Silverstar

styggian_nights, posting in gimp_vent @ 04:33 am: I hate the way people don't believe that I really am in *that* much pain. I have to delve into examples of pain medication overdose to prove the point.

I have taken 4 naproxen combined with 2 ibuprofen before, and not have it touch my pain at all. It leaves me beyond irritable and annoyed, making it much easier for me to lose my temper for random stupid crap.

I feel in agony right now, and unfortunately I left the remains of my hydro from my kidney stone at home. Oh gods... shoot me.

My neck, back, shoulders, even my chest and lower torso are hurting so bad right now. Combined with the ever present aching in my knees and feet, I feel miserable. I just want to sit and do nothing.

I took 4 naproxen. I would take more, but I don't want to add nausea to the list of reasons I feel like crap right now. And I kind of like having a functioning liver.

This coupled with depression and anxiety can make for some horrible late nights. The graveyard leaves me awake in the dead of night alone with nothing but the thoughts in my head. If I told you that a year ago, I was in a terrible mental place that I could only describe as being imprisoned in an emotional and psychological hell, it wouldn't even begin to describe it.

Now winter is fast approaching, and it is taking a conscious effort not to succumb to SAD. I keep slipping, and then have to claw my way back up. Fighting my own unbalanced brain and dealing with my body's revolt and insistance of making me feel pain for reasons no one seems to know, it's such a damn heavy burden sometimes.

I've managed to make myself functional and self-sufficient, but some days it is so damn hard. And if I dare mention my pain, either physical or psychological, no one understands.

I restarted my psych pills, since I now have insurance and can go get them renewed. I need to do that soon, and maybe even up the dosage. I have a friend who can recommend a doctor that will renew my hydro for me too. I just need a few a week is all, so I can have some pain free moments now and then. (A positive side effect being mood elevation as well, but we'll not mention that to the doctor.)

What's more frustrating is that my mother, who has chronic pain of her own and has suffered depression and anxiety, has no sympathy for me. I just need to deal with it and move past it she says. I tell her that I'm just not strong like she is.

It seems to be getting better tho.. Being medicated again and shifted my brain chemicals and finally I feel human again, but it's ongoing. I might need the pills forever, but as long as it keeps me human and functional, I don't care.

Sorry for all the randomness. Needed to vent :/

theartistscurse, posting in ssdi @ 02:19 am: Appt w/ SSDI Doctors...
SO I got a letter in the mail that I have an appt with the SSDI doc on Wednesday... My friend told me this is more positive than getting a flat out "HELL NO"... I dunno I had an anxiety attack when I read it. Haven't I been through enough? I have 20 years worth of documentation, what more can they possibly need to know????

lara_everlong, posting in gimp_vent @ 07:24 pm: Why?
Why is it that strangers love to inquire about my love life? "Do you have a boyfriend?"

Well, yes, actually, I do but that's really none of your business...

Why, why is it that the response to my answer of "yes" is so often "oh, how nice! Is he disabled too?"

theljstaff, posting in news @ 01:53 pm: LiveJournal Major Notes: Notes, Tweaks, Bug Kills, LJ_Cares!

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

Tags: bugs, csi wii, fck, lj_cares, lj_photophile, notes, rte, writer's block

dwell, posting in lj_maintenance @ 02:00 pm: Network Maintenance: Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 04:00-06:00 UTC/GMT
EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

fighter_chick, posting in chronic_pain @ 06:12 pm: Upon Request: Minimizing Plane Pain

Air travel with chronic pain sucks. And as I dug into a post about the suckage, I discovered that this is a *big* topic! When the outline reached 500 words, I realized that I needed to break this post into parts. 

Minimizing the Pain on the Plane, Part 1 of 4

A reader here mentioned that I have not addressed the issue of pain during air travel. Travels With Pain is only a few months old, so there are lots of topics that I haven't covered yet, and probably a whole bunch of topics I won't necessarily think of myself. If you've got a trip coming up and want advice, if you're looking at a method of travel I haven't talked about, if you want information about a destination...let me know! I want to create a useful and fun blog, and I can't do that without a community of active readers. You folks here--folks who travel and want to travel with chronic pain--are my core community. Any advice and suggestions you can give me for Travels With Pain will only make it better.

perfectfigure, posting in chronic_pain @ 04:37 pm: advice/support
I will try to keep this concise, though I am known for my ability to blah-blah-blah about anything. ;) This isn't specifically pain-related, but I think y'all can help me anyway. 

I have some sort of unidentified auto-immune disease like CFS or fibromyalgia; due to my other health issues it's pretty much impossible to determine which symptoms belong to which Issue, and I haven't pushed really hard for an "official" diagnosis. Having a word for it doesn't make it suck any less, so whatever. :) 

So...I've gotten myself in a really annoying position. My SO and I moved a few months ago. Prior to the move I hadn't worked in almost a year (just been going to school), because between my SO and student loans, there was enough money to support us (and my schooling). Since we moved money has been real tight as he has been trying to get established in a new city/state and my loans haven't come in yet and school is like 5x as expensive as an out-of-state resident, so I took a job. It's a part time job - about 30 hours a week - but I'm working six days a week on top of taking 9 credit hours at college.

( By some miracle, I've survived this situation for the last two months...  )

crazedcamel, posting in seattlepagan @ 11:25 pm: NW YULEFEAST PRESS RELEASE - FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRUBUTION
The Board of Directors of NW Yulefeast, in recognition of these tough economic times has decided to extend the pre-reg rate through Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 26th, 2009. Any Registration received from the 27th though the closing date of December 1st will be the higher 'regular rate'.

The Board has received to date four requests for the Grandma Fussie Scholarships. Deadline for this years scholarship requests is November 15th, with the recipients notified by email by the 20th.

Online registration is available on the website http://nwyulefeast.org as well as the flyer for download. Details for the Grandma Fussie Memorial Scholarship is also available on the website.

Thanks,

NW Yulefeast Board of Directors

codeman38, posting in gimp_vent @ 10:37 am: Can you hear me now? No...
Is it just me, or do phone companies make it as hard as possible to get a smartphone on a data-only plan-- at least now that the Sidekick, what I'm using currently on a grandfathered plan, seems to be dead and gone?

Seriously. The whole reason I want a data-centric phone to begin with? Because I can't hear well on the phone. In any given month, I usually don't use more than 100 minutes of talk time because phone calls are so stressful; in most months, I don't even use 60.

( Let's look at the options... )

So, in other words: If you want a data-centric plan, better prepare to have a credit check and be billed on a postpaid basis, possibly with a 2-year contract required. And you may have to go see a doctor in the process to become eligible. If you want an off-contract option, don't expect to have a nice data-centric phone or a reasonably priced data plan.

Seriously, why aren't there more options for this? There are tons of options for voice plans, but very few choices for people who can't use voice services for whatever reason (or who use them so little as to not even hit 100 minutes in a month).


EDITED TO ADD: ( more about Verizon )

theljstaff, posting in news @ 01:15 pm: LiveJournal Major Notes: Spam counter-attack, RSS feeds again, CSI Deadly Intent contest

The empire strikes back

In recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal.

RSS feeds again

If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience.

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

c_s_i

If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here.

Enveloped in postcards

Last week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be giving ten random users paid account credits.

Photos of the week

If you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too!
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Tags: csi, photos of the week, postcards, rss, spam, writer's block

firehauke, posting in chronic_pain @ 03:00 am: so I had the procedure today
Or rather, Wednesday - sheesh - my awake times run from about 2pm to about 4am every day, so while I know this time (3am) is a new day, I don't think of it as a new day. Anyway - enough of how whacked out my brain is.

I got there early, had a confusion with the damn insurance (I have Medicare now), and then got called back relatively quickly.

And then things slowed down, as they always do. What's with that anyway? I mean, they seem to hustle, but once you're in the middle of it, everything slows down.

I came home and slept off the conscious sedation (about 5 hours) and am now aware that the lidocaine is no longer in effect. My right hip aches, but not as bad (nearly a 7 in that area alone) as this morning. And my left thigh is numb.

I was told it would take between 3-5 days before I noticed anything.

the thing I don't like? I was told to come back in 8 weeks to do this again. I will call if I don't get relief and tell them to try something else. I wasn't given an option to this, though I could have protested then. I don't care for his bedside manner either. But whatever. Not every doc has it. Course, I've dropped doctors who had this problem. We'll see how it goes.


Thanks for having a place to come talk about this, outside of my own journal and among folks who've been there.

fighter_chick, posting in chronic_pain @ 05:11 pm: Give Yourself a Break Too

Though this post is specific to travel, the theme applies to daily life too. Be nice to yourself and to your body--it may not be perfect, but it is the only one you've got.

Giving Myself (and Everyone Else) a Break

firehauke, posting in chronic_pain @ 12:07 am: question about a procedure
Ok, for the grossness (or perceived, everyone handles this kind of TMI differently), everything's ( back here )

Thanks!