Site Down

I don't know what's up, but it's not Crazy Meds.  I've opened a ticket with the domain host, so as soon as I know anything, I'll post it.  

Some of their other sites seemed to be having problems as well, but not any longer, so I don't know if it was systemic, fallout, or coincidental.

Update 11:30 Mountain Time: fuck if I know what happened.  I couldn't ping the site from two different TCP/IP tools sites, nor could I maintain a telnet connection, but the logs show business as usual.  I'm chalking it up to Internet weather or something similar.

Software Upgrade

I've begun the software upgrade.  We'll see how long it takes.

Edit 2:04 PM Mountain time: The forum and blogs are back online.  Now let's find out if it really was all that painless.

Forum & Blog Software Upgrade

Invision has released version 3.3.1 of the board and version 2.5.2 of the blog. I plan on installing them this weekend, with Sunday, 15 April being the target date. The forum and blogs will be unavailable from around 11:00 a.m Mountain time (GMT -6) until however long it takes to finish.

Going Mobile

I'm redesigning the main section of the site to make it easier to read for the 30% or so of the people who access it with a mobile device.

I'd like some feedback on this.  The main thing being if you want the stripped-down version or not for whatever mobile device you're using.  I can override for iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, and any Palm handhelds contacting the site from bit heaven.  I can also override by OS/browsers, but that seems a bit broad.  As I know jack shit about mobile devices, I could be wrong.  Specific software recognized for override is Android, Opera, and Windows.

If you're using a Nook or Kindle, I have no idea what the software behind this considers you to be.

Being able to toggle between the two interfaces manually might even be possible, but don't get your hopes up.

Is the Prescription Drug Shortage Being Created by Big Pharma?

Ed Silverman on Pharmalot posted this: 

Lower Drugmaker Fees To Combat Shortages?

In response to the worsening shortage of prescription medicines, a coalition of more than 30 groups representing physicians, medical centers, hospitals, pharmacists and a large generic drugmaker has written Congress asking for incentives to be created to staunch a crisis that is jeopardizing patient safety across the US.

[...]

Specifically, the coalition suggests that the FDA could offer reduced application fees for medicines in short supply or discounted fees if a drugmaker demonstrates that its contingency plans are sufficient to reduce the risk of a shortage if production is halted.

This begs the question: have the drug companies been reducing the production of medications to artificially create the shortage in order to force the FDA to change policy in a way that favors Big Pharma's bottom line?  Much in the same way Big Oil seems to do routine maintenance on refineries every summer.  One of Pharmalot's readers raised this question last month, when the FDA looked at allowing lower-cost imports to deal with drug shortages.

Don't these people make enough money as it is?

Let's Get Personal

So I have yet another blog, because I like having things sorted into neat piles of like with like.  This blog is now for for site updates, notices of impending software updates, new t-shirts, etc.  Along with the Facebook page, Forum section, and page on Crazy Meds.  It's still the place for site status updates in case the forum, or the entire fucking site goes tits up.

The focus of this blog will be shifting to links to the latest from various psych, neuro, medical, pharm, mental health, and assorted other blogs and sites related to what Crazy Meds is all about.  I might even post stuff along those lines that is appropriate in the context of a blog, which will probably be duplicated in various locations on the forum.

The new blog will be about my life, and the usual miscellaneous crap that shows up in random blogs across teh interwebs.  It's also the new home of the Panoply of Stupidity, Humilation, Pain, and Absurdity, along with the blog lists of the surreal and the geekness.  Unfortunately there's a bug in the blogger software, so I can't change the title of the entries.  So it looks shittier than it otherwise would.

1/2-to-2/3 of the Way to Oblivion

As my 50th birthday approaches I reflect upon what I probably never will do, as well as some of the great birthdays I've had in the past.

First up, things I've started, but will never finish.  I began most of these between the late 1980s and mid 1990s, and have been working on them sporadically ever since.

• Several books and a couple of screenplays
• Encryption software for social media
• Learning Japanese
• Numerous articles for Crazy Meds (since 2004)

Things I'd like to do before I die (the ever-trite bucket list).  I'm as likely to do any of these as I am finishing any of the above projects:

• Visit the Grand Canyon, preferably off-season and after the air has been cleared by a good storm.
• While I'm in the neighborhood, see the Arizona Meteor Crater.
• Live somewhere between 53° and 60° north latitude for at least two years.  I'd also like to be at least 3,000 feet above sea level and have a clear view to the horizon facing north, east, or west.  A completely unobstructed northern view would be difficult, but east or west is certainly possible.  As it's never going to happen I may as well dream about living on a fucking Scandinavian mountain top.
• There were more, but since I read this article in The Atlantic, I'm not caring all that much about, well, anything.  I go into too much detail about it all on my Crazy Meds-based health blog.

Like Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. my birthday is just another day to me.  Unlike Christmas and some other holidays, the TV schedule is rarely different, which is the only thing that distinguishes a holiday from a non-holiday to me now.  As my birthday is during the President's Day three-day weekend more often than not (especially since so many people tend to stretch those out to anything from 3.5 to 6 days), and is less than a week after National Disappointment and Heartbreak Valentine's Day, it is easy to overlook.  Unless God/fate/karma/the universe has nothing better to do:

• I'm a true child of the Space Age, as I was born the day John Glenn made his historic space flight.  My mother isn't exaggerating all that much when she says I popped out the same time he emerged from his capsule.  As a kid I built lots of shitty model rockets.
• 1976 - The one time it snows in Stockton during the entire time I lived there is on my birthday.  When I'm sick.
• 1980 - The tradition of the birthday nervous breakdown begins.  It takes me about two years to fully recover from this one.
• Before we get married, my (now ex) wife moved in to my apartment.  At some point after that (this happened about 30 years ago) her former roommate's boyfriend moved in with the former roommate.  Said boyfriend was an abusive douchebag and I spent my birthday supervising his eviction and helping to prevent the former roommate from changing her mind.  While those activities were essentially positive, learning about what had been happening was the suckass part.
• 1986 - Second nervous breakdown begins.  It started a week or so before my birthday, but close enough.  I'm over this one in a little over a year.
• 1989 - Saw Laibach at the SF I-Beam.  They didn't get on stage until long after midnight, and were drunk as fuck when they did.  I smuggled in a tape recorder, which managed to not record anything.
• 1999 - Three days after being hit by a car, it's pretty obvious that one of the cats isn't going to recover.
• 2002 - Most recent, and worst of all birthday breakdowns.  I have yet to fully recover from this one, and I don't know if I ever will.
• I've spent a lot of birthdays in hospital waiting rooms and doctors' offices.  Sometimes driving for hours to get to specialists.  I wasn't always the patient.
• 2005 - Hunter S. Thompson dies, Robot Chicken premieres.  I have no idea how to rate this one.

 I had more, but these things just don't seem all that important now.

We seem to be up and running

I've yet to get a message from tech support.  Everything is running OK, and it looks like they finished around 2:00 AM (Mountain time) Friday morning, but I'm still getting some odd messages in the system log.  I'll check in with them Monday.

Make That Friday for the Scheduled Downtime

Lunarpages tech support called me when I was on my way out getting groceries.  There's some sort of law covering that, isn't there?  

In any event the down time is now scheduled for tomorrow.  That's Friday, 13 January at 5:00 PM Pacific Time, 6:00 PM Mountain, 0100 Saturday GMT.

-------------------

It looks like the disk-drive replacement started last night around 7:00 PM Pacific, 8:00 Mountain, 0300 GMT.

So far the site is still available. Parts of the OS are acting oddly, so don't be surprised if the forum or wiki software acts strangely, or any posts made between then and some other time vanish, etc.

More Scheduled Downtime - As in Sometime Today

The techs at Lunarpages are seeing another RAID drive failing and need to replace it today.  As soon as I know when that will happen I'll post it

This will affect the entire site - forum, drug pages, and PI sheets.  It will take as long as it takes, because it depends on a bunch of factors, like what happens to be on the drive that is failing.

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Update 1:25 PM Mountain Time (20:35 GMT) 

I haven't received word as to when this is going to happen.  I really need to get some groceries, as I'm pretty much down to earthquake supplies.  I'd also like to see if the pharmacy has the rest of my methylphenidate prescription.  So don't be surprised if we're suddenly gone, or if everything is running smoothly until sometime after 10:00 PM Pacific Time tonight (0600 Friday morning GMT).

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.

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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. 

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