The boring life of Jerod Poore, Crazymeds' Chief Citizen Medical Expert.

Attention gmail users of the Crazy Meds forum

For anyone on the Crazy Talk forum who uses gmail - especially anyone who just registered - I've just noticed that you haven't getting any of the mail the forum has been sending you since 14 June or so.  gmail isn't sending it to your spam folders, it's all sitting in the mail queue on the Crazy Meds server.

I really don't know who the dumbasses are, as it involves Intertubes stuff I don't understand any more. In this case it's ipv6 vs. ipv4 and quad A MX records. So if you've got a gmail account you're not get your notifications of PMs, posts in topics you're following, etc. New members aren't getting validation e-mail.

I've opened a ticket with the domain host and they're looking into it.

I've also got close to 700 messages sitting in the queue waiting to be delivered to gmail. Now they're really going to think I'm a spammer once it's fixed and those all go out at once.  Messages sent out prior to 20 June have already been deleted from the queue by the mailer, so you won't be overwhelmed with notifications that are excessively out of date, just moderately out of date.

In the meantime I'm manually validating accounts of people with gmail addresses.  Until this is fixed it may take a day or two for your account to be fully activated.

Asocial Networking

I've added Facebook and Google+ buttons all over the Crazy Meds site.  I know Google+ works, but I'm not sure about the Facebook likes yet.  If you have a Google+ account it would help us a lot to add me (on the pages I wrote), and any specific pages on the site you like, to your circles.  If you don't have a Google+ account but use some other form of social bookmarking, adding any individual pages you like, and not just the front page, would also be a big help.

Turns out it doesn't matter where you decide to follow the Crazy Meds via the Google+ button, even here.  All those little +1 buttons, those add up on a page-by-page basis.  So any specific pages you liked/found genuinely useful, please be sure to +1 them.

Adding me to your circles as well makes a big difference.  A huge difference.  I'm not interested in personal popularity, and cannot wrap my head around why people have over 1,000 'friends' on Facebook, but as I have the purely monetary motive to keep Crazy Meds viable (and me off of SSDI):


I'm open to suggestions as to what the Google+ page will be good for, other than yet another channel to communicate site status reports & updates.
I've also changed the name of the site's Facebook page.  We're now at www.facebook.com/BrandCrazyMeds.
Because someone already has faecesbook.com/crazymeds, even though his profile has fuck all to do with medications of any kind.  So we're the brand-name good stuff and he's the generic wannabe.
The Facebook group which is the de facto Crazy Meds support group, has the same URL as before.

Guess what? More possible down time today.

They're still trying to track down whatever the hell is going on with one of the RAID drives.  The site may or may not be down today, 1 June 2012, from somewhere in the neighborhood of 5:30 PM Mountain time (23:30 GMT) until who the hell knows.

This reminds me so much of a time in the long-ago Big Iron Age, when IBM produced a bunch of RAID drives with a faulty component.  They scheduled a free replacement for all of their customers and a week before ours was due to occur the drives started to fail.  As I was the only IT staff member available and crazy enough to attempt to pump the data from a mainframe's faulty disk drive, pull it out of a six-foot tall tower of drives, replace it with a new one, pump all the data back, make sure it wasn't corrupted, then do that seven or eight more times, guess how I spent an entire weekend?  Back then that was the sort of thing that required a trained hardware tech from IBM - there wasn't one in town due to these things being replaced all over northern California and the three-day weekend - and the ritual sacrifice of a goat.  So one guy who was on vacation talked me through it over the phone.  After doing it twice without fucking up I let him get back to his mimosas.

And a few years before that, when I was living in Australia, IBM produced these disk drives that looked and sounded like washing machines.  For some reason they were painted on the inside, and the paint began to flake and the flakes landed on the discs.  Oops.  Fortunately someone else got to deal with that problem.

This is why the on-going hardware wackedness doesn't faze me in the least.  It's an inconvenient pain in the ass, and it is so out of the domain host's control.  Especially these days, when nobody will own up to anything being their fault.