Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I don't have any trouble, myself, with saying that, yeah, everyone HAS been conditioned, because everybody has. Sexism is a societal and structural problem, and it gets into everything and everybody, and I have no problem with saying this.

"Which doesn't mean we don't also pick and choose what's the best way forward for each of us, starting from wherever we're starting, and doesn't mean that a given reaction to our conditioning is necessarily unhealthy. It means that your pink skirt and my leather bra are not neutral choices.

"But, you know, when I say that I always know that almost nobody is going to read past 'conditioned.' You can almost hear the shutters slam up, sometimes."

-- commodorified, 2008-03-26

[Posted, backdated, after the IJ outage ended.]

"I don't have any trouble, myself, with saying that, yeah, everyone HAS been conditioned, because everybody has. Sexism is a societal and structural problem, and it gets into everything and everybody, and I have no problem with saying this.

"Which doesn't mean we don't also pick and choose what's the best way forward for each of us, starting from wherever we're starting, and doesn't mean that a given reaction to our conditioning is necessarily unhealthy. It means that your pink skirt and my leather bra are not neutral choices.

"But, you know, when I say that I always know that almost nobody is going to read past 'conditioned.' You can almost hear the shutters slam up, sometimes."

-- commodorified, 2008-03-26

Are any other Blurty users suddenly seeing blogspam?
Is InsaneJournal down, or just my route to it?
Have any other Scribbld users had their clients stop working even though posting new entries via the web interface still works? (Huh. This morning's QotD got posted to Scribbld while I was writing this, so maybe that's fixed -- let's see whether this entry appears there on the first try.)

Saturday I took one of my dwindling supply of migraine prevention pills, and made it to the concert. (I think I may have landed harder on my right foot at some point than I realized at the time, because my ankle started hurting like I'd whomped it as the adrenaline wore off.) Sunday and much of yesterday, between skimping on meds (a second glitch in my paperwork in addition to the expected delay means that even with having taken most of my meds only half as often as I'm supposed to for the past six weeks, I'm going to run out before I can get more -- with any luck, I'll be back to being properly medicated in another week and a half or so) and recouping spoons expended on stage, I was kind of a wreck. And between headaches and leg cramps and twitches, I'm not sleeping worth a damn, so I feel half-asleep a lot of the day and when I finally do fall asleep it's at inconvenient times. (And often for only an hour or two at a time anyhow; sometimes only a third of an hour.)

So I'm not getting much done.

But it did mean that when a spambot posted nineteen identical comments advertising a gold-farming service, one to each of the nineteen most recent entries in the Blurty copy of my journal, it happened a few minutes after a particularly nasty sensation in my right calf had jerked me out of hard-won, short-lived sleep, so I saw the blogspam roll in and deleted the comments right away. So, silver lining of sorts. And now that's one more site where I've set anonymous comments to be automatically screened. *sigh*

They all came from the same IP address, so I tried getting back to that host to get some clue whether it's a spammer's machine or a zombie; I can ping it, but I couldn't connect on 22, 25, or 80, and traceroute didn't get all the way there. But nslookup gives me a name with 'dynamic' in it, in a domain in .cn, so I'm guessing it's somebody's home computer ... not that that tells me for sure whether it's a beginning spammer or a zombie, but for the time being I'll assume it's a zombie.

I wonder whether it'd be worth the trouble to write a script where I can drop in an IP address and have it track down an admin contact for the right ISP to tell them one of their customers has/is a problem. Oh, wait, I'm thinking in the wrong decade again: I should STFW to see whether somebody else has already published such a script.

I should tape a reminder to the top bezel of each monitor in the house: "Check whether somebody has already written it before you fire up vi and start coding, impatient dumbass."

In other news ...

For most of the drugs for which I've had a chance to compare the brand-name and generic versions of, the generic has worked as well or very nearly as well for me as the brand name. I know that this, despite being the expected result, is not true for everyone, but for the most part it works for me.

So it is with surprise and disappointment that I note that store-brand omeprazole, which I was pleased to see become available and hoped to save money with, does not work as well for me as brand-name Prilosec. Argh. (Despite most drugs' tendency to not work as well or as long as expected in my body, when I first started taking Prilosec I only needed to take it every other day. Nowadays I'm up to eight times a week -- if I skip that extra Sunday-evening dose, I really feel it, but it's still pretty close to once a day. With the generic, I need an extra dose every four or five days. I have to look up what I paid for the generic and figure out whether it's still a net savings -- IIRC the price difference isn't terribly dramatic.)

Hmm. Now I'm wondering about the generic cetirizine (Zyrtec) that recently became available in the US (after having been available in Canada for quite a while). I'd been taking the generic Canadian stuff (one ninth the price of Zyrtec here ... 1/9!!) and it was working reasonably well, but lately, after I took advantage of no longer having to have a friend mail it from Canada to obtain the affordable generic version, I'm noticing that it's just not quite doing the job. Thing is, there are at least three factors that could explain this: 1. my body eventually stops reacting to an antihistamine, and it may be simply that I've run out of time with cetirizine, an event I've been dreading[*]; 2. the US generics (two brands -- differently shaped pills so I'm assuming two different manufacturers) don't work as well for me as the brand-name or the Canadian generic version(s); 3. this Spring's allergen load is just so intense that it's overwhelming the ability of the drug to moderate my body's response.

Hmm. If the US version is just not as effective (for me) as the Canadian version, I guess I can go back to the Canadian version (or maybe find one US generic version that works as well as the brand-name and the Canadian generic, if I'm lucky). If it's just an unusually heavy pollen load, I'll just have to suffer the daytime breathing tickle and nightly attack of the phlegm-monster until the end of the season and hope the autumn pollen season isn't worse (and try to get put back on Singulair again). If I'm reaching the end of cetirizine's usefulness for me, well that's just gonna suck, though it's a suckage I've seen coming from a long way off.

[*] This used to happen much more quickly, sometimes after just a year or two. But the last few antihistamines I've used have worked for longer than that, and with the exception of loratadine (which still worked longer than anything I took in high school and university, even if I had to take it twice as often as recommended during spring and fall allergy seasons), each seems to work a little longer than the one before. I don't know whether this reflects a change in my body as I age, or some useful feature of recent antihistamines. Since new antihistamines used to be introduced fairly often, I had hoped that this slowing would mean that by the time Zyrtec stopped working for me the next new drug would already by OTC and/or generic so I would no longer be switching away from a just-became-cheap drug to a new, still prescription-only one. But I also stopped hearing about new antihistamines, giving me the impression that development of new ones had slowed as well and making me fear that I would still be on the wrong side of the curve. Right now, I don't even know whether there's another antihistamine to switch to yet.

The extreme case of this, by the way, was Benadryl, which several friends had suggested as the Extreme antihistamine. The first "24 hour" dose I took worked for less than 24 minutes, though I will admit that was a really dramatic improvement in my breathing and comfort level during the fraction of an hour that it lasted. The second time I tried it, several months later, it barely had any effect. The time after that, nothing I could even notice. But most antihistamines, if they worked for me at all, worked for at least the better part of two seasons, and Zyrtec has been useful to me for several years now.

And finally: I'm thinkin' I probably shoulda' taped last night's The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson, because I have a vague, poor-sleep-addled recollection of John Waters' having said something I wanted to stick into the QotD queue, but I was feeling groggy when I watched it and more groggy the next four times I woke up, and now I barely remember what they talked about.

Are any other Blurty users suddenly seeing blogspam?
Is InsaneJournal down, or just my route to it?
Have any other Scribbld users had their clients stop working even though posting new entries via the web interface still works? (Huh. This morning's QotD got posted to Scribbld while I was writing this, so maybe that's fixed -- let's see whether this entry appears there on the first try.)

Saturday I took one of my dwindling supply of migraine prevention pills, and made it to the concert. (I think I may have landed harder on my right foot at some point than I realized at the time, because my ankle started hurting like I'd whomped it as the adrenaline wore off.) Sunday and much of yesterday, between skimping on meds (a second glitch in my paperwork in addition to the expected delay means that even with having taken most of my meds only half as often as I'm supposed to for the past six weeks, I'm going to run out before I can get more -- with any luck, I'll be back to being properly medicated in another week and a half or so) and recouping spoons expended on stage, I was kind of a wreck. And between headaches and leg cramps and twitches, I'm not sleeping worth a damn, so I feel half-asleep a lot of the day and when I finally do fall asleep it's at inconvenient times. (And often for only an hour or two at a time anyhow; sometimes only a third of an hour.)

So I'm not getting much done.

But it did mean that when a spambot posted nineteen identical comments advertising a gold-farming service, one to each of the nineteen most recent entries in the Blurty copy of my journal, it happened a few minutes after a particularly nasty sensation in my right calf had jerked me out of hard-won, short-lived sleep, so I saw the blogspam roll in and deleted the comments right away. So, silver lining of sorts. And now that's one more site where I've set anonymous comments to be automatically screened. *sigh*

They all came from the same IP address, so I tried getting back to that host to get some clue whether it's a spammer's machine or a zombie; I can ping it, but I couldn't connect on 22, 25, or 80, and traceroute didn't get all the way there. But nslookup gives me a name with 'dynamic' in it, in a domain in .cn, so I'm guessing it's somebody's home computer ... not that that tells me for sure whether it's a beginning spammer or a zombie, but for the time being I'll assume it's a zombie.

I wonder whether it'd be worth the trouble to write a script where I can drop in an IP address and have it track down an admin contact for the right ISP to tell them one of their customers has/is a problem. Oh, wait, I'm thinking in the wrong decade again: I should STFW to see whether somebody else has already published such a script.

I should tape a reminder to the top bezel of each monitor in the house: "Check whether somebody has already written it before you fire up vi and start coding, impatient dumbass."

In other news ...

For most of the drugs for which I've had a chance to compare the brand-name and generic versions of, the generic has worked as well or very nearly as well for me as the brand name. I know that this, despite being the expected result, is not true for everyone, but for the most part it works for me.

So it is with surprise and disappointment that I note that store-brand omeprazole, which I was pleased to see become available and hoped to save money with, does not work as well for me as brand-name Prilosec. Argh. (Despite most drugs' tendency to not work as well or as long as expected in my body, when I first started taking Prilosec I only needed to take it every other day. Nowadays I'm up to eight times a week -- if I skip that extra Sunday-evening dose, I really feel it, but it's still pretty close to once a day. With the generic, I need an extra dose every four or five days. I have to look up what I paid for the generic and figure out whether it's still a net savings -- IIRC the price difference isn't terribly dramatic.)

Hmm. Now I'm wondering about the generic cetirizine (Zyrtec) that recently became available in the US (after having been available in Canada for quite a while). I'd been taking the generic Canadian stuff (one ninth the price of Zyrtec here ... 1/9!!) and it was working reasonably well, but lately, after I took advantage of no longer having to have a friend mail it from Canada to obtain the affordable generic version, I'm noticing that it's just not quite doing the job. Thing is, there are at least three factors that could explain this: 1. my body eventually stops reacting to an antihistamine, and it may be simply that I've run out of time with cetirizine, an event I've been dreading[*]; 2. the US generics (two brands -- differently shaped pills so I'm assuming two different manufacturers) don't work as well for me as the brand-name or the Canadian generic version(s); 3. this Spring's allergen load is just so intense that it's overwhelming the ability of the drug to moderate my body's response.

Hmm. If the US version is just not as effective (for me) as the Canadian version, I guess I can go back to the Canadian version (or maybe find one US generic version that works as well as the brand-name and the Canadian generic, if I'm lucky). If it's just an unusually heavy pollen load, I'll just have to suffer the daytime breathing tickle and nightly attack of the phlegm-monster until the end of the season and hope the autumn pollen season isn't worse (and try to get put back on Singulair again). If I'm reaching the end of cetirizine's usefulness for me, well that's just gonna suck, though it's a suckage I've seen coming from a long way off.

[*] This used to happen much more quickly, sometimes after just a year or two. But the last few antihistamines I've used have worked for longer than that, and with the exception of loratadine (which still worked longer than anything I took in high school and university, even if I had to take it twice as often as recommended during spring and fall allergy seasons), each seems to work a little longer than the one before. I don't know whether this reflects a change in my body as I age, or some useful feature of recent antihistamines. Since new antihistamines used to be introduced fairly often, I had hoped that this slowing would mean that by the time Zyrtec stopped working for me the next new drug would already by OTC and/or generic so I would no longer be switching away from a just-became-cheap drug to a new, still prescription-only one. But I also stopped hearing about new antihistamines, giving me the impression that development of new ones had slowed as well and making me fear that I would still be on the wrong side of the curve. Right now, I don't even know whether there's another antihistamine to switch to yet.

The extreme case of this, by the way, was Benadryl, which several friends had suggested as the Extreme antihistamine. The first "24 hour" dose I took worked for less than 24 minutes, though I will admit that was a really dramatic improvement in my breathing and comfort level during the fraction of an hour that it lasted. The second time I tried it, several months later, it barely had any effect. The time after that, nothing I could even notice. But most antihistamines, if they worked for me at all, worked for at least the better part of two seasons, and Zyrtec has been useful to me for several years now.

And finally: I'm thinkin' I probably shoulda' taped last night's The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson, because I have a vague, poor-sleep-addled recollection of John Waters' having said something I wanted to stick into the QotD queue, but I was feeling groggy when I watched it and more groggy the next four times I woke up, and now I barely remember what they talked about.

[Posted, backdated, after the IJ outage ended.]

Apparently the "Message from John Cleese" to The citizens of the United States of America, about revocation of our independence, is making the rounds again. So I figured I'd post a little reminder that despite what it says in the email, it was not written by John Cleese ... but it does work well to imagine hearing it read in his voice.

[Posted, backdated, after the IJ outage ended.]

Apparently the "Message from John Cleese" to The citizens of the United States of America, about revocation of our independence, is making the rounds again. So I figured I'd post a little reminder that despite what it says in the email, it was not written by John Cleese ... but it does work well to imagine hearing it read in his voice.

According to CountryMouse ( countrymouse), " InsaneJournal's hosting company screwed up and canceled the databases. Squeaky has a copy of them from a month ago."

Argh!

I wondered how CountryMouse knew this; her post gave me a couple more search terms, which led me to knitmeapony's report reminding folks that there's an IJ-status Twitter feed (which I should have remembered on my own -- doh!).

So the latest (smushing a few tweets together) seems to be:

It appears that I will be able to get the databases back [~11:30] This may take awhile longer. They have the drives set aside but I have to order new servers. [~13:30] May be up to 24-48 hours now [~15:30]

*sigh* Reminds me I need to get around to writing up that combination "ethical issues and the evolution of LJ" and "no site is safe (because even if the owner doesn't sell out, sie might get hit by a bus[*])" entry that's been percolating in the back of my head for about nine months.

With luck we'll see an announcement that everything's coming back online soon [knock wood]. I look forward to reading the whole story.

[*] Or get eited by hir providers.

[Posted, backdated, after the IJ outage ended.]

According to CountryMouse ( countrymouse), " InsaneJournal's hosting company screwed up and canceled the databases. Squeaky has a copy of them from a month ago."

Argh!

I wondered how CountryMouse knew this; her post gave me a couple more search terms, which led me to knitmeapony's report reminding folks that there's an IJ-status Twitter feed (which I should have remembered on my own -- doh!).

So the latest (smushing a few tweets together) seems to be:

It appears that I will be able to get the databases back [~11:30] This may take awhile longer. They have the drives set aside but I have to order new servers. [~13:30] May be up to 24-48 hours now [~15:30]

*sigh* Reminds me I need to get around to writing up that combination "ethical issues and the evolution of LJ" and "no site is safe (because even if the owner doesn't sell out, sie might get hit by a bus[*])" entry that's been percolating in the back of my head for about nine months.

With luck we'll see an announcement that everything's coming back online soon [knock wood]. I look forward to reading the whole story.

[*] Or get eited by hir providers.