doit, doit now!

The facts surrounding the horrors in front of us loom far too large to be ignored:

• As of today the illegal, unjust, unwinnable war in Iraq has cost us at least 1,900 American lives and the lives of countless innocent Iraqis.
• The Bush administration lied to the nation and to the world about the reasons for the war:
  • The Bush administration had plans to invade Iraq long before 9/11 and lied about that.
  • The Bush administration falsely tied the Iraqi government to 9/11 and Al Qaeda when there was no connection and thus lied about that.
  • The Bush administration knew there were no weapons of mass destruction and also lied about that.
• The Bush administration cut taxes for the people with the top .1% of the incomes in the US and yet lied to people with incomes of $25,000 or lower (which the U.S. Census says is around 80% of the country) by telling them that they would somehow benefit from these cuts, when in fact many of their tax burdens increased.
• The Bush administration, with the cooperation of the neocons in Congress, has run up a huge deficit (which is being financed almost entirely by China’s buying of government bonds) that they had no way of paying for.
• The cost to us taxpayers is already at several hundred billion dollars and is estimated to eventually run up to $1 trillion or higher if the war ever ends. This is of course to say nothing of the immeasurable cost of human lives.
• The Department of Defense is saying that the US will have to continue its occupation of Iraq for at least 4 more years and will have a large presence there for at least a decade. Since the insurgency shows no signs of abating this means that hundreds, if not thousands, more Americans and who knows how many innocent Iraqis will die in Iraq.

The war was a lie. If you believed it for a moment you were listening to goddamned Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh or Bill Frist or Ann Coulter or any of these other disgusting people. It was built on lies and deceit and people are dying at this very moment because of it, and now they are not only dying in Iraq, but they are dying in America.

With Katrina we are facing an unprecedented national disaster, and there are not enough National Guard to fulfill their actual role of Guarding the Nation since they are all over in Iraq fighting in that horrible war. If this war was not happening the domestically-stationed military would be home, as it should be, and we would have the full resources of that military to bring to bear on this tragedy. Instead there are innocent Americans dying in New Orleans because the soldiers, helicopters, ships, and vehicles that would normally be available to service the people they are actually meant to protect are instead over in Iraq where they have no business being.

This administration is disgusting, and if you chose to support it you should be ashamed of yourself.

Stop watching Fox fucking News and start thinking for yourselves.

I keep finding myself near tears when watching the news reports of these poor people in New Orleans. This is really unthinkable. The tragedy keeps reminding me of living as close as I did to the Twin Towers (below Houston Street!) when they fell and how overwhelming and confusing and heartbreaking it was. My heart really goes out to these people — I can’t imagine what it might be like to actually be down there right now.

It also reminds me that California, much like New Orleans, quite literally exists because of the levees controlling the Sacramento River Delta. If a quake on the Hayward fault was to rupture those levees it would essentially poison the state’s water supply with saltwater and could quite possibly lead to the evacuation of the entire state south of Bay Area, which is to say nothing of the devastation that would occur in the Bay Area itself. (A quake on the San Andreas would work too, but the quake would have to be much larger in order to affect the Delta). Don’t believe me? It happened last year in June to only one levee, causing 270 people to be evacuated and state water officials to go crazy trying to prevent water contamination. It also happened just by itself with no natural disasters to prod it. An earthquake with enough force would take out far more than one levee and spill into the Central Valley Project, which would ruin farmland and leave LA and San Diego with only the relative trickle of water that they get from the Colorado River. Marc Reisner’s A Dangerous Place talks about this risk in great detail if you want more info.

Some people might be complaining about people living in areas that are disaster prone and spewing bullshit about our tax dollars being used to subsidize people who “chose to live in the area.” First off, I would much rather have my tax dollars subsidizing people in the United States in genuine need than in some foreign war that we were lied to about and that has only made us as a country less safe and killed tens of thousands of innocent people in the process. Second off, there is no place in the US that is immune to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and other ilk. Not. One. Place. This sort of tragedy is precisely why I think we have a federal government and exactly where I think tax dollars should be going. These people are in desperate need of help.

I am not only happy to have my tax dollars going to that assistance rather than the evil war our disgusting leaders have us in, I am happy to give even more than my tax dollars voluntarily. I even looked into volunteering down on the Gulf but most agencies are requiring a minimum of a week stay and my clients would quite literally kill me if I did that at the moment. In the mean time, donating is the best thing for anyone to do. The Red Cross is the most logical place, and is where I donated. You can donate anything now, even $5, on your credit card or debit card. Don’t think about it. Just click that link and do it. You can afford something. There will come a time when you need other people to do the same, either for you or for someone you love.

Doit. Doit now.

I haven’t written anything lately because I have been ridiculously busy lately. I was up till 7AM one morning last week and then again till 5AM the next night. One of my clients had their development server meltdown while we were in the middle of a big rollout, and I had to stay up crazy hours recovering data that should have been backed up. I also got a new version of CHOW launched and I also scored a great new client, so I am relatively happy about all of those things even though I didn’t really have time to do much of anything besides work.

What I am not happy about is how bad the third week of my taper off of Effexor has been going. The amount of stress I’ve been under is nigh-on ridiculous. As such it may not have been the best time to go off of the meds, but I just think it was something I had to do. It was weird — the moment I put the brain shocks and the Effexor together I immediately knew that I had to go off the Effexor. There was no question in my mind.

I dropped from 75mg to 37.5mg three weeks ago and one week ago dropped again to 18.75mg. The two weeks on the 37.5mg were not bad at all. In fact, I really didn’t notice a difference from my original 75mg dosage. However, the drop to 18.75mg was steep. I have been in an awful depression for the past week and for some reason it got significantly worse today. I am hoping against hope that everything I am experiencing is a result of the withdrawal and is not the depression that these drugs were meant to treat in the first place, but I don’t know. I haven’t felt this depressed in a long, long, long time. It’s not fun.

I’m going to tough out the withdrawal, though. I only have one more week to go, and then probably another two weeks of attenuation to “normal” brain chemistry. Then we shall see. I can always go back on them.

In the mean time, this really sucks.

Okay. He is just too cute for words.

My mother and sister both have this bizarre and impossibly cute way of calling their dogs “little.” They baby talk and say “You are just little! You are just so little!” to the dogs. Of course I picked the this up and as a result Kevin picked this up, and now we call Feynman “Little” so much now that he will come when called either “Feynman,” “Feyny,” or “Little.” A corollary to the Rule of Little is that Kevin and I now call one another “Big,” which of course confuses the hell out of people who have no idea what we are talking about. Which is most people.

Here’s Kevin & Feynman:

Here’s Feynman with his upper lip caught underneath his lower teeth, which just kills me:

Here’s Feynman with his crazy long hair, and Kevin in the background with various Cat5 and USB cables draped around his neck for no apparent reason:

Here’s Feynman humping his good bitchfriend Eika:

Here’s Feynman with a ball in his mouth. I wonder where he learned that?

And finally here’s Feynman with his new haircut:

Oymygod I am just such a gay dad.

As I reported previously I am attempting to debunk the need for spending $100 on the Invisalign Cleaning System. In this chapter I have done mankind a fabulous, disgusting, selfless service by not cleaning my previous set of Invisalign aligners in any way, shape, or form for two weeks. The results are not startling. They are exactly what you would expect.

The first three pictures of are of a fresh, just-out-of-the-package set of aligners. When you remove your Invisalign from the package you are advised to rinse them off before putting them in your mouth. This is because they coat the aligners with angel dust some sort of protective preservative crap. Actually I have no idea why they advise you to do it, I just do it.

If you’re into that sort of thing you can click on the full-size photo for ridiculously large versions. This will eat my bandwidth alive.

And now we come to the really gross part. If you look close you can even see my spittle! I told you this would be gross. Some people might argue that the spittle is actually causing the aligners look dirtier than they are. Some people might be right. But the money shots that follow the spittle shots will dispel any of these notions.

And these are the money shots: a comparison of a not-cleaned-for-two-weeks aligner and a fresh-out-of-the-package aligner. Guess which one is which.

So, as you can see, not cleaning your Invisalign for two weeks causes a fairly noticeable yellowing of the plastic. My hypothesis is that not cleaning your aligners for two weeks is the worst thing you could do in terms of dulling or discoloring them. Invisalign claims that using Efferdent or similar cleaning products can (not “will,” mind you) dull the surface of the aligner. I am highly skeptical that using those products will dull the surface of the aligner enough for anyone to notice in the relatively short two-week window you wear each set of aligners.

Now begins the Day of Efferdent. The dirty aligners will suffer repeated dunkings in Efferdent, and we shall see what the outcome is later on.

Enjoy my spittle.

This is sort of what our house looked like shortly after I joined Amazon Prime. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that Kevin is around to smack me out of my hyper-OCD hoarding syndrome.

President Bush has recently endorsed so-called “Intelligent Design” theory and has stated that he thinks it should be taught alongside evolution in our schools. No matter that Intelligent Design is not science. Science, as most people besides Intelligent Design proponents know, starts with a hypothesis, continues with an experiment, and ends with a conclusion. Intelligent Design, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then goes and looks for ways to prove the conclusion.

This means it is not science. End. Of. Debate.

But science isn’t my main concern. My main concern, like President Bush’s, is that alternative theories be taught to the children of the United States (SAVE THE CHILDREN!!!!). My own particular religion, the First Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, represents yet another way to describe the creation of the universe, and the scientific establishment has just been shutting us out! The Flying Spaghetti Monster of course created the Universe by using His Noodly Appendage. I’m asking you all to support Him by forwarding this Open Letter to the Kansas School Board to make sure that all competing theories of the creation of the Universe are taught alongside evolution in our schools. And buy a t-shirt while you’re at it.

I went to the doctor today and she essentially confirmed my suspicions about the brain shocks and the Effexor withdrawal. She ran some basic neurological tests on me and then told me to continue taking the Effexor for a while to see if the brain shocks go away. If they don’t go away we’ll do the whole MRI-EKG-CAT thing. If they do go away then she gave me a plan for tapering off my dosage and going off Effexor entirely.

This whole ordeal has made me realize that I have essentially been medicated my entire adult life (ten years now!) and that I have no conception of what life is like off of the drugs. I have tried going off of them a couple of times but I have always done it abruptly and without the supervision of my doctor, and each time it has completely freaked me out, prompting me to go back on the drugs. This time I am doing it under a doctor’s supervision and hope that it goes smoothly. My insurance company and pocketbook will both thank me for it.

Yesterday at the gym I was doing my regular chest routine with my good friend & workout partner Shannon Riley and something very painful happened inside my head. To give this very painful thing some context I should say that I’ve been lifting weights for over fifteen years now and am a complete beast (raaaaaaaawwwwrrrr!) when it comes to lifting. I think the first time I put up 6 plates on a bench press was when I was 15 and working out at the Morse Center at the Medical University of Ohio, where I was working at the Center for Creative Instruction, which we then called the Digital Meat Locker. But I digress…

So I started the workout with my usual light warmup set. I don’t lift like some retarded high school football lineman where I bounce up and down on the bench and tense my whole body and hold my breath for the duration of the set. Rather, I relax beforehand and try to make each set into a much more fluid, constantly-breathing motion. So the warmup set went fine, and then we alternated until my last set: 295lbs x however the hell many I could get up. I aimed for 8 reps.

I managed to get all the way to the 8th rep and still had some energy left, so I went for 10 reps. At the end of the 9th rep something very bad happened inside my head. It felt like an electric shock started at the base of my skull and radiated up around the outside of my brain, landing oh-so-pleasantly at the backs of my eyeballs and then continuing to throb maniacally with my heartbeat. It also briefly clenched my stomach up into a ball the size of my fist, though that particular affliction didn’t happen again. Luckily the shock happened on the concentric part of the lift and not when the weight was coming down, because I was able to just essentially drop the weight on the rack and cry out in shock and pain.

I have never had anything even remotely similar to this happen to me before. I have high blood pressure caused by my sleep apnea, so my first thought was that I had just had a stroke. After this notion wore off a few seconds later Shannon asked me if I wanted to quit our workout. Like the stupid weightlifting beast that I am I of course said no, and we moved on to incline bench. I did a lot less weight this time, a more-reasonable 135lbs, and still the pain shot through my head. I then dropped it to something like 85lbs, and it still happened.

So my next thought was to try something where I wasn’t holding weight over top of me, but rather something more simple, like a cable machine. Shannon and I went over and I tried doing cable crossovers, and the pain shot through me again. I decided to call it quits.

I came home, took a Vicodin, smoked a bowl, and tried to fall asleep. I couldn’t. I tossed and turned all night long, having weird dreams and alternately sweating and being cold. This had actually happened the night before, as well, but I never really thought about it.

So today I woke up (late, of course, after getting no sleep) and went about my day. 5:30PM rolled around I was off to the gym. Shannon and I decided to pick up the previous day’s chest workout and jumped on the incline bench. I knocked out a warmup set and felt the dreaded tinglings in the back of my head, but they didn’t shoot through my whole skull. They stayed put in whatever hellish otherdimensional vortex they came from. Then I did my first real set (which was still comparatively light for me), and again made it to the 9th rep, when suddenly the little electric maggots broke through and ricocheted around my head. I dropped the weight on the rack and sort of shouted “My head hurts!”

Shannon was just as supportive as he was the day before and said “Let’s get out of here.” We left, and the pain again stayed with me, throbbing with my heartbeat. We left the gym and I dropped Shannon off at his place. We were supposed to go see Nikka Costa tonight but I just couldn’t see myself in a small club with super-loud music — the music would be fighting with my heartbeat to decide who got to control the tempo of my pain. Shannon encouraged me to stay home.

At this point I was really kind of scared. Tears were actually welling up in my eyes on the way home, which of course made the pain worse, so I tried to calm down. I had never had anything like this happen and I didn’t know what to do. I called my doctor and got the answering service, so then I called my mom.

I love my mother and she is a great nurse with a lot of experience, but my sisters and I have taken to calling her the Angel of Death in the past few years because she has a penchant for telling people that they are going to die. She generally gives excellent medical advice, but I’ve had to learn to toss out the inevitable proclamations of fatality she sprinkles in like poisonous fairy dust. Indeed, she pointed out that my dad had some vertebral problems in his early 30′s and that I might as well, but she also mentioned that it might be a brain tumor.

See what I mean? Ángel de la muerte.

Well, I decided to do what any self-respecting geek would do: I Googled for it. “weightlifting headaches,” “exercise headaches,” “weightlifting high blood pressure,” etc etc etc.

Then I hit it. “Brain shocks.” The first result was about brain shocks resulting from discontinuing the usage of Celexa, an antidepressant.

I take Effexor, a SNRI antidepressant, and have for perhaps 5 years now. I have somewhat severe generalized anxiety and the Effexor sort of, kind of helps. I ran out of it this past weekend and amidst all of the birthday revelry I just forgot to go pick up more from the pharmacy. I took my last pill on Saturday, meaning that I went without it on Sunday and again on Monday, and then most of today until I went out and picked some up this evening. I have gone without Effexor for a day or two before, but I have never really critically examined the way I felt as a result of going off. Nor, for that matter, have I ever critically examined the way I felt while on it.

So I started reading all about Effexor withdrawal symptoms, and suddenly everything fell into place. I was ready to cry at completely random things that normally wouldn’t make me cry… I was alternately sweating and feeling cold… I had severe insomnia… And I had severe, lingering brain shocks and then aftershock headaches during activities that have never caused those before.

Wyeth acknowledges the shocks and whatnot on their withdrawal side effects page. In fact, they have a euphemism for it called “severe discontinuation syndrome,” which is Pharmaspeak for “We have your ass hooked on our junk and it’s legal, hahahahahahaha!”

It turns out that this withdrawal is an acknowledged problem with SSRI’s and SNRI’s — the wool isn’t totally being pulled over anyone’s eyes here — but I never realized how widespread or severe the results could be. Then again the effects of antidepressant withdrawal aren’t exactly waved in front of society’s collective consciousness like, say, the withdrawal effects of cocaine addiction, even though they can be just as severe. This is a perfect example of how the pharma industry is allowed to develop and push highly addictive drugs that are “acceptable” (read: taxable) to the government while other drugs are demonized and prohibited because no one can patent them and make money on them.

Here’s a list of links of information and other people discussing this problem:

• MedHelp
• anxietyhelp.org
• MyTherapy
• RxList
• BrainZaps: a blog on Effexor withdrawal
• The Doctor’s Lounge
• Focus on Recovery
• CrazyMeds.org

I think it’s time to go off the meds. I am still going to get the whole battery of tests now, the MRI and the EKG and all that crap, but I am going to talk to my doctor about tapering off the Effexor. It’s time.

I have been writing a daemon (Unix-speak for “server program,” like a Web server or mail server) in PHP5 for one of my clients. PHP is not normally used for writing daemons; rather, it’s used as an in-process scripting language for Web pages. Zend, the creator of PHP, added a non-beta command-line interface (CLI) version of PHP in version 4.3.0, alongside a bunch of POSIX process-control functions and similar tweaks necessary to support most daemon-programming needs.

The last time I had to write a daemon of this sort was for Remote Lounge in NYC. Remote consists of lots of “cocktail consoles” that are each comprised of a custom-designed breadboard running a PIC microcontroller that controls the attached pan-tilt camera, joystick, gas-plasma readout, telephone, and television. Each cocktail console is connected via good old reliable serial cabling to an IP-to-serial converter from Moxa. The daemon runs on a plain old Dell Debian Linux server and essentially acts as the master control program for all of the cocktail consoles, reading from and writing to each one as necessary.

I wrote that particular daemon in Perl, and my advice to anyone attempting to do the same is “don’t.” Perl’s motto is “There’s more than one way to do it,” and while this is one of Perl’s strengths I also find it to be its primary weakness. Perl is a great language and has lots of uses and packages and modules and really weird people who can write an entire program in one line, but it suffers from a remarkable consistency in how the resulting code ends up looking like utter, incomprehensible crap. That and object orientation is sort of an afterthought to Perl5, and the current project required strong object orientation.

PHP5, on the other hand, was written with a strong focus on its object-oriented functionality. PHP’s syntax is also much more structured than Perl’s. It is of course possible to write crap in any language, but some make it easier than others. With all other things being equal, a PHP program is generally easier to read than a Perl program (let the flamewars begin…)

This new daemon runs on servers with multiple-modem cards in them, and it’s responsible for dialing those modems, sucking down data from the remote modems, parsing that data, and dumping it into a database. The daemon is also clustered and runs on multiple servers. It fork()s and waits for its children to die and all the yummy pcntl goodness that comes with being a daemon.

By and large I have to say I have just been really impressed with command-line PHP. It works, and it works well, and it is very easy to get things done with it. As I abstract out more and more of the code I will post the basic classes so that other people can make use of them, and hopefully improve on them.