 2017 Bobbie1 Comment

I have struggled with Facebook– as a concept — for the last several months. Much as with my friends, I find the election year did it no favors with howling political rhetoric and drama around every corner. It’s not the Facebook I joined.

Remember when you could “poke” someone? And then at the holidays, you could “send candy canes” or throw sheep at them? Remember when the status updates had your name in them, so instead of saying things like “Today I discovered the best maple bar doughnuts are to be had at Tully’s!” you’d type something like, “is enjoying a maple bar doughnut from Tully’s” because it would show up as “Bobbie is enjoying…” and so forth. But over the years Facebook functionality has changed; I can’t throw sheep anymore and it lets me do things like tag people and “react” to their posts and serves up ads to me (that are, I must say, pretty on the mark).

I appreciate Facebook needs to evolve and some of these evolutions I truly enjoy. I’m Facebook Friends* (that is a new definition of friendship, I think: you wouldn’t go interrupt them at 3am in the airport in Hong Kong, for example, but if you saw them wine tasting you’d wave hi to see if they wanted to be friends in person again) with a few dozen folks I haven’t seen in many years and I *like* seeing how they are doing. There’s the guy I used to work with who quit his day job and went full time DJ (and is making a damn good living out of it and seems to be having the time of his life). There’s the gal who decided to become a photographer, the Canadian who got his US citizenship and goes rock climbing all over the place, the gal who became a florist (and again, nice work!), the guy from the old SLT job who is raising two daughters *right*, the couple moving to Austin because they can get a brand new mid-century modern house and you know they are going to make it look good. I can check in on my cousins in Buenos Aires, my friends in London and my friends in Australia. I can check on my friends from high school– curiously I haven’t any from college — and my friends that I see regularly so when I see them, I can say things like “so how *did* the mustard sauce turn out on the pork?”. Facebook is particularly useful to getting out the word for civic responsibility and nonprofit work, as well, and for word-of-mouth business (that’s how I found out about Silver and Salt, for example).

Perhaps like most people the part I am unsure of — unsure because I am not certain how much of it is my perception or how much of it is Facebook’s reality — is how much of what I am being fed is representative of the “real” world. That is to say, I have the power to mute people (which I admittedly did do during the last 2 months of the election — I’ve since unmuted everyone), I have the power to “react” to ads (don’t show me this because it’s not relevant, don’t show me this because I see it all the time — they really need to have a “don’t show me this because you are tempting me and if it goes down much further in price you’ll have my visa card”), and I have the power to say “don’t show me so much of this” or “show me more of this”.

There’s been much discussion of the “bubbles” we live in and how Facebook feeds into that, I won’t retread the ground. With all due respect to Mark Zuckerberg, I don’t believe Facebook should be my only news source — something that is/was the case with many and contributes to the aforementioned bubbles. (I don’t believe Reddit should be your only view to the world, either)**. It is evident though that as you choose your circles and selectively mute or “show me more of this” to ads and content you are tweaking the algorithm in the background and reinforcing your bubble. (It isn’t clear to me how to re-set it back to 0, incidentally — remove all of the “customizations” I’ve either explicitly or implicitly requested and see what a “new user” sees). I therefore have my bubble, reinforced and evolving, and that is just what Facebook is going to be.

My options are thus: I can leave Facebook (directly as in closing my account or indirectly as in just not visiting), I can stay on Facebook passively (the occasional thumbs up, the occasional “Happy Birthday” as it reminds me and I remember to look), or I can actively participate. I’ve been waffling between the latter two and seriously considering the former (I know a few who have cut the cord, as it were).

The problem with divorcing Facebook is that I would no longer have a ready answer to “I wonder what so-and-so is up to?”, and I don’t have contact information (short of LinkedIn) for many of the so-and-so’s. I would miss more birthdays, I am sure. I wouldn’t get the reminder of where things were at five, six, or ten years ago; in short: I wouldn’t get the things I signed on to Facebook for. I would not at all miss the ads, the requirement to curate the content (“see less of this”), and I would certainly not miss the uproar that echoes through the platform whenever there’s an election. (To be clear: I have political opinions and leanings just like everyone, and I back them with money and action. I am just not a yell at the top of my lungs person.)

I think, therefore, I am going to stick with one of the three options as an experiment: I’m going to carefully work with Facebook. I’ll go and like all of the things I like, and work harder to engage with the platform; I’ll use the tools it provides for privacy and for filtration, and we’ll see. I will not make it my only source of data for news (social, local, national, or global) and if this experiment fails I’m basically fine with that. I just figured I’d give it an official run.

*see Dunbar’s number for context.

**I much prefer the Economist and then I use Flipboard to subscribe to topics rather than platforms; so for example I’m just as likely to see an article from the Wall Street Journal as I am to see one from Fox News or USA Today. I’m also a big NPR fan. I blame my dad for that, I can remember riding in the back of a 1981 Volvo 240DL on the way to and from school and listening to NPR, thinking it was the driest, most boring stuff on the planet. Somewhere in my late 20’s that changed and now I’m putting my son through that.

In Vein: The Vein Strikes Back

January 14, 2017 BobbieLeave a comment

“If you’re going to see any reaction, swelling, or pain, it will happen somewhere likely between day 5 and 10.”

For me, it happened on Day 9.

Day 8 I had spent with the Sammamish Troop 571 Scouts in the annual Christmas Tree pickup event (you leave your tree on the curb with a donation, they take it away and chip it). As navigator my job was to sit shotgun and tell the driver where to go for a car with 4 scouts (who collected trees). Essentially I didn’t move much on Day 8.

On Day 9, my leg started itching. Not much. Just a bit. Around noon I got that naggy itch you get when there’s a hair or something in your pants leg, and you find it annoying. It wasn’t much until about 6pm, when it started to increase — first my calf was itchy, then my inner knee, and then up my thigh. Investigating, I found a thick red stripe from entry point to leg crease, and it started to hurt.

The on-call doctor informed me that I am/was now part of the 5% of the population allergic to the vein glue. They had asked if I had ever had acrylic nails and I answered yes, as there was a period of time in my life — roughly four years–where they were de rigeur. The ensuing fifteen years has provided plenty of time for me to formulate an allergy. The advice was to take some antihistamines and see how that goes.

That didn’t go so well. The next day I was on the phone with my doctor, and the day after that I saw Dr. Pepper (I am not making that up, that is his name, and he has four family members who are also Doctors Pepper), who took one look at my leg and said, “Yep, wow, that’s really bad, you’re having an allergic reaction.”

(For those who like data: my left thigh at its most swollen was 3.5″ thicker than my right thigh, and my calf reached almost 2″ thicker).

Onto the Steroids I go, which if you haven’t had a Prednisone Pack ever, are you in for a treat. It’s a tapered pack for six days, but on the FIRST day you take 6 doses. And if you get the pack at the end of the day, for the first day, you take all 6 doses at once, “before bed”.

I say “before bed” because you won’t sleep. In my case I got four loads of laundry done, some detailed analysis, updated some documentation, did some filing, did some housecleaning, emptied the dishwasher, reorganized part of my spice cabinet and half of a dozen other things I’m sure to remember later. For the record I was offered Ambien, but I’m not a fan and figured I’d make it productive.

The next day I had my regularly scheduled check up with Dr. Gibson, who indicated it looked like the steroids were working (Dr. Pepper had put a dotted outline to the swelling from the previous day, so I had a visual measurement aside from my tape measure), and I asked her if it was okay to run all or part of my half marathon. She asked when it was and I said “Sunday” (my time with her was on Wednesday). Verdict: I could walk the half marathon. Maybe run if I really really felt like it, for parts. She also cleared me to fly and did a quick ultrasound to ensure no DVT was present (there shouldn’t have been but hey I was in and the machine was right there).

Today is Day Four. The remaining days’ doses were a normal taper (1 in the morning, 1 at lunch, 1 at dinner, 1 or 2 at bedtime) and the swelling continues to go down, even though I spent most of yesterday afternoon walking around Disneyland. This morning there isn’t any soreness, but I’m still a bit swollen. I think this little episode has passed, so I’ll check in with another update (for those of you interested in the process) in about a month (with pictures).

In Vein

December 30, 2016December 30, 2016 BobbieLeave a comment

I have had, since I was 14, a varicose vein on the inside of my left leg (90 degrees from my kneecap). It started as a 1-2 cm annoyance and then ended up about 4cm for a good long time. Somewhere in the last 5-7 years it grew and grew, and as I’ve come to realize that I am genetically likely to become my parents, I came to the decision to do something about it.

(Side note: in my thirties I amassed attorneys — family law, traffic law, estate law, construction law — and in my forties I am amassing doctors: cardiologist, vascular surgeon, physical therapist, etc. Happy to give recommendations to any who need.)

I went on recommendation from my cardiologist (Dr. Maidan of Evergreen Cardiology) to go see Dr. Kathleen Gibson with Lake Washington Vascular. I like her because she’s direct and patient and answers all of the questions, and since we know I am the kind of person who showed up at the cardiologist with an Excel spreadsheet of my cholesterol metrics from the last 10 years, I had a few. She basically broke it down thus: there are two “tranches” of things I could do for my varicose veins* — I could get the problem child glued (the problem child vein is usually farther up the trunk, in this case my problem child was about an inch below my groin) or I could get the problem child lasered.

A woman after my own heart, she gave me a T-table of what to expect with each treatment. With laser treatment, I would be on antibiotics for two weeks. There would be local anesthetic but also a general “happy drug” for during the procedure (so I wouldn’t be upset by the burning smell that was me). There would be a 10% chance of DVT. I would have to wear a compression stocking for 2-3 weeks. I would not be able to work out for at least a week. It wouldn’t necessarily remove the visible varicose vein, just the problem child causing it, so I’d have to get a separate treatment for that.

With glue, there would be:

no antibiotics
<1% chance of DVT
no compression stocking
I could run the same day
no happy drug (just local)
and it would likely remove the visibility of the vein in about 3 months.

Why do people pick laser with how awesome the glue is? Well, insurance. Some insurances cover the glue. Most don’t, although I understand Medtronic (maker of the magic glue) is working with insurance companies on this.

I’m at the gym at least 4 days a week. I don’t like taking medicine (of any kind) if I don’t have to. And I have a luxury of being able to afford this procedure — so I went with glue.

Today was my procedure.

At 8am I checked in at the front desk, and was taken to a room to change. Shirt stayed on, so did undies; the rest had to go and I got to wear a standard-issue hospital gown (the kind that opens in the back) and a waffle-knit robe (which had me really warm). Coffee, iPhone, and bag in hand I went to the operating room (that’s right, I took my phone. There was no side table for the coffee but that was fine). After a brief discussion of music, Alice in Chains started playing and I was introduced to the crew: Megan, who was assisting during, Matt, who did prep (including betadining my leg, so it looked gloriously tan), and Pam who was on ultrasound. Dr. Gibson was there, and Medtronic had two folks visiting as well including Monty who was part of the original company that developed this glue (out of Spokane, WA! Shout out!) which got acquired by a 2nd company which in turn got acquired by Medtronic.

At 8:30 I was prepped and Dr. Gibson took a time out to discuss the procedure so everyone was on the same page (including me), and at 8:35 I was getting local anesthetic applied. The needle was supposed to feel like a bee sting, but if so it was the gentlest bee I’ve felt. If you sew, and you’ve stuck yourself with a needle through say, just the top layer of your skin– so it’s annoying but not stabby– that’s about the range of pain. It lasted half a second and was gone, and short of pressure and the occasional tickling sensation that’s the last thing I felt, although I was completely awake and we were talking about the procedure, 90’s alt rock, and how Medtronic works with physicians and patients to solicit feedback.**

the sharp, white diagonal line about 1/3 from the top is the needle in my vein. the rest is leg meat. 🙂

fullsizerender — Martha Stewart’s gun isn’t this cool. On the right is Dr. Gibson, that’s Megan behind her, and you can see Pam’s left arm on the left side of the frame.

The way it worked was this: a catheter was stuck into the side of my calf, about halfway up. Then, they put a super-long, flexible needle, and snaked it up my great saphenous vein . The glue was injected by what looked like the medical answer to Martha Stewart’s glue gun, and was held in place for 3 minutes. (At this point we all did a little sing along with Stone Temple Pilots). Then every 3 centimeters down the vein (so a slight tugging feeling, then pressure as they glued, plus 30 seconds wait for the glue to set) until they got to the injection point.

At 8:55 I was done, they put a band aid on the injection site, and washed most of the betadine off my leg. An ultrasound pass over the area to make sure there weren’t any issues, then I went to change and get my discharge instructions. No pain meds (unless I felt the need, in which case, Advil), be active (don’t sit on your butt), and if it’s going to be sore it will hit about day 5 to 10. Follow up appointment is January 11th.

Then we looked at my before pics, and took some afters, which I will share here. Note: full impact in terms of visibility would hit around the 3-month mark, so this is just immediate results.

As always I’m happy to answer any questions based on my experience and/or pass them along to the professionals, and will update with my results as we go.

*as can be expected, your mileage may vary. This post is meant to provide an example of what can be done about varicose veins based on my own experience : talk to your doctor. Also, look both ways before crossing the street.

**an awful lot like I work with my customers at work — a combination of “what features do you want” and “what problems are you having”, because we all know that you get two different sorts of very valuable answers to those questions.

Fight Enough

November 28, 2016December 13, 2016 BobbieLeave a comment

One of my favorite movies this time of year, for sheer shlock and Americana, is Holiday Inn. Holiday Inn is a Bing Crosby/Fred Astaire vehicle, full of musical numbers (the premise is a musical act that moves to rural Connecticut and opens a dinner theater that is only open on holidays), and that 1940’s vibe of “wow, things were so much simpler.”

Things were not, in fact, simpler then. Objectively: technology was ruder, and there was that whole World War II thing: families back home were just as invested in the war as the soldiers abroad — meatless, sweetless, and wheatless days, for example. Nevertheless, Bing kept singing and Fred kept dancing, and all in glorious black and white.

My very favorite routine of the whole movie is Thanksgiving. Because Thanksgiving is when our hero (Crosby) has been “cheated” of his girl (by Astaire) (and no he hasn’t been cheated, he was a dick and she caught him at it), and so he’s alone on Thanksgiving listening to his own recording of his musical number, “I’ve Got Plenty to be Thankful For”. During the number he savagely cuts into his dinner, clapping back at his recorded signing self, and has to get told by his “Mamie” (an African American housekeeper. So much can be said here but you know it already: not how it should have been, not how it should be, caricature, racist, etc.). “Mamie” tells him off and tells him to go “get his woman” because otherwise he doesn’t “have fight enough to keep her”.

Well.

I like Mamie and all but the reason I like this piece has to do with before she enters stage left (oh I like that she tells him off, too.) It’s the two Bings: Bing one is sitting and eating dinner, all pissy and whiny about his circumstance, and Bing two is looking at the bigger picture (gee, I have food and health and I’m not busy fighting a war on two or three fronts that we don’t know when it’s going to end.)

The two Bings remind me that I have two Bings too: I can choose to focus on the negative (and like most privileged people I can manifest a series of bullshit reasons my life is so hard: yet I have food on the table and a roof over my head, etc.) or I can choose to focus on the positive. So when I look at the bevy of things I can be upset or disenchanted about, I can either mope or I can figure out what I can do to address it. I’ve got a slew of things to address: work stuff, home stuff, “political” stuff.

Well. I’ve “fight enough”, as it were. And I think we all do. So if I can give y’all a belated Thanksgiving message: don’t let the Turkeys get you down :).

*edited to update the name to Mamie instead of Mammy. Thanks Stan :).

New York in Just Under 24 Hours

November 11, 2016 BobbieLeave a comment

Who am I kidding? I saw nothing of NYC except from the interior of a cab and my 1.2 mile walk this morning. My flight landed at 8:30pm last night local time. I made it to my hotel at 10:30pm (thanks Times Square!). I fly out 7:30pm tonight. Fun facts ensue:

There’s more than one “Hilton Garden Inn Times Square”. Ask me how I know.
I get in a cab in NYC and I get carsick. Every. Single. Time.
New Yorkers are the most helpful beings on the planet, and I am NOT being sarcastic.
If you attend a conference in NY as a female human, and you elect to wear jeans, you will be in the minority of about 4-6%.
It is possible to adopt your new time zone with no issues whatsoever. Until morning.
You will find a way to get clean with minimal light and low water pressure.
We cut the cord on cable years ago and every time I try to watch commercials irritate me and I remember why we did that.
Not all outlets on the Delta Airlines flight work.
Yellow cab is feeling the pressure of Uber and Lyft to the extent that one of the main commercials in the yellow cab is how awesome yellow cab is.
If the agenda for a conference you’re scheduled to attend is light, reach out to the organizers and find out who it’s geared towards. You’ll still get value out of a sales/marketing conference even if you’re a technical PM — but you have to work at it. Oh, and you get a lot of blank stares when you explain what you do.

#businesstravelisglamorous

Eat Your Frogs

October 19, 2016 BobbieLeave a comment

“Eat a live frog first thing every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” – Mark Twain

The relative cholesterol of frogs notwithstanding* this has been my mantra for the past several days. As part of the seasonal reorganization of things here at my company, I have a new boss and new coworkers (sorta) and so there’s a bit of an administrative tax associated with that: the PowerPoint that describes your products. The weekly update email on how those products are doing. The monthly update PowerPoint on how those products are doing. The one-off PowerPoint to discuss the ProblemChild in your product, and the one-page Word docs to describe the individual projects of your Product. Then of course there’s the emails about each of these items. It was a rough three weeks getting all of that in order, but now I think we’re there and it’s time to eat another frog.

America needs to eat a frog. Actually, your average American citizen needs to eat a *lot* of frogs, because it is Election season. Whatever their opinions are about the candidates for the Top Office are, and how much they do or do not like said candidates, that is (frankly) the least of the frogs Americans need to eat.

*All* of the 435 House of Representative seats are up for reelection this year. Thirty five of the 100 Senate seats are, too. One hundred and sixty three ballot measures are up in 35 states, and 72 citizen initiatives. In my home state we have some pretty big decisions to make, including the possibility of a carbon tax (the Economist covered it last week). There are initiatives about pot, about gun control, about taxes, and about minimum wage; I guarantee the average American has an opinion about some or all of those. I equally guarantee there are no simple choices.

Let’s take my home state: Washington. We have the aforementioned carbon emission tax on the ballot, which economists love but I guarantee you local businesses will not. Ditto the Minimum Wage initiative (actually economists are split on that one, depending on who you talk to regarding artificial price floors, etc.). Firearms make another appearance, this time around risk protection orders. Another initiative asks you to weigh privacy risks against proper compensation for home health care workers. There’s also not one, but two advisory votes (where we get to let the State House/Senate know how we feel about taxes they approved without subjecting them to vote). You may think we have a lot in our state but it turns out California and Alabama voters will have a much thicker pamphlet to read through.

All of these frogs to eat and yet, while the states are doing their best to saute them in butter and garlic (or is that braise them in red wine and tomato sauce?) our election year coverage seems largely devoted to the biggest frogs who, depending on the status of the Congress they are rewarded with, may be stuck in the mud anyway and unable to do much other than croak for the next two years.

Because of the howling cacophony over those “biggest frogs”, it’s rare you find an intelligent, balanced conversation over the little frogs (and possibly tadpoles) we need to consume. It’s almost like the sheer dread of that first big frog negates the fact that once we’re done chewing that one and swallowing it, we have to eat another fifteen, or twenty, or thirty frogs. Unlike college, there isn’t going to be some sort of machismo pride on the line for chugging your frogs; there’s not going to be a team of your brothers and/or sisters cheering you on as you eat your frogs. This is probably because they’ll be busy with their own frogs. Stopping to discuss the balance of flavors in the small frogs, or cooking method, seems ridiculous.

It is, however, the platefuls of small frogs that await us are what we’ll have to subsist on for the next two years (at least — remember Senate terms, for example, are six years), and they are not getting the attention they deserve. I’d argue the biggest frogs are over seasoned and will be cooked to a crisp, leaving little taste on the palette and not otherwise making any long-term impressions. It’s those carefully prepared, home-grown frogs we need to fill up on. On voting day, you get to pick your frogs.

*50mg per 100g of frog meat, in case you were wondering, vs 88 for chicken. There may be a missed opportunity here.

Bonus Round: Protein on the Go

September 25, 2016 BobbieLeave a comment

Having finished up the protein powder comparison it’s another week until I tell you all about Premier Protein vanilla shakes, right?

Wrong.

Here’s how this ended up happening: PP was the only premixed I purchased and it sat in the fridge, faithfully, for the first week or so. But then I got hungry, because one or two of the shakes didn’t quite cut it when I was doing a long run, or because I didn’t have time to pack a lunch as nicely for myself as I wanted to, and so I just threw a shake in there.

The smallest batch of PP’s you can get I think is 4 (unless someone breaks up a pack and gives you a one-off) and within a week they were gone. I didn’t think they’d go that fast and I also didn’t think it would be fair to compare a premixed to have-to-drag-the-blender-out powder, so here’s a comparison of 3 premixed proteins (all Vanilla!).

The contenders: Obviously there’s Premier Protein, which is available pretty much everywhere (Safeway, Costco, Amazon) and was the recommendation by my best friend’s hubs. I then tried out Muscle Milk in Vanilla, and there’s the old standby of Labrada Lean Body protein shake in Vanilla Ice Cream.

The flavors:

Premier Protein: basic vanilla, not fancy and not too rich.
Labrada: my favorite vanilla of the three, slightly lighter flavor (despite advertisement as “ice cream”
Muscle Milk: was fine for the first split-second but there’s a medicine-y aftertaste.

The textures: All three were much more watery than anything I did in a blender, although Premier Protein was the least watery. Then again I’m not sure how I’d feel about a thick shake for a shelf-sitting product.

The vitals:

Premier Protein offers 30 grams of protein at 160 calories. Somewhere in there there is 3 grams of fat and 25mg of cholesterol (it is a bit on the high side, while the packaging says 8% of my intake it would technically be 13%).
Muscle Milk offers 20 grams of protein at 130 calories, with 4 grams of fat and 10mg of cholesterol (so about 5% of my daily intake).
Labrada offers 25 grams of protein at 180 calories, with 7 grams of fat and 10mg of cholesterol.

The performance: These all performed equally well – not quite meal “replacement” (I don’t care what the package says) but with leftover veggies from the night before or to cure mid-afternoon drag they worked great!

The cost: I’m going to use Amazon as the great leveler of prices here; your mileage may vary.

Premier Protein: $7.46 as an add-on item of one 4-pack, or a 12-pack for $30. First price would be $1.87/serving, second would be $2.50/serving
Muscle Milk: 2-4packs (so 8) for $24. $3/serving
Labrada: $31 for a 12 pack (that’s not a type-o!). $2.58/serving.

Grade: Premier Protein gets an A- (subtracting points for cholesterol, although it’s still less than my original shake mix by far), Muscle Milk gets a B- (minus points for being the most expensive and medicine-y aftertaste), and Labrada gets a B (minus points for all of that fat).

Lean Green: Nutiva Hemp Protein

September 25, 2016 BobbieLeave a comment

Nutiva was another Facebook friend recommendation and I have to say the packaging is different from the bags-o-powder thus far; in fact the packaging lets you know it’s a Non-BPA container and frankly once I’m done with the powder I’ll likely reuse it for other stuff.
One thing to note about Nutiva is it is green. Very very green. And so if you don’t normally mix your shakes with green stuff (the greenest thing in my shake these days is a questionable banana) you get a new color to drink.

The flavor: Kinda vanilla? Hint-o-vanilla. Hard to get a bead on it, because I was so distracted by…

The texture: I don’t think “mealy” is the right word, but maybe sandy? More time in the blender didn’t help; although blending it with softer textured things did a bit (e.g., the aforementioned banana). It’s very likely this was intended to be blended with many other things, and in fact there’s a recipe on the side that includes coconut and pineapple (and rice milk or almond milk, the latter of which would kill me). (Oh, and blending with psyllium is a *bad* idea for this, namely because it has it’s own fiber content, so you get to gelatinous goo phase much, much faster.)

The vitals:10 grams of protein per serving, making it the smallest protein provider of the bunch. However that doesn’t actually appear to be its focus as much as fiber, of which it also provides 5 grams. (It thinks each is 20% of my daily diet). 120 calories per serving means it’s bang in the middle of the current offerings, but where’s the 1.5g fat coming from? Still, no cholesterol.

The performance: Okay. And by okay I mean that I didn’t feel the need to eat until lunch (unless I ran that morning, which is 5 mornings a week) and it didn’t cause any reverse-broom or broom effects, as it were.

The cost: The container I purchased holds 15 servings (about — you can do 2-4tbsp, they don’t give you a scoop and they don’t tell you if those are heaping or not; they do nutrition based on 3 tbsp), and can be got at Amazon for about $14 (Prime free shipping) so it’s probably the least expensive of the lot by “serving” (e.g., slightly under a dollar). However if you were trying to match protein with the original (so, 18 grams) or with Vega (the other vegan offering, which offered up 15 grams) you’d have to use considerably more.

Grade: B-. The texture doesn’t work for my application but may for yours; and I already get my fiber from the psyllium powder. Bump it up to a B+ if you need fiber and mix with smoother textured items (e.g., peanut butter and the like).

Gold Standard Whey – Good, but…

September 21, 2016September 25, 2016 BobbieLeave a comment

Gold Standard Whey was recommended by one of my friends (I have like, four) who is a true badass. Like get up in the morning at 4am, run 10 miles, then kick butt at work, do eleven billion hobbies, in bed by midnight people. He’s in data so he’s aware there is a curve that most people fall on and is completely ambivalent that he’s ruining it.

gswhey_label He posted this before and I’ve heard his recipe — he mixes with peanut butter and kale (he actually likes kale) and chocolate and I have no idea what else. I put this stuff to the test plain, with psyllium, and with a banana.

The flavor: standard, regular, vanilla. Not to sweet, not too plain; not too fancy. Very vanilla vanilla.

The texture: PERFECT texture. Truly. Not gritty, not mealy, not slurry, just a great texture. NB: like every other shake thus far (except my original), if you leave it alone in the blender it will seize up and make an impressive gelatinous goo.

gswhey_nutrition The vitals: 24 grams of protein per serving, which this agrees should be 50 grams per day. 35mg of Cholesterol making it less than my original powder but still an impressive fifth of what I should intake per day (a little more). Only one gram of sugars and 120 calories.

The performance: I felt full, although here’s an unpleasant side effect: remember that “Nature’s Broom” effect some protein shakes give? Let’s call this one “Nature’s Cork”. What this did after standing in my blender it did to me, and while I gave it a legitimate week’s try there is no way I’m doing that again. No.

The cost: a one-pound bag of 14 servings can be got at Amazon for about $19 (free shipping with Prime) making the cost about $1.36 — not the most spendy but close to. But even if it was 50 cents the stoppage in my system is enough of a sign.

Grade: C-. I’m sorry, I just can’t get over the grinding halt of my gears. BUT! Protein shakes hit everyone differently, if I were to remove the gastrointestinal seizure I’d give it a B+ based on the other criteria.

Decibel – No Thanks Turkish, I’m Sweet Enough

September 18, 2016 BobbieLeave a comment

I really wanted to like Decibel because I could tell they really wanted me to like it. The website is clearly meant to show professional, serious people doing extremely fit things. The packaging is black, white, and gold (in that order) and there’s a whole booklet on how awesome the product is, that is shipped with said product. Also, my trainer recommended it.

Quick break for this: one thing my trainer pointed out is protein shakes aren’t the same for everyone, and one thing to consider is how likely they are to act as (shall we say) Nature’s Broom. It never occurred to me that that would be a consideration.

So Decibel shipped from the UK and arrived while I was out of town, but I gave it a good week. This review is for Decibel Whey Protein Concentrate in Madagascan Vanilla.

The flavor: If I were making a shake that would be for dessert — you know, like the kind you get at a Dairy Queen or a Fatburger — then this is the shake to use. If you have a chronic sweet tooth and need your breakfast shakes to be dessert-level sweet, use this. I cannot stress enough how sweet this is. Unfortunately I tend to cut my shakes with things like banana or strawberries, which only serve to make the shake *more* sweet.

The texture: Not as moist in powder form as the Vega was, more of a ‘traditional’ powder. Blended with the usuals (or even stand-alone) it is *extremely* smooth; it even found a way to grind out some of the impact of the psyllium husks I use. Just like other shakes it will congeal if left and you want to rinse out your blender well.

The vitals: This has 23.6 grams of protein per serving, so more than my comparison point and quite a bit more than Vega. However the nutritional panel, while including things like fat, does *not* include cholesterol. Also I noticed something else — this said my daily intake of protein would be 50 grams (backward-calculated form 23.6 being 47% of my daily according to them), while Vega declined to opine just how much protein I need, and my original Designer Whey agreed that 50 grams was it. What I find interesting here is technically it depends on what kind of diet you’re on, but some calculators tell me I should aim for as much as 1 gram/pound. I weigh more than 50 pounds.

The performance: I stayed full, but the cloying sweetness would drive me to drink a bunch of coffee to kill the sweet; this resulted in a couple of over-caffeinated days and some dehydration (remember to drink water!). Also, that “nature’s broom” effect? Let’s just say it worked in reverse. You’d think the coffee would’ve helped with that.

The cost: Here’s where I’m glad I included cost per serving — I thought the bag was a bit large and I was right, this bag has 31 servings. It’s 18.99 british pounds per package not including shipping, and that was another 13 pounds. Just shy of 32 pounds translates to about $44, which in turn means this is about $1.42/serving and the most expensive one so far.

Grade: B-. More expensive, too sweet. If you are into sweet and you find your protein shake is not sweet enough, and/or if you don’t mind the extra expense, you can bump that up to an A or A-.

Next up: Gold Standard Whey in Vanilla.