Time to catch up

I’ve really been away from this for far too long.  Other aspects of this thing called Life have piled atop me and I’m just get­ting around to catch­ing up with everything.

Around 3–4 weeks back, the deci­sion was made to pull all three of our vBul­letin forums together, on one host’s server.  The move was made, at least part-way, but the intended result of run­ning all three forums from one reseller account never mate­ri­al­ized.  As a result, approx­i­mately 10 days ago, we pulled up the tent stakes and moved all of the forum domains to a Vir­tual Pri­vate Server, or VPS, hosted by Known­Host.  I was a lit­tle ner­vous about the move, but the sup­port team at Known­Host has ban­ished all my fears about oper­at­ing a VPS.  And the mem­bers of all three forums are now enjoy­ing page loads that are faster than any­thing we’ve ever wit­nessed before.

Reflect­ing on the deci­sion to move to a VPS, I’ve real­ized there are times when it is nec­es­sary to spend a bit more money.  In this case, spend­ing a bit more each month has ended up being a good value, because our forum mem­bers are enjoy­ing the benefits.

But it is not always nec­es­sary to spend more money to obtain qual­ity.  So it is always impor­tant to research pur­chases, before blindly spend­ing the money.

This evening’s shave is an excel­lent exam­ple.  I am sit­ting here and enjoy­ing an absolutely BBS shave and none of the com­po­nents used in this shave cost as much as some gents will spend on a sin­gle brush.

Tonight was a Treet.  No, I didn’t spell it wrong, I used a Treet blade in a late ’40’s Gillette Super Speed.  My pal Gio­vanni, at Bar­bi­eria Ital­iana, sells Treet Clas­sic blades for as lit­tle as 13 cents each.  Yes, that’s what I said — a pack of 100 blades sells for just $13.00.

The Ylang-Ylang shav­ing soap was made by my favorite soap-maker, Mama Bear and sells for just $8.99.  A lux­u­ri­ous lather was mixed up with my Omega 33175 brush, another item avail­able from Bar­bi­eria Ital­iana for only $39.00.

After an excel­lent shave, I splashed on a bit of Pin­aud Club­man, which is one of my favorite after­shaves.  And the over­all result is one of the smoothest shaves ever.

I will be the first to admit that I am not sure how well a brush like a Simpson’s Chubby #2 works, but when I can get out­stand­ing results with the above-mentioned mate­ri­als, why would I want to spend $235.00 on a brush?  My favorite razor is a Merkur 23C that cost me all of $28.00.  That razor and a Derby blade can give me about as good a shave as I can get with any other com­bi­na­tion and with­out the need to invest a lot of money.

To the gents that can afford the higher-end razors and brushes, I offer you my con­grat­u­la­tions.  And I hope you can get results com­pa­ra­ble to what I am get­ting with a frac­tion of the out­lay.  To those that can afford the var­i­ous com­po­nents used in ‘method shav­ing’, all I can say is my tub of Mama Bear shav­ing soap gives me out­stand­ing results.

For any of you that are not yet bit by the wet-shaving bug (what are you wait­ing on?!?), don’t be fooled by peo­ple talk­ing about how they’ve spend hun­dreds of dol­lars on razors, soaps, creams, brushes and after­shave.  You can get excel­lent results with­out spend­ing so much money.

Related posts:

1. We made a move
2. Sput­nik lives on and on and …
3. Mov­ing Web hosts
4. Catch­ing up on my shave reports
5. Play­ing catch-up around here

Tagged as: Gilette, KnownHost, Mama Bear, Merkur 23C, Omega brush, Pinaud Clubman, Super Speed, Treet, vBulletin, Ylang-Ylang