Finally funded, Hulk T, greased lightning

So finally, finally, finally, around 3 months after I sent in the paperwork for my taxes the refund is sitting in my bank account.  I met Ali at the bank once again yesterday and was able to get the transaction done in 5 minutes.  I have been anxiously awaiting the deposit of these funds to replenish what I already laid out to get the pool deck painted a couple months ago.

I also should be able to finally get a new set of rubber on the Tacoma.  The tires have been worn and noisy for quite a long time, something to be expected since they probably have at least 75,000 miles on them now.

So when I had my physical a few weeks back it was revealed that my testosterone level was ridiculously high, 1360, the reason I wound up getting my man parts ultrasounded. They wanted to rule out some sort of abnormal mass causing the high score.

Well when I initially went in for the exam and was asked about medication I was taking I didn’t even mention a testosterone supplement I was taking because I didn’t feel like it was making any difference.  I had started taking it a few months ago in an attempt to self medicate for some issues I was having that could be related to low T scores.

When I went back in to the office after my initial blood test the doctor sat down and said he had an awkward question for me, he asked if I was taking steroids.  I laughed and said no.  He said that my testosterone number was off the charts high, 1360.  Normal range in healthy men is classified as number between 300-800.

Once he told me my score I told him about the supplement I was taking and how I didn’t bother to mention it because I hadn’t noticed any difference with my issues.  He found it hard to believe that my T number could spike that high with any non-steroid supplement.  He looked up what I was taking online and found the ingredient list.  The major ingredient is something called stinging nettleweed. Still he was dumbfounded by the score.

So anyway the high score was why I was sent for the ultrasound, to rule out a physical problem as the cause.  He also told me to stop taking the supplement ( I already had) and that he wanted to draw more blood later (last week) to see how my levels are.

The ultrasound scan revealed no abnormalities that could cause elevated T production thankfully.  When I went back to the doctor yesterday the results of my second blood test seemed to confirm that my sky high T was tied into the supplement.  My testosterone level had dropped to 785, a nearly 500 point drop and now just inside the upper “normal level”.

The results of the test seem to point to the Revita-T supplement being the sole contributing factor which still is pretty amazing, a T supplement just never produces those kind of numbers.  Hell you could be injecting yourself with testosterone and not see a level that high.  Perhaps my body chemistry just really responds to what is in the pill.

The more surprising thing is I was actually only doing the lower of the two dosing options with the supplement.  The instructions say take either 1 or 2 pills at night before bed.  I was only taking one and there were plenty of nights I forgot to take it altogether.

So anyway, the end result of this month of blood draws, ball scanning, and other uncomfortable/awkward physical examinations is I am walking around with a stellar T score.  For comparison, I had a T test done in 2011 and my number was 560.   I am actually considering resuming my supplement although maybe on an every other day basis.  It is a bit unsettling that the directions also advise you to “cycle” the product on a 2 month on 1 month off schedule, when shooting roids you follow a similar schedule.

So I just got done installing a Samsung SSD drive in my work computer. I was following some very thorough directions that I found here. However I ran into an issue when I was trying to clone the existing system partition to the SSD drive.

I also got myself in trouble using the command line DISKPART tool when I set the wrong partition on my SATA drive as Active, causing a bootmgr error.  Luckily I was able to boot up my Windows 7 recovery cd (be sure to make one first) and fix the problem.

So anyway, after getting my system booted back up on the original SATA drive I decided to throw in the CD that is included with the SSD drive.  On there was a setup for a “Data Migration” utility.  I installed the program and fired it up.

Wow the utility makes migrating an existing installation on a SATA drive to a new SSD drive stupidly easy.  Pick your source drive, pick the SSD drive as the destination and click COPY.  Roughly 25 minutes later my 170 gig of data was moved across.  I shut down the system, unplugged the SATA drive, plugged the data cable for the SSD drive into the port formerly used by the SATA drive and hit the power button. WOW.

Once the POST process was done and the computer started hitting the SSD drive the system was amazingly fast.  My existing Windows 7 install was over a year old at this point.  As a result, when booting off the SATA drive it took well over 5 minutes until everything was done loading up.  This slowness is despite weekly de-fragmentation that had been done to the old drive.

Once I logged into the upgraded system the SSD drive was completely done loading the desktop in less than 15 seconds.  It was amazing.  Every thing I did on the system felt like it had a rocket booster attached compared to how things performed before, it’s just incredible.

I had avoided SSD drives in the past because of the reputation they had early on of wearing out.  Although there are no moving parts in a SSD drive, the repeated writes to the flash memory eventually will make certain areas stop working.  However as in most things in tech, they have gotten much better with SSD drive reliability as time has passed.  The Samsung 840 drive I installed has a 5 year warranty, better than anything you will find on a conventional SATA hard drive.

The huge performance improvement I am seeing makes me want to install the technology on my home computer as well.  Unfortunately SSD drives come with a price, literally.  They are much more expensive than their conventional spinning platter counterparts.  Right now I need to be using that money towards tires instead of toys.