Jesus built my energy drink...

It's a love affair, mainly Jesus and my drink.

This morning was like any other. I woke up, and reached for the caffeine. Lately, Red Bull and the like haven't been doing it for me. This all started, doc, a few months back when I was looking for something to wash down some drugs at the local pharmacy. While I was there, I needed some food, too. So I headed across the hall in the Crystal City Underground, and lo, I was at GNC. This was a bad idea. GNC was having a fire sale on energy drinks called "Stinger" which are also labeled "Stacker 2" on the back. They were $.50. I figured, hey, that's one hell of a deal. I consume energy drinks frequently, and I typically pay about two bucks for them. So I buy the remainder of their stock. About eight cans. I have one can and some weird whey protein bar to buffer said drugs in the ol' stomach.

I've been drinking energy drinks since I first became aware of Red Bull years ago. When Monster came out, it was great, I could get a double-sized energy drink along with a double-sized dose of caffeine in a regular sized can. Sobe followed with their No Fear drink, and then things got seriously out of hand. I started seeing triple sized Monsters, and this weird "Boo Koo Energy" drink which was also 24oz. Then Coca Cola got into the market (at the time, Monster was independent, and out of Costa Mesa, which is where Dr. Freecloud's is, so that didn't suck. Anyways, Coca Cola comes out with this Full Throttle stuff, which actually doesn't taste bad. So I generally switch to the Full Throttle ones, which are 16 oz, but don't give me jitters, and seem to be Just About Right. Then there are the various incarnations of Monsters which taste better, and eventually the Full Throttle Fury comes out, and then this weird half-juice-half-full-throttle one, which I think tastes the best.

Anyways, fast forward to that first Stinger outside Rite Aid. Wow. I was completely floored. I don't think I've had a caffeine buzz since I was twelve. But buzzed I was. Jitters and everything. I was completely all over the place and tweaked Sandy and others who bumped into me that afternoon. After the stuff had worn off, I looked at the rest of my booty, realizing that I had just bought a whole bunch of them at $.50 per ea, and they were at least twice as effective as Red Bull. And I can't figure out why. It doesn't say that there's more caffeine in them than RB. The only thing they seem to have lots of is various B-vitamins. I have since learned that B-vitamins are viewed as important in avoiding a hangover. So those evenings (Massive Attack coming up this friday night, that'll be a vodka-and-redbull evening) when I'm having Goose and Bull all night, I suspect a "Goose and Stinger" would do less damage in the morning. Although I've yet to have a hangover from the vodka/RB combination (the Goose and I however, are no longer friends). I digress a little.

So I notice that after I go through these Stinger drinks that RB doesn't do it for me anymore. No real surprise, so I seek them out, and find more at a gas station out at Front Royal, VA (for all intents and purposes a truck stop; I wouldn't be surprised if they had mini-thins). I also find this peculiar one called Redline. And then there are all kinds of weird ones. They seem to fall into two categories:

The first category is the standard "weird B vitamins" drink. Niacin will give you the jitters (and is a proper B vitamin) but along with that are seemingly dozens of others. I am suspecting the "stacks" alluded to these drinks are stacks of B vitamins, although I have also heard of aspirin/caffeine/B vitamin stacks (which are reportedly hard on the heart).

The second category is the "humongous caffeine" drink. Redline falls into this category. After spending some time this evening researching its guts, I've updated its wikipedia entry. Also worth noting is evodiamine which apparently reduces fat uptake and is endothermic in un-food-sated mice. Go figure. In an exothermic "carb-free" drink.

So all this boils down to strange things afoot, and me drinking two RB's before I could get myself out the door this morning (I was out of all my various "weird" drinks, and have now restocked). Let's see if all said weird drinks are enough of a shock to the system to bring the Candida back! Maybe I'll gargle with the fuckers and that'll kill it. They're certainly all foul tasting enough.

But anyways, you've been updated. If for some reason you find that RB doesn't do it, you have options. And you don't have to look like a crackhead or meth-fiend trucker anymore.

Decks, drums, and rock and roll

So my delightful wife bought me a Nike+iPod, gave me her 2gb nano, and we've discontinued using the 60gb iPod Picture that I had been lugging around for a while. Swoon. I'm in love. The '60 was just so big. I got to put about half my music on it, but I could never figure out which half (five-deep nested smart playlists anyone? just try doing that in SQL, selecting from a view of a view of a view of a view, yeah?). With the 2gb, there's just no question. I bring me my "runnin'" music (more on that in a minute) and nothing else. I suppose soon enough we'll have podcasts on it, but I need to get my iBook, nibbles, to steal some music from fruit my soon-to-be-ebayed powerbook, and subsequently upload it. Pain in the butt, but not overly muchso. So, I've been walking (not running) at work. Remember, I'm still recovering from systemic candidiasis and pneumonia. That, and I work in an underarmor, a polo, heavy denim jeans, and sneakers or boots, depending on how much work I'm doing in the datacenter. I don't come to work prepared for much of a workout. This may change. The walk from the metro to work is about a mile (now that I can walk through the Census building instead of around it), and of course the walk back is just as far. At lunch, I walk the perimeter of the Suitland Federal Facility, which is about 3 miles, depending on how you take the route. Actually, it's anywhere from 2.1 to right about 3.0 miles, but sometimes the route has to vary because of construction. There are also considerations like traffic and the air pollution that day (respiratory problems, remember?). Anyways, anything that gets me to do 15+ miles a week of walking is A Good Thing. And since I'm all registered at Nike, maybe some of my co-mac-users who also have the Nike pebble and a Nano will want to sync up (although "challenging" me is probably silly). I suspect I'll be running (and bringing a gym bag) just in time for it to be too cold for me to do so.

So, dig this. My lunch, including a liquid beverage (usually some form of energy drink, but more on that later) is about 800 calories. Of which, I burn about 600 or so on my walk. So I net 200 for lunch, leaving me 1800 for dinner, which I'm surely not doing. Net result is I'm probably losing weight (well, in addition to all the weight Candida took off me) and definitely getting fitter (all my blood tests as well as my blood pressure ~[118/65] led the doctors to say that I was very healthy, despite my, er, healthy portions of mass). My diet changed somewhat with the Candida, as well. The antibiotics were fucking up my stomach, and I started eating a lot of tofu and yogurt and vegetables (specifically, chinese broccoli, for whatever that's worth). So my intake of bad foods has reduced due to the illness, I'm not terribly inclined to go back to Census Cafe (read: "Eurest" cafeteria, barf) when I can bring my lunch with me and eat for less money and put less garbage in my gut. But enough of that.

Regarding decks, the iBook is now pimped, with 1.25gb of ram. This little 12" iBook has a 1.06ghz G4, and with the 1.25gb of ram, it's a very usable little machine. I'm the kind of guy who has 30 or more tabs open in Firefox (well, Minefield these days...). Before, I was lucky if I could open four or six tabs in a single window. Things would go to swap hell and the machine would just grind. Forget doing anything productive. It was strictly a dumb terminal. Now it's quite useful. So speaking of "decks", I've been having this kind of debate with a few people recently about "thick" vs "thin" laptops. I had rather a long discussion with Steve today via email, and I feel inclined to paste a small snippet of that:

If I may elaborate a little more, philosophically, let me borrow a little from science fiction. William Gibson referred to portable computers in Neuromancer as "deck"s. They were small, portable, not entirely powerful devices that allowed one to tap into a much larger, much more powerful computers. Sun tried to hint at this with their slogan "the network is the computer." They're right, of course. And they were pitching thin clients. SGI even has the ability to raster graphics remotely with what they call a "VAN" (a "video area network") where a vastly powerful render engine (with, say, 128 graphics pipelines) is able to do graphics tasks for machines with little to no graphics capabilities.

So I look at laptops more as decks these days. I think the world is moving in that direction. I think that the computing available to us at home, as long as we have ubiquitous bandwidth (and we're 90% there), should be enough for us on our thin, portable decks. My choice is presently a 12" ibook. I love it. I even got rid of my 60gb iPod for a 2gb nano. The nano fits on a 'biner. I could hardly fit the 60gb in my pocket with my cell phone. Now everything fits in two pockets. The only reason I need a case for the laptop is it sticks out on public transit ("hey come mug me"). Otherwise, everything is small and doesn't need a lot of processor, screen, storage, or bandwidth. I've got all that at home and plenty to spare.

I think that just about sums it up. I'll have a beefy desktop machine for doing all the stuff I fantasize about doing on a plane, and count on there being bandwidth available to me so that I can take advantage of it from my seat on the plane. I'm reading Charles Stross' Accelerando now, and he uses a curious metric: the fraction of mass of the solar system used for computation. I think that's leaping a bit too far forward, but then Stross has never been much of a luddite or mud-gazer. We are getting to the point of ubiquitous connectivity (at least in the West), and we are getting to the point where I can borrow CPU from my desktop. Maybe not GPU, but companies (like Sony) want to change that. I, for one, welcome our new networked brains. Or our crustacean overlords. Or whatever.

The point is, I've moved away from my 17" monstrosity, down to a thinner, more svelte machine, and I don't need a monster for a laptop. I probably will never own another one. I hope to never have to lug one around on my back again. And I love that all my various devices fit on a carabiner in my left pocket and the only thing in my right pocket is my Ety ER4-S's in a little tucano bag.

Lastly, when is Nike going to come out with a piece of music that is as entertaining, listenable, and sweat-to-able as the Crystal Method "Drive" track? Have they signed up no other artists?

(read the Stross book)