More Scheduled Downtime

Tech support at the domain host need to tweak the replaced disk array a little bit.  We scheduled Tuesday, 10:00 AM Mountain time (1700 GMT) for that to happen.  They expect it to take no longer than 15-20 minutes.  As it involves hardware the entire site will be off the air.

We're back up, but who knows what things are going to be like.

Well, wasn't that special. When I restored everything to Sunday night's backup it turned everything back online. Which makes sense, because that was the status at the time of the backup.

I hope it everything works. Especially since I was restoring the fucking database, then converting it to a new format.

And Now We're Gone Once More

And the forum is offline again, because way too much is broken.  Looks like I need to rerun the install.  We may lose whatever was posted between midnight Sunday and now.

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OK, I'm testing the board software.  Smilies are fucked-up.  Not that I care.

And all posts, PMs, blog entries, etc. that happened after midnight Sunday are gone.  Sorry.

We're Sorta Back

The good news: the forum is back online.

The bad news: the blogs aren't.

I'll try again tomorrow with the blogs, although it may require tech support, which means Tuesday at the earliest.

I haven't tested everything, so I have no idea what works, what doesn't, what has and hasn't been fixed or broken.  Guess we'll all find out together.

Forum Software Upgrade has Begun

I don't expect this to take too long, as in two hours or so.  We'll see.  Check in around 2:00 PM Mountain time (2100 GMT).

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OK, make that 3:00 PM Mountain time (2200 GMT).  I thought I had already uploaded the software to a holding directory on the server.  I didn't.  Hence the extra hour.

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This is what I get for writing an optimistic target time.  Apparently the tag conversion process takes a long time.  The more tags (over 1,100) and more blog entries (nearly 4,000) there are the longer it takes.  So this could go on for quite some time.

Reminder: Forum Software Upgrade

I still plan on updating the forum software tomorrow.  Beginning whenever I finish amusing the cats, eating breakfast, and finishing the crossword puzzle.  So, figure noonish Mountain Time (1900, or thereabouts, GMT).  I expect to be finished within a couple hours.  Give or take.

For everyone else who shares my "It's just another day with an anomalous TV schedule" attitude, the only Xmas songs you'll ever need:

And We're Back

It took until around 1:00 AM Mountain Time (0800 GMT) to finish rebuilding the array and repair the forum's database.  It's up and running now.

This is why I love Lunarpages.  I know from my experience back in the Big Iron Age that resynchronizing the data on a RAID after a hardware fault and rebuilding a large database can happen only so fast, but there was someone there until midnight Pacific time making sure it happened.

We're off the air again.

Of course I don't check the site before doing anything, so I was unaware that we were getting an internal server error all over the place.  I'll keep everyone posted.

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Update 14:41 Mountain Time (21:41 GMT): There's a hardware fault, and Lunar Pages tech support is looking at it.  

In a way this is partially mostly my fault, as I had seen messages relating to the fault in one of the RAID drives starting a few days ago, but my social anxiety/avoidance was so fucking bad I couldn't even open a ticket about it.  I kept trying to, but just couldn't.

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Update 16:45 Mountain Time (23:45 GMT): The drug pages, etc. are back up.  The forum is still down, this time it's unhappy about the database.  The new components of the RAID are still being synchronized, and nothing is obvious when looking at the database, so it might be a matter of waiting.
The Lunar Pages techs had the hardware replaced in about one hour.  Pretty damn good for the Friday before Xmas. 

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For anyone who is wondering and speaks *nix, here are the messages I was getting with increasing frequency for the last week:

Dec 22 16:17:02 server smartd[18984]: Device: /dev/sda, not capable of SMART self-check
Dec 22 16:17:02 server smartd[18984]: Device: /dev/sda, failed to read SMART Attribute Data

That's why I wrote it was my fucking fault this happened.
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Slight Redesign

With all the traffic coming in from Crazy Meds itself, I figured I should change the focus of the blogrolls to something more in line with the Crazy Meds site.  Hence all the pharmacology, brain, and assorted medical blogs are now first, followed by links to similarly-themed sites that aren't blogs, then emergency room/department blogs, then the panoply, other blogrolls, and links to other sites.  I also added a shitload of blogs to the neuro-pharma-med roll.

There is also another Facebook page, just for site content and status updates.

I should have known better

Just because I'm less susceptible to mood swings doesn't mean they won't happen.  I wind up getting depressed and being unable to deal with my life.  Oh well.  It's been over couple years since I was last depressed, and that's the longest since I've been on meds.  As part of distracting myself and convincing myself that I'm doing something I did a huge reorg of the blogrolls.  I've pruned dead links, moved defunct blogs, added a shitload of new blogs to the Panoply, and added a new section dedicated to Emergency Rooms/Departments.  Now you don't have to just take my word for it, you really don't want to go to the ER unless you absolutely must need to.

Who knows when I'll do all the stuff that needs to be done.

With Whom Does One Talk About Total Social Avoidance?

How bad has my social anxiety/phobia/avoidance been?  By the time I've written and addressed 3-to-5 Christmas cards I'm emotionally exhausted, so that appears to be my daily limit.  I'll be lucky to get all of them sent by the end of this week.  The mailman just stopped by to drop off a package.  That's the sort of thing that throws off my entire day.

Answering e-mail is out of the question.  Posting this on my Crazy Meds blog or the Crazy Meds facebook page isn't happening either, as too many people would see it.

Like a lot of people I want more, because I can never get enough of what I already have.  I want more latitude, altitude, and solitude.  Living at 47° north has been good for me.  16 hours of daylight with long dawns and dusks in the summer, and 8 hours in the winter with the sunlight filtered by trees most of the day has made me less susceptible to seasonal mood swings.  I'd like to live further north and higher up to enjoy things like auroae and noctilucent clouds more often.  I'd really like a place at or above 53° north and 3,500 feet up, with a clear view of either the eastern or western horizon.  Someplace to set up a telescope to look at anything interesting that comes by, like another green comet, and a receiver to listen to the solar wind.

As if any of that will ever happen.  

If I manage to get the resources to leave this lemon of a glorified Unabomber shack I have to use them to move closer to a city with better doctors.  It's becoming more difficult for me to drive, cook, and generally deal with my life.  I need to live where I can take a cab to wherever I need to go, and get food delivered that's safe for me to eat.  Solitude is no longer an option.  Which sucks, because one of the few good things about this place is its location.  Depending on where you center it, the population density here is between 1 and 5 people per square mile.  When I lived in Berkeley and Missoula I often felt lonely.  Out here I rarely do, and when I do it's not as bad.

I'm Popular! Why?

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a total stats whore.  Whenever I'm feeling a bit off I look at statistics.  Mainly Crazy Meds' traffic.  

Starting 28 November there was a spike in the number of visitors.  That happens.  For some reason on 8 November the whole world did a search on Lexapro.  Traffic has been continuously high since 28 Nov. - 10k-12k visitors a day.  Not that I'm complaining.  So I dug down to find out why.  A big chunk of that is due to people visiting the page on TCAs.  Directly.  Not from other sites, not from search engines, not even from clicking on an link in an e-mail, but from pasting the URL into their browser from another source.  The peak was 9 & 10 December, when over 3,400 people stopped by to look at that page.  On 8 December 1,700 people went there directly, on 7 December 900 did.

The thing is, they stay on the page for ten seconds, if that.  Hardly anyone goes to another page.

What the fuck is the attraction?

Most of the visitors are from major North American cities, but plenty of them are from Paris, Sydney, Dubai, Hyderabad and so forth.  Of the places with more than 20 visitors, the people of Istanbul read the most on the site (78 visitors averaging 2.18 pages), and the people of Valencia stayed stayed the longest (39 visitors, average visit 3:54).  Contrast that with the 12 cities where the average time for their 21 to 30 visitors was so short it couldn't be measured - they must have serious connectivity problems in Spokane, Duluth, and Puyallup - and obviously didn't go to any other pages.

Some of you may understand how I can read so many studies without my eyes glazing over.  I may have lost the math to fully understand the more complicated stats, but I still like looking at the raw data.

They aren't printing the page.  At least they aren't using the print function from AddThis.  Have I done someone's homework, or is there something hilarious that I'm missing?  Because I don't care how ridiculously stupid something I wrote looks.  As long as the information isn't wrong and it helps people understand and/or remember something they otherwise wouldn't, I'll be happy to duplicate it elsewhere.

At some point the interest will probably die off, although site traffic overall is still over 9K on weekdays without the TCA page.

Abilify Page, Updates, More Cites, and I'm Sure it's Just a Coincidence

At long last, a brand new med page.  Abilify.  It may not be a new med, but at least it's a med that's being advertised.  I'm still working on various pages, but the Basic Overview Page is mostly done.

I've finally added links to sites with consumer reviews.  Most of the ratings/reviews are from the Big Five rating sites:  Ask a patient   Revolution Health   Patients like me   WebMD   Drugs.com 

I have links for these meds: 

Abilify  BuSpar  Cymbalta  Invega  Keppra  Lamictal  Lexapro  Paxil  Risperdal  Seroquel  Topamax  Wellbutrin  Zoloft  Zyprexa

Crazy Meds was mentioned in another journal back in February, although it's in an article I'd file under "blame teh InterWebs.". From Psychotropics Without Borders: Ethics and Legal Implications of Internet-Based Access to Psychiatric Medications

Internet-based consumers have access to extensive medication information through websites such as erowid.com, crazymeds.com, and drugs.com, among many others.

That is one broad spectrum. 

We also turned up as a source here, but it was one of those incidents when we seemed to be the only place someone could find the MADRS at the time.  It wasn't the first time we were the only available source for one of the psych tests. 

In a Zyprexa vs. Abilify study I found I learned that "which sucks less" has an official name - "time to all-cause discontinuation" - and that they run trials just to measure that. Whichever med has a longer time to all-cause discontinuation is the one that sucks less.
What's funny is when you run a search on PubMed and Google Scholar, the terms "all-cause discontinuation" and "all-cause medication discontinuation" are used in papers exclusively about psychiatric medications, and that comparative studies about how long people stay meds based upon which sucks less don't start appearing until 2005. Prior to then the term appears in a single paper about beta blockers and heart attacks, and then it was just to indicate that all the reasons for discontinuing are all lumped together.
It has to be just a coincidence that researchers didn't start doing studies comparing psych meds - using the fancy new term or not - to find out nothing more than which one sucked less (or the least) until over a year after I started a somewhat popular site about psych meds that used data from published studies, along with anecdotal evidence I collected and consumer ratings & reviews, to determine which ones sucks less than others.

Brand vs. Generic page. Finally.

At long last the Brand vs. Generic meds page has been renovated and updated. 

As I come across them, I'll add URLs for case reports, studies, etc. that support one side of the issue or the other.

We're in PubMed, Bitches!

Of course the journal is Journal of Medical Internet Research and the article is mostly about consumers bitching about side effects online, but, hey, there we are, going head-to-head with WebMD once again.

Can Online Consumers Contribute to Drug Knowledge? A Mixed-Methods Comparison of Consumer-Generated and Professionally Controlled Psychotropic Medication Information on the Internet

Crazy Meds and Ask a Patient vs. WebMD and former consumer-generated media site Revolution Health on the effects of Lexapro and Seroquel. The results:

Consumer reviews and professional medication descriptions generally reported similar effects of two psychotropic medications but differed in their descriptions and in frequency of reporting. Professional medication descriptions offer the advantage of a concise yet comprehensive listing of drug effects, while consumer reviews offer greater context and situational examples of how effects may manifest in various combinations and to varying degrees. The dispersion of consumer reviews across websites limits their integration, but a brief browsing strategy on the two target medications nonetheless retrieved representative consumer content. Current strategies for filtering online health searches to return only trusted or approved websites may inappropriately address the challenge to identify quality health sources on the Internet because such strategies unduly limit access to an entire complementary source for health information.

The data are clear: WebMD can suck it.

The paper raises two points I constantly reiterate:
1 - Consumer-oriented sites, including this forum, skew negative, which is why I don't depend solely on them for the anecdotal evidence I use in my drug pages.
2 - Like drug company-sponsored studies, drug company-sponsored professionally-run sites tend to  skew positive, which is one reason why I think they are still useful.

You have to really read the article to realize Crazy Meds and Ask a Patient are not total bitchfests about meds, especially since significantly more people taking each med reported they worked better on the consumer-oriented sites than on the professionally-run sites.  I may have to re-evaluate how the stats skew.

Oh, NOW You're Crazy

Brent Arthur Wilson decided that he's crazy after all.  The Montana Supreme Court disagreed.  From the Missoulian:

Brent Arthur Wilson, who insisted on serving as his own lawyer dozens of times during court appearances last year and once threatened to "arrest (the) bond and seize (the) surety" of any attorney who said one word on his behalf, argued on appeal that he never should have been allowed to represent himself.
The court disagreed, and also ruled against Wilson on two other issues.
"Though we acknowledge that Wilson's demeanor with the District Court was unconventional and at times somewhat bizarre, the fact remains that he was found by a mental health evaluator to be mentally capable of making decisions and fit to proceed and act on his own behalf," Justice Patricia Cotter wrote in the decision.
"Mindful of Wilson's right to represent himself if capable of doing so, the District Court was placed in the difficult position of balancing Wilson's constitutional right to counsel with his right to represent himself," she went on. "We conclude the District Court did everything in its power to persuade Wilson to accept counsel, without unduly pressuring him to do so in possible violation of his right to represent himself."

Plus there was this bit during his trial:

"For the record, on the record, let the record show I have no constitutional rights, I want no constitutional rights, I claim no constitutional rights," Wilson said repeatedly during court proceedings.

Be careful of what you wish for and all of that.

Mug Discount & New Bumper Stickers

Zazzle is offering a 30% discount on mugs today (10 November) only, until 11:59 pm Pacific time. In honor of Veterans' Day, which is tomorrow. Enter code:

VETERANSALE4

at checkout in the "Zazzle Coupons/Gift Certificates" box. More details here.

Crazy Meds mugs are here. You're welcome for all the notice.

I've also put up a bunch of new bumper stickers, which you may or may not be able to see when you read this.  A whole bunch of Team stickers: Agoraphobia / Anxiety / Bipolar /  Crazy / Depression / Epilepsy / Manic! / OCD OCD OCD OCD / Panic! / PTSD / Schizophrenia.  As well as: I Feel Fantastic!, My Doctor Can Beat Up Your Doctor, and My Shrink Can Beat Up Your Shrink.  All of which are available as mugs and t-shirts.

Also new is a Team Crazy Meds mug, which I've also done with a solid black background.  But it's not a completely black mug.  Let me know what you think.

I got a My Shrink Can Beat Up Your Shrink and a Medicine Is The Best Medicine mug for my doctor.  I'm impressed by Zazzle's print quality.  The imprints on the pills are really clear.  I have no idea how well they will hold up to dishwashers, microwaving, etc.  But fresh out of the box the 'art work' looks really sharp.

Crazy Meds Mugs & Bumper Stickers Now Available

The annex to Straitjacket T-shirts is now open at Zazzle.  Right now it's all mugs and bumper stickers.  Some have the same designs you'll find on shirts, and some designs that may show up on shirts eventually, and some have their own designs. 
A few examples manage to not look like utter crap as they scroll by:


So get your favorite medication prescriber a gift to show your appreciation, and let them know that someone besides their local pharm reps is thinking about them.

As much as I've complained about Cafe Press' gods-awful interface, Zazzle's is just as confusing, frustrating, and time consuming, albeit in different ways, such as being really fucking obstinate about orienting the mugs. I either want the handle on the left or in the back. Notice how many handles are on the right. And it handles alphabetical order as well as I did in 2003.

Plus at $14 for their least expensive mug, or $1 more than the cheapest t-shirt I offer on Cafe Press, I may wind up splitting the merchandise between the two shops or something.  Fuck if I know.  It's going to be a big pain in the ass no matter what I do, so figuring out which option sucks less is going to take time.

Occupy Big Pharma - or at least wear a t-shirt to tell other people to do so.

New Shirts at Straitjacket T-Shirts:

Occupy Big Pharma Big Pharma puts profits before people. Let everyone know you want to do something about it. Or at least tell people what you think they should do about it.

Fuck Big Pharma! If Big Pharma really pisses you off, let everyone know about it.

Big Pharma Sucks! Or you can wear one of these if "F#¢< Big Pharma!" isn't really your style.

Occupy Sanity It's political AND a cry for help.

Team Crazymeds
And I want you to be able to advertise my site in as many ways as I can think of. 

 

I've just opened a store on Zazzle for non-shirt items like mugs and bumper stickers.  I'm working on those.  I'll probably move the shirts there eventually.

Why I Hate Mythbusters

1. First and foremost: fewer myths (urban and otherwise) and too many ads for movies disguised as episodes debunking Hollywood physics.  Especially when they do James Bond, because it's product placement within product placement.
2. While I like explosions as much as the next person, not every episode needs to be about blowing things up.  The Discovery Channel is the "Watch People Blowing Up Stuff Because That's Their Job" network, so they could have an entire show dedicated to great explosions and blowing stuff up. "Tonight on The Biggest Bangs we'll be making detcord macrame, comparing the different properties of explosions produced by vehicles powered by regular, diesel, natural gas, and other fuels, and taking a look back at the 1947 Texas City explosion."
3. Padding.  My memory sucks, but is a detailed review of what happened prior to the commercial break really necessary?
4. This one might actually bother me the most: wasting all of that food.  Granted that is a quintessentially American thing to do, but when I see the last 10 minutes of a Mythbusters episode before whatever I want to watch on the Science Channel is on (e.g. In Search Of... Dark Matters) and they're blowing up or otherwise destroying a shitload of food you know what's going to happen?  That's right, there's going to be an ad about starving children that makes you sadder than watching an hour-long infomercial of Sarah McLachlan in puppy Auschwitz.
   No wonder people who live in countries where they like to keep women uneducated and at home all day so they have at least eleven kids hate us.  They're starving and we blow up food for entertainment purposes.

Away we go

I've begun the forum and blog software updates.

I have no idea how long this will take.

It's about 11:15 Mountain Time (17:15 GMT) and the files are still being uploaded to the server.  This is a big-ass update, with over 3,000 files totaling about 31 MB.

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Update: It's now 1:15 PM Mountain Time (19:15 GMT). The file upload is finished and I'm now starting the install.

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Update: A little after 3:00 PM Mountain Time (21:00 GMT).  The upgrade is complete, and I'm going through some settings.

I may have fucked up the avatars.  The new version allows only one picture per account instead of two.  I thought I told the upgrade process to use everyone's avatar as the picture, but I'm not sure it did that.  Invision's syntax is often counter-intuitive, to me at least.

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Update: As of 4:10 PM Mountain Time (22:10 GMT) the Crazy Meds forum is back on the air.
I can't tell you how much I hate the new look.
Allegedly the old version of the default skin is available, but it doesn't work.  I'll see what I can do.
At least the avatars don't seem to be as fucked up as I thought.

Now 25% Less of a Crazy Cat Person

One of my cats is missing, and presumed eaten.  I don't know how long he's been gone, because he vanished around when I got really sick, and I don't know when that started or how long it lasted.  I also don't remember if he was gone before I got sick, or if that happened while I was ill.  I've never had a physical illness fuck with my memory like this.

In addition to being barely able to take care of myself and the other three that managed to stay, I wasn't concerned because one of his sisters is in the habit of going away for a few days, even a couple weeks, now and then.  They are both really good hunters, and catch (and eat) hefty game like squirrels, wood rats, and decent-sized birds like robins.  This time of year they'll catch at least one critter a day.  They are both extremely shy, so putting up lost cat posters, notices on Craigslist (which gets maybe one hit a year from this neck of the woods) wouldn't do much good.

Then MAO went missing.  And the porch was covered with the spray of a large predator.  And MAO's remaining two offspring were acting really weird.  I wasn't very functional that day.  Fortunately I found her, 20 feet up a tree.  She wasn't coming down.  I dragged a ladder on top of the carport, fought the vertigo of standing on that (ladders and I don't get along) to hold out an eight-foot-long plank to a branch below the one she was on, and she wouldn't step on to that fucking thing to walk down to me.  Eventually I had to give up.  I was physically exhausted from repeatedly putting the ladder on the roof of my truck, climbing up onto the carport, pulling the ladder up onto the carport, trying various things, putting the ladder back on the truck, climbing down, getting more stuff, climbing back up, lather, rinse, repeat.

I figure, she's a cat.  She'll get down when she's ready.  The tree has a shitload of branches that are fairly close to each other, and stands between a carport with a flat roof and a garage with an A-frame roof.  I left the ladder on the roof of the truck so she could get all the way to the ground.  Karuna got down from the now-cut-down eucalyptus tree that was at my old place in Berkeley without any help.  She was also about 20 feet up, and that tree had hardly any branches below her and the only thing near it was a fence.

Nope.  MAO was still there the next morning.

I tried the plank again.  Same thing.

Eventually it dawned on me.  Falling out of a tree is probably how she broke her leg.  No wonder she won't climb down.

So I started calling around, trying to find someone with a boom lift.  Eventually I found a tree service in Missoula with someone available to come out right away.  It cost $800, but when you live on the outskirts of civilization, you have to expect that sort of thing.  MAO was more than happy to be rescued by them.

I don't know if the local volunteer fire department still rescues cats from trees.  I wasn't going to call them, or the utility company.  Even if either of them did that sort of thing, with my luck as soon as they got here there would be an emergency somewhere else, and today I would still feel like it was my fault.

So now everyone stays inside at night.  They aren't all that happy about it, but tough titty.

Forum software upgrade 18 September, 2011

I plan on updating to the latest and greatest versions of the forum & blog software Sunday, 18 September.  All subject to the whims of health, physical and mental, and fate.  

Most of the changes are behind-the-scenes sort of stuff, concerning things like performance, moderator tools, and system administration.  Changes everyone will see include:

• A new text editor, which I usually classify as "change is bad."  Like this new blogger editor and interface.  At least IPB's new editor comes with two useful features: autosave (finally!), and it will notify you if someone posts a reply before you finish with your reply.
• You'll be able to add tags to topics.  I can hardly wait to see some of those.
• Following topics, being notified of new content, etc. is supposed to be easier to do and less buggy.
• Liking stuff and social media interfaces are supposed to be easier.
• The user control panel, where you play with your account settings and the like, is supposed to make sense and generally be easier to use.
• Fixes for various bugs on the blogs and the mobile interface.

I'm whining about my crazy & shitty health elsewhere

I've started a blog on Crazy Meds exclusively for whining about my mental and physical health problems.

Queror ergo sum  I complain, therefore I am.

Everything else, Crazy Meds updates, status reports, whining about other aspects of my boring life, and anything else I'd bother writing about, will still be here.

New Shirts at Straitjacket T-Shirts

Has anyone else complained about how painfully slow Cafe Press' process to upload apply designs is?  I think a better question is: where are the Cafe Press sux shite websites?

I think I'm going to migrate to Zazzle.  Their options for mugs look a lot better.

In any event, new sections, new shirts, and I've given the sections thumbnails:

Bipolar Rollercoaster Shirts to buy during a manic spending spree	alt.depressed.as.fuck As if you you deserved to buy these shirts	Anxious and Panicked Shirts that offer protection in a decidedly unsafe world, by letting people know you want them to leave you the fuck alone.
Obsessed and/or Compulsive OCD shirts. OCD shirts. OCD shirts. OCD shirts. Wash four times before wearing	My Brain Hurts Future rags to sop up the mess after your head explodes	Shizophrenia Nation Messages for you to project into the minds of others
Those Crazy Meds Shirts that let the meds express how you feel about your meds	Stigma Busting Come out of the mental health closet with these shirts	Say it with Pills Not otherwise specified shirts

Here are some of the new shirts:

Team Bipolar Show your pride of being part of the team everyone wants to be on for some insanely stupid reason or another.

Team Bipolar Captain We know who we are. You may know someone this crazy. You may even be this crazy.

Team Manic! When too much is never enough.

Team Depression As if you deserved to be on any team. Team Depression Captain The clock of your soul is stuck on midnight. Picked Last for Team Depression Because you suck that much.

Agoraphobia: Don't Leave Home Without It It's an old joke, but it's still funny.

Team PTSD You're not alone.

Team PTSD Captain Suitable for civilians and service personnel of all ranks.

Team Panic Captain If you think this is what panic looks like, you haven't seen a pro in action.

Team Epilepsy Shake things up in your life by joining team epilepsy.

Team Epilepsy Captain For those who've ridden the med-go-round too often, but aren't giving up.

Picked Last for Team Epilepsy We are such losers that we're even picked last for Team Epilepsy.

Team Schizophrenia Team Schizophrenia: It doesn't get any crazier than this.

Team Schizophrenia Captain Anyone can wear a tinfoil hat and pretend to be schizophrenic. Spelling out your trans-dimensional adventures in psychotropic meds is something else entirely.

Picked Last for Team Schizophrenia What's the stigma like? It's getting picked last for Team Schizophrenia, that's what it's like.

I don't know if I'm going to plaster what I've got uploaded onto any more shirts, let alone upload the remaining designs I haven't already, until I investigate Zazzle. It's taken over three solid days just to do what I've already done, and I've got over 20 finished designs still to go.

Not that these things are selling.

Crazy Meds Updates

15 June 2011

• Somehow I managed to skip converting the Thorazine (chlorpromazine hydrochloride) and Elavil (amitriptyline HCl) pages when I moved everything to the new format. I just finished the Elavil page.
• Added anticholinergic and antihistamine subsections to the common side effects page.

11 June 2011

• The Invega pages have been converted to the new format. These are the first pages written by someone else to be converted to the new format, so I’ve had to mess around with a bunch of stuff to get all the copyright information to appear correctly, which is why I didn’t include them in the first wave of meds.
• I finished up the Meds & Supplements page.
• The HONCode certification has been renewed for another year. You may have noticed we have the certification logo up on the forum. Sites that have collaborative aspects (blog, forum, etc.) are now reviewed as a whole. You won’t find many peer-run mental health fora with HONCode certification, although that’s mainly due to stigma. As I don’t have a problem putting my real name up all over the place, and I don’t care how much of a jerkwad people consider me¹ when I ask for some kind of source to back up claims of miraculous vitamin cures, we’re able to have a HONCode-certified forum.

Stats Whore

Statistics calm me down.  Comfort me.  Stave off depression.  Con me into thinking I'm accomplishing something when I'm just dicking around.  

I'm such a fucking stereotype.

Thanks to all the different tools available I can analyze Crazy Meds' statistics in so many different ways that I wouldn't have to look at the same ones twice in a couple of days.

Today I looked at search terms that resulted in the highest eCPM.  If you speak Googlese you understand what I mean.  If you don't, eCPM is a hypothetical potential of how much money a page could make if a buttload of people showed up and clicked on the ads there.  It has as much bearing on reality as the applicants' incomes on sub-prime mortgage applications.

Here are some of the more interesting search terms used in the last 30 days that resulted in eCPMs between $2,000 and $450.  I'm not showing the eCPM numbers because that might violate something in the Adsense agreement.  In descending order of potential value, here are some of my favorite search terms that have led people to Crazy Meds, and my answers to any that are questions:

1. drugs that are named black boxed

2. how much remoron to takeremeron

3. intial dose wellbutrin sr broke in half

4. what is a doctor called who prescribes pi

5. how long for lamictal to show on blood test

6. cash price of nuvigil at schnucks pharmacy

7. sorrta remeber

8. why does my scalp twitch

9. can i take paxil with a factor 5 mutation

10. dexedrine minority psychosis

11. what if enzymes are taken near phych mess?

1. Black Box isn't a drug name, it's the name of a warning.  Drugs with black box warnings have side effects that are potentially life-threatening and everyone is sure it was due to the drug.  Unless a bunch of hysterical moms got together to pressure Congress to force the FDA to force the drug companies to add black box warnings to drugs that don't necessarily have those problems.

2. "Remoron."  Why have I never noticed that before?  It's brilliant.  In any event I think you might be taking a little too much Remeron.

3.  If your SR tablet broke in half, don't take it.

4.  She's usually called "Grandma."  Unless you're like me and are calmed down by some aspect of math, in which case the doctor is called "competent."  Or maybe "Grandma" as well, they aren't mutually exclusive.

5.  For all of its wacky pharmacokinetics, Lamictal is absorbed quickly and nearly completely.  It shows up in your blood plasma in 15 minutes.  How long it stays there is anybody's guess.

6.  I have no idea.  Why Crazy Meds is the first thing returned by Google for that phrase is beyond me.

7.  Whatever you're taking I hope it's working for you.

8.  I don't know.  Do you know where Mouse's pendent is?

That is not a question to type into teh googles if you're a hypochondriac.

9.  This is actually a very serious question that just looks weird as hell.  I honestly don't know what effect, if any, a factor V mutation has on any crazy med, or how any crazy med would mess with someone who has a factor V mutation.  I hope you find someone who has an answer for you.

10.  Minority psychosis isn't real.  The term isn't used in any of the literature, outside of dubious gray literature, or in the periphery when trying to succinctly describe extra-irrational racist behavior.  Racist scumfucks don't need Dexedrine, or anything else, to be racist, although abusing drugs would certainly make them even more irrational.  

As someone who is batshit crazy I find it really fucking insulting whenever racism is equated with an actual mental illness, as opposed to being generally irrational, or 'crazy.'

11.  It all depends on the enzymes and the meds.  As most enzyme supplements are a bunch of overpriced snake oil your biggest problem might be paying for your meds, so you're probably better off not taking the enzymes at all.

Nothing to see here

First the stuff that matters - 

I've updated the Know Your Sources section, which includes:

• What is the purpose of Crazy Meds?
• Who are these crazy people?
• Why do they think they know so much?
• Where does their money come from?
• Are they part of the CONSPIRACY that is monitoring my online activities?
• How do I get past their anti-telepathic mindcontrol tinfoil hats? 

That took care of the site's HON Code certification for the next 12 months.

I'm done with most of the Things You Need to Know When Taking Crazy Meds / Basic Crap all Neuro-Psychiatric Meds have in Common section, which includes:

• Tips on How to Take Crazy Meds 
• Tips on How to Stop Taking Crazy Meds
• Common Side Effects 
• Meds & Supplements 
• What You Should Know Before Buying Meds Online

I'm still working on the updated Brand vs. Generic page.  No telling when that will be finished.

I've also juggled a bunch of blogs between defunct and the panoply of stupidity etc.

No need to read any further...

Extreme couponing has arrived in small town Montana.  I moved out here to avoid shit like that, but I should know better; if I live where broadband is available, and near where cable TV is available, there's no escaping the bits of civilization I can't stand.  The clerks at the grocery store were acting like Elvis showed up to buy some peanut butter and bunny bread.  They couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of people 'buying' four items (I don't know what, just making it to Superior to get my meds and a couple things from the store was a heroic conquest for me that day) with nothing more than two coupons from two different sources, and purchasing nothing else at that.

Fifty-one out of 54 counties in Montana have had a state of emergency declared due to the flooding.  So far Mineral county is one of three with no flood emergency.  Yet.  Instead we have to have other forms of excitement, like a bank robbery in St. Regis and a murder in Superior.

I had the snow tires swapped for the 'regular' (i.e. all terrain) tires on the truck, so at least I didn't have to deal with inclement weather when I drove to Spokane to see my shrink.  Twice.  Because the there was appointment confusion.  I should have called when I didn't get the usual appointment verification call, but thinking clearly hasn't been one of my strong suits of late.  It still took me three hours each way, and not because there was snow on the road (but plenty on each side) going over Lookout Pass, but because the shocks were shot and I couldn't drive any faster than 60.

 

Tuesday night Stephen Colbert smoked a pipe on his show.  It's not the first time he's done that.  While the main reason I smoke a pipe is a bowl of pipe tobacco is about all I want to smoke in a day, another reason is the chance of pipe smoking ever being cool-popular like cigar smoking is somewhere in the neighborhood of non-existent.  Still, I think even Mr. Colbert won't be able to elevate the pipe from eccentric curmudgeon territory.

Brace yourselves

The switch to the new server just happened.  It will take anywhere from one to 48 hours for the DNS to propagate all across teh interwebs, so some of you will still see the old stuff for a day or two.  I unfortunately jumped the gun and reset the forum to full featured mode on the old server, so the only way to tell the difference is to look for an announcement about the site being on a new server.  Although you might be able to get on the new server before I do, especially since I haven't had breakfast yet.

Up, up and away!

I'm getting the server upgraded.  The sudden increase in popularity warrants it.  Expect even more outages throughout the night.

The forum's back, for now at least

The forum is back, with a bunch of features turned off.  I'll keep you all posted on dealing with everything.

What's in a named?

I don't know how the fuck it happened, but the named service stopped.  So it was a nameserver problem after all.

The drug pages are back up.  The forum is still down, but that's intentional until I finish doing what I was trying to do in the first place.

Still have no clue

I've opened a ticket with tech support.  I still have no idea what's going on.  I've put everything back the way it was, but only some people are able to get an HTTP connection to crazymeds.us or crazymeds.com and I'm not one of them.  I can't even get a connection to the non-forum part via a proxy site.  Traceroute fails to the name crazymeds.us, but works to the IP address.  That indicates a nameserver problem of some kind, but I didn't go near the nameserver.

But some people are able to access the site.  I can telnet and see active HTTP connections.  Not only that, the access and error logs are showing typical activity.  The traffic is way lower than normal, but the usual files being accessed.  It's not stuff from Google's cache, but live data.

Crazy Meds offline

Both the forum and the medication pages are off the air until I can figure out what the fuck is causing HTTP session to use unholy amounts of CPU time.


Update: the medication pages are available.  The forum should be up soon, although some features may be a bit constrained. 

Update: the forum is back up now. 

Update: I've taken the forum is offline for a bit.

Update: well, I thought it was going to be just for a bit, but I've run into that problem where I can't get an http connection.  I can see all sorts of http connections happening for other people, I just can't get one going.

Crazy Meds Ver 2.0 Beta Is Now Up

Due to med pages coming up blank at random times for anyone using the most recent versions of IE, Firefox, and Chrome, along with assorted other technical issues,  I've had to convert the non-forum part of the site to the new format a hell of a lot sooner (i.e. now vs. whenever I managed to get enough of it done to open it up) than I wanted. 

So there's a lot missing, far too many of the pages are fugglier than shit with no updates to the content like I wanted to do prior to unveiling it, and it's full of missing links, dead ends, incomplete and barely started pages. But at least you can see all of my incompetence instead it merely taking the form of empty space.

The new URL is http://crazymeds.us/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/.  Redirects should be happening automagically, so don't worry about too much about updating anything.

No more frames, although there is a menu down the left side.

Pay attention moron.

As if I needed anything else to go wrong.  Shortly after waking up this morning I take the pills that were in the pill case, just like any other day, right?  Except that I took the night doses, not the morning doses.  And didn't notice until after I swallowed everything except the lamotrigine, which, of course, is the same dosage (100mg for those keeping score) both times.

So that was 250mg topiramate vs. 50mg and 30mg protriptyline vs. 10mg.

Other than being extra super spacey and completely unable to drive - hence screwing my plans for the day after they were hosed yesterday because the lack of antifreeze was enough to freeze me more than the truck - I'm not really worried about the early Topamax.  It's the protriptyline that has me concerned.  60mg in the course of 11 hours shouldn't be that big a deal, except protriptyline is one of the few crazy meds with an actual warning about, and recommendation of a dosage adjustment for people who are poor metabolizers of CYP2D6; and 60mg a day is the maximum in-patient dosage if your liver isn't as lazy as mine is.

One of the reasons why protriptyline isn't prescribed very often: complicated pharmacokinetics makes it tough to nail down a good dosage.  W00t.

I'm having second thoughts about Torrent's topiramate.  It might be as unreliable as Teva's used to be.   Or it could be I'm especially sensitive to being sleep-deprived.  I had a total of eight hours of somewhat restless sleep last night.  If I don't get that full 9-10 hours a night - and naps don't help, they just mess with me - I'll just do shit like this.

Missed the aurora, had a great aura instead

There's been a lot of solar activity lately, some of which has hit the earth's atmosphere.  For details see:

Latest solar events.

Space Weather and their March Aurora Gallery

Spring is Aurora Season

The only aurora I've seen so far made the sky look like a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were the same shade of faded green.  It's been too cloudy on nights with events that could be seen at this latitude.  Or I don't get the alert until it's too late.  Or I've been too out of it.  Or there's a full moon.  And when there's a lot of snow on the ground a full moon is as bright as, if not brighter than dawn.

Yesterday I had one hell of an aura.  At first I thought I needed coffee, as I've been drinking the extra strength stuff I make that's like a weird hybrid of Vietnamese and Turkish.  But no.  The headache was still there after the coffee.  Getting the electric-shock tingling sensation in the palms of my hands was new, so I thought I had slept on my arm in a strange way.  Nope.  The odd feeling in my stomach wasn't from hunger, as it stayed around after I ate.  I just zipped through the Sunday crossword puzzle, so I could think relatively clearly.  For awhile.  Eventually that stopped.  And the tingly-shocks started running down my legs as well as my arms.  My stomach tightened up, the headache was getting worse, and I began to get disoriented.  It was an aura, no doubt about it.

So take a 1mg lorazepam tablet, an extra 25mg of topiramate, 800mg of gabapentin, my usual afternoon 10mg of protriptyline and 25mg of topiramate a few hours early, crawl into bed and, for everything to go away and probably take a nap.

No such luck.

I don't know if the lorazepam has reached it's expiration date or the aura is just too strong, so I take another 1mg of lorazepam.  Eventually I pass out around 3:00 p.m.  I wake up around 1:00 a.m., stumble into the kitchen to take my nighttime dose of 250mg of topiramate, 100mg of lamotrigine, and 30mg of protriptyline.  Then it's back to bed.  Where I sleep until nearly eight this morning.  Seventeen hours of sleep and I'm still groggy and somewhat out of it.

I have no idea what brought it on.  Is Torrent's topiramate crap?  Have I been working too much on Crazy Meds?  Some days I'll work on it for five hours.  Am I sleep deprived?  Lately I'm getting only 8 to 8.5 hours a night.  Have I been drinking coffee that's too strong?  Or was it just some random epilepsy thing?

Life in epilepsyland, one never knows what could trigger a seizure.

You still haven't found what you're looking for

Every now and then I get fed up with all the whining I've done about my boring life and how much it sucks.  Considering how I don't live in Haiti, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or wherever people wish they had my problems I don't have much cause for complaint.

So if you were looking for things like "Whaleshit on the Bottom of the Ocean," or "Nothing Nice," they've been relegated to bit heaven some time ago and are unlikely to return.  I've been using what time I have when I'm functional enough to do more than feed the cats and wash dishes to work on long-overdue improvements to Crazy Meds.  I may whine more here in the future.  If you're lucky, I won't.

Crazy Meds was temporarily off the air.

We were off the air for about an hour and a half today.  This was due to several spambots, spiders looking for non-existent files, and one brute-force crackerbot all converging on the site at once.  The result was the same as if we were hit with a denial-of-service attack.  We weren't, it just had the same outcome.

It's back to the usual insanity now.

Happy Fucking New Year. Those Mayans had best be right about 2012.

Nothing starts the new year right like a fuel tank lid refusing to come off, a blinking "check engine" light, and spiraling into depression.  So much for driving into Missoula early New Year's day, so I could deal with shit when everyone was hungover and the stores wouldn't be too crowded.

I've had plenty more to whine about for the last two months, but I didn't want to write about it.  What little functionality I've had has been devoted to keeping my life barely together or working on Crazy Meds - mostly behind-the-scenes crap.  I've become socially avoidant to the point of rarely answering e-mail and just occasionally checking in on the Crazy Meds forum.  That's it.  Not this blog - the blogrolls need a lot of pruning - let alone other blogs, no other sites, nothing.  I'll use my laptop exclusively as a radio for days at a time.  I haven't been depressed.  Sunday was the first time I felt real, near-suicidal depression in months, maybe more than a year, and I'm already getting over it.  I'm just fed up with clogged drainpipes that prevent the washing machine from working, and yet another mystery leak in the plumbing, and all the other problems people in Haiti wished they had.

I did find one thing that still cracks me up.  Best off-label application ever:

Exorcism-resistant ghost possession treated with clopenthixol.

Background: An Indian man now in Britain explained his criminal behaviour as episodic ghost possession. Traditional exorcisms failed to help.
Method: A 'Western' diagnosis of dissociative state or paranoid schizophrenia was made. Treatment commenced using trifluoperazine and clopenthixol.
Results: The patient underwent remission during neuroleptic treatment, despite previous evidence of genuine possession.
Conclusions: Many cultures give rise to apparently genuine cases of ghost possession. Neuroleptics may relieve symptoms of exorcism-resistant possession.