07:42 am - QotD
"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."
--
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commodorified,
2008-03-26
08:36 am - A Sleep-Deprived Brain-Dump
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.
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