Have you heard of this stuff? The titanium bracelets that golfers, ballplayers and other athletes are taking to the fields, courses and trails? There are a couple of debates among these accessories. There is the ever present performance enhancing debate that exists as well as the debate that these items even work at all. In a nutshell the purpose behind them is that they create a type of energy that helps your body with peak performance.

The Power Balance accessories promote that they increase flexibility, balance and strength while the Phi-Ten products promote that they increase power and endurance. Anyone can purchase these bracelets, necklaces, pendants and even apparel that claim to be lined with titanium. While some argue that they create a placebo effect, some claim that they actually work to increase your performance. This is difficult for me to write about because, I do have a pretty disciplined training regimen. For this reason, it makes it hard for me to be objective in regards to what helps and what does not.

What I can tell you is that I use them both. Although the physical act of putting the item on your person may help with the placebo effect, I am pretty sure that they do work and here’s why. I am going to do something “different” here so bear with me. In the effort to not promote any product over the other, I will simply refer to them as product one and two. Product one I had first and would constantly wear for one particular type of workout pattern. Product two would be worn in other circumstances. One day product two was put on and the workout routine completely switched. I remember thinking to myself, “I guess we’ll se what happens.” I had one of the best workouts in a very long time.

This still could have been attributed to the placebo effect due to the fact that I remembered, “Hey, I have the wrong one on.” but it is hard to tell. I am sure that there are more and more studies going on into whether or not these things really work but, for me they do. Placebo or not, wearing one during a half-marathon decreased my time by 20 minutes. Yes, thats a lot. It could have been the route but, when one compares elevation changes between one race and the other, the argument  dies. It could be the training. More than likely but, it is still a piece of equipment that I do not workout without.

I admit that I had my doubts but then noticed that it is the number one selling application in several countries. I was reluctant to use it last night because I had to be up this morning to take my car into the shop. I set my normal alarm as a back up and decided to give the appplication a shot.

The way that it works is that it will wake you in a 30 minute range based on when you would like to wake up but, no later than the time you enter. You place the phone at the head of your bed and go to sleep. When I woke up this morning I was absolutely astonished at how refreshed I felt. For someone that has been getting very little sleep lately, this was the best 99 cents I have ever spent! I thought about putting off this rave review until I had two or three nights of awesome sleep but, the amount of energy that I have right now could not be ignored.

Seriously, I have responded to all of my emails, taken the car in, have had breakfast and coffee and am the first one in the office. For you iPhone users, there are other similar applications out there, some higher priced, but this is the one that I have and it works great so far.

Resolutions

I have never been one for setting resolutions on New Year’s and even the ones that I will share may be obscure at best. Nevertheless, I thought that they are worth sharing. I think that often resolutions that are set as goals really need to be set as smaller items that are the means to achieving those goals. For example, I would like for my baseball blog to do better in 2010. Solution: I need to do more writing. I also am the proud owner of the famous get in better shape resolution. I am in decent shape but I would like to do more running. Overall I just want to be cooler to everyone. Less sarcasm among friends will not make for boring conversation, it will just be more pleasant. Okay… if you can handle it, I know who you are, you might get some. I do want to focus on being positive and making sure that I see the good in everything. I try to have an objective point of view on things so that might be a challenge when things just are bad.

I hope that your new year brings you all that you can ever ask for in 2010. Stay awesome and keep in touch!

Byline – An application that allows you to import and read you Google Reader subscriptions.

Jaadu VNC Client – A virtual desktop connection client to your Mac from your iPhone.

Merlin – An iPhone application for the Mac Project Management tool.

To Do – A task management application for the iPhone.

Things – Another task management application for the iPhone but, this one synchs with its desktop counterpart.

Evernote – A note management application that synchs to an online note service.

MLB At Bat – MLB baseball scores, news and video.

HR Battle – A homerun derby video game application.

WordPress – An application to help with managing my blogs.

Tweetie 2 – Twitter client for iPhone that allows me to tweet on the go.

MyPantone – Pantone color guide that helps with selecting colors for a client’s project.

Color Expert – Another color guide that helps with selecting colors for a client’s project.

WhatTheFont – A tool that allows you to upload a photo of a font, upload it to the provider’s site for analysis to compare with available fonts.

Analytics – Access to Google Analytics for the iPhone.

Easy WhoIs – Access the WhoIs, DNS and IP information from the iPhone.