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.

------
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).

---------

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.

--------
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.

----------

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.

----------
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. 

--------------
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.
-------------

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.