MAOI Update and the Syndrome With the Funny Name
No new MAOI dosage, no more late-night milk-spilling slapstick, and no better feelings. To be fair to the meds, the past month has been a stressful one. The wife thinks I have Asperger Syndrome. (Henceforth "AS" for brevity and to avoid the "ass-burger" images.) It fits my career, lifestyle, and personality, and I've suspected it myself.
Unfortunately, if it's AS and not "just" depression and anxiety, the behavior that causes us so much domestic strife is not so much a symptom of those mental diseases as it is a part of who I am and will always be -- more like Tourette Syndrome. I cannot relate to other "normal" (neurotypical or "NT" in the AS lingo) people. There's no pill to make me do so. (Although I know a certain liquid that helps tremendously.)
Thus, my condition is no longer something I can overcome through therapy and medication, but something that is just part of who I am. Hell, AS people seem to embrace it almost as much as the radical fringe of the deaf community embrace their lack of hearing.
That's not to say therapy can't help me deal with others, but now it's entirely a matter of therapy (and my willingness to make that effort) and not medication and therapy in conjunction dealing with the underlying problem and the symptoms going away. I'll still need the medication for the comorbid bedfellows of severe depression and anxiety, but it's not going to make me into the man she wants me to be.
Is that the man I want to be? I want to be happy, I want to sympathetic if not empathetic towards my loved ones. I want to be a "good" husband and father. However, before all this, before my attachments, I never wanted any attachments. Yet, I was lonely -- but was it lonely for relationships, or lonely for physical intimacy, for sex?
When I was a kid, a lonely dateless high-school kid, I dreamt of just skipping ahead in time with some girl to the family and the white-picket fence. Towards the end of high school and into college, as I became more depressed, well, I don't know what I wanted then. I was still lonely, God wasn't returning my messages, and I became an atheist. Once I found the Internet and started actually interacting with girls(!), at least virtually, I became vehemently against marriage and kids and the rest.
But, it happened. Maybe, knowing who I was, I should have objected, but who I was (and still am) is also someone who avoids conflict (and change, to a degree) at all costs.
Anyway, what was this about? The title says an MAOI update. I see my psychiatrist tomorrow and I'll ask him about AS. I'll also give my 1-10 "how do you feel" scale and downgrade it from last time's six to a four or less. I don't know how he'll react to that. MAOI is kind of the end of the line for me on the medication train. I don't want to switch to something new, primarily because it means being off everything for two weeks, then allowing the new stuff another month or so to start working. Nevertheless, 40MG a day is still a pretty low dose, he says, so maybe he'll try something higher before giving up.
As for AS, I mentioned it to my therapist and she said that people with AS usually can't function as well as I do. That threw me, because AS is on the "high-functioning" spectrum of autism and plenty of people live successful and fulfilling(?) lives with it. She didn't think my psychiatrist would agree with the wife's "diagnosis." In any case, she said she'd mention it to him and look into any local therapists or psychologists who have experience with it. We'll see.
Back to the MAOI for a moment before closing. I've done remarkably well with it, physically. The dietary restrictions aren't really so bad, and I haven't made any big slips or had any hypertensive crises. Plus, last night, I took the kids across the street to their friend's house for a bonfire his parents were having. I wrote about one of those nights before, and this one was similarly satisfying -- and booze-infused. The upside of that side is that I had two beers and at least three cocktails and the only effect was my feeling relaxed and socially comfortable.
Plus, the kids had a great time. We didn't go home until 10:30PM. They played hide-and-seek with flashlights, and the girls put on a couple of their unique plays, with an encore of "The Mummy." The eldest is one demanding director, nay -- auteur. Her younger sister gets the parts of the vampire, the mummy, the ghost, the ghoul, the ... hunchback. And, of course, all the male roles.
So, that's life right now as we enter the summer season. Things will probably be a lot different when the girls start school in the fall. The anxiety is about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, and the unknown encounters on the path from here to there.
Stuffing Text Into All Screen Windows
Various pagers have been giving me question marks in boxes and hexadecimal codes. This is probably because I didn't have the right font in the past and inserted various hacks into my ~/.bash tree to get around them, e.g. aliasing a LANG=C before every perldoc command.
Well, now I've just about got everything right and proper in UTF-8 mode using a uxterm, but those little nigglers still pop up. Today I did a man less and found the LESSCHARSET environment variable. Awesome! But if it's not set, it's supposed to use the locale, and my locale is already properly set up to en_US.utf-8. Not a problem. I just export -n LESSCHARSET to un-export the variable.
But I'm in screen, with fourteen windows open. How do I loop through all screen windows, stuffing a command into each?
Luckily, a quick reading of the screen man page led me to this:
at \# stuff "export -n LESSCHARSET\015source ~/.bash/aliases\015
And BAM that gets stuffed into every window I have open. Unfortunately, some of those are SQL prompts, log tails, and maybe an open vim session or two, but such are the pitfalls of impatiently trying out a new command, and no harm was done.
The trick is to use the backslash-escaped octothorpe to specify all windows. The rest is just a normal stuff, with that annoying octal \015 to specify a newline.
Oh, and I added a second command to source my bash aliases, because I'd added new ones recently.
Mounting Windows Shares On Linux
There must be a gazillion posts on this, so I'm just going to concentrate on what I did wrong.
First I wanted to mount the target share as NFS, but the server doesn't export to our desktop subnet at work. I saw it was running Samba, and remembered having had it working on Windows XP, so tried that. A friend at work had an /etc/fstab line that almost worked.
Turns out smbfs is deprecated and cifs is the new smbfs, so there was a documentation detour of sorts. Anyway, I contacted infrastructure and they gave me a line that worked, but included the password. My coworker's line used a credentials file, and I'd prefer that, because I'm old-school anal about including passwords in the clear and logging in as root and that kind of thing.
So, I took the infrastructure guy's fstab line, turned it into a mount command, ran it with three verbose flags, and saw it was trying to log me in as root, even though my credentials file included my own username.
The fix turned out to be to explicitly add another username option to the line:
//samba-server/dude /ext/dev/dude cifs rw,credentials=/home/dude/.ntcred/dev,username=dude,uid=dude,gid=dude,auto,user 0 0
Replace "dude" with your username everywhere. Here's my ~/.ntcred/dev file:
username=dude password=dude-password domain=dev
Replace everything with the appropriate values. I'm not sure the domain even matters in this case, but it's the NT domain/workgroup of the share.
I think the root of the problem is the parsing of credentials files. Apparently extraneous whitespace causes it to b0rk itself up.
Oh, and the "user" option (to allow any user to mount it, as opposed to just root, or the conflicting "user" option to samba) won't work unless you set the cifs commands suid root:
chmod +s /sbin/*mount.cifs
Your package manager will probably gripe and/or change that back whenever an upgrade comes up, and since we're using "auto" it's going to be mounted on boot, anyway, so you might as well just sudo the mount the first time and then rest easy.
While I was at it, I tried mounting a few other shares on another domain. One works fine. When I try to enter any subdirectories of the other, everything goes to hell. So, whatever. I'm done.
Gitweb Diffs Between Versions
Our company deploys code into production primarily from our version control system. I suppose all companies do, in some way or another. We endured a long hell with CVS and a far shorter stint in the purgatory of Subversion before we went into the heavenly light of Git.
The way we do it is to tag various branches destined for certain groups of machines, archive a snapshot, then copy those out to where they belong. This is all partially automated by an awesome (if somewhat Byzantine) home-grown software suite that I inherited once the original author left for (at least literally) greener pastures in the Pacific northwest.
I'm not normally in charge of deployment, but since I "own" the software now and the usual dude is on a well-deserved vacation, this week I'm handling the once-weekly scheduled deploy and the multitude of little tweaks that absolutely positively must go out immediately.
Our regular deployment manager sends out hand-written emails when he starts a test deploy, initiates the production deploy, then a final one when everything is finished. Myself, being a hacker, just can't stomach the thought of not having something like that automated. Thus, I dug into the command that prints the deployment status of all servers and hacked it up to be slightly more informative and email-friendly, so I could just copy-and-paste its output to an email.
Then I thought, as all hackers think, "Wouldn't it be cool if I could include a link to Gitweb that shows the exact changes that occurred since the previous deploy?" I know the previous version commit-ish deployed to each server, and of course I know the new one, so I could do it quite easily with a simple git command.
However, I didn't want to just slap that command in there so someone could (and likely never would) issue it within their cloned repo. I wanted a simple clickable link to Gitweb. Anyway, the query ends up being something like this, tacked onto your own Gitweb URL, of course:
gitweb.pl?p=your-repo.git;a=commitdiff;hp=695de2d;h=fb7b608
Where hp is the previous commit-ish and h is the usual "current" commit-ish argument.
Voilà!
The next step was to group all the servers by common changes so there's only one diff link per group, and next I might try adding an --email-to option to send the email, skipping the copy-and-paste.
...and then I'll work on the bugs.
I Brake For Debt
We've been trying a "cash budgeting" system for a few months now, and it's going pretty well. That is, it covers our variable expenses. I still use a bank account dedicated to relatively fixed expenses such as rent, utilities, membership dues, and minimum credit card payments. Most of those are paid automatically, pulled directly from the account.
Unfortunately, there are two places where the system falls short. This isn't so much because of any flaw in the idea of cash budgeting, but due to our limited funds.
The first is that we don't have anything left over to pay down the debt besides the aforementioned minimums. I'll be relying on my annual bonus to hack away at that fecking demon.
The second is "unexpected" expenses. We didn't fully account for birthdays or other special occasions and gifts. "Gifts" for us mostly means for the kids (and the increasingly frequent parties they attend), since we don't usually give them otherwise. School lunches we could roll into groceries, so that's not so bad.
However, there are those big ones that hit you now and again. Although we do have a "Car" envelope (cash allotted for each expense goes into an olde-fashioned paper envelope), it builds over time. Over the past week, my front driver-side tire has been angrily grinding under 20MPH. I finally took the day off today to get it into the shop. It's the brakes. And the rusted calipers. And over $600.
We ain't got that much in the envelope.
So, it'll probably go on the credit card we just managed to pay off, with last year's bonus, and I'll try to pay it off again with the two "bonus paychecks" a year direct-deposited into the dedicated bill-paying account.
Oh, and I put about ten bucks on the same card for Star Wars miniatures from Miniature Market in an attempt to find one suitable to represent my scoundrel in our Star Wars Saga campaign. Of course, since these are mostly under a dollar each, I had to buy a dozen or so to avoid paying more for shipping than for the actual merchandise. Maybe I'll post a picture when they get here.
That's not irresponsible spending, is it? $10 for my only hobby?
Back to "working from home" and waiting for the car.
MAOI Stage 4 – Crash!
I sat in a pool of milk and wondered how it got on the floor. I knew I'd spilled it on the countertop trying to pour it into my cereal, but how did it get all over the floor? I stood, shakily, and saw that the half-gallon cardboard container of organic whole milk was tipped over, as was my cup of cereal. Milk was everywhere, soaking boxes, creeping under the toaster, dribbling into the sink.
Wednesday afternoon, my psychiatrist upped my dose of Parnate to 10mg four times a day. He said I could start immediately, and that some people take two in the morning and two at night. That'd be a lot more convenient and better distributed than the three times a day I had been doing: 8AM, 1-2PM, 5-6PM.
After the appointment, around 2PM, I took my second of the day. When I got home, I waited, as I sometimes did, and took the double-dose right before putting the kids to bed between 8PM and 9PM. The eldest was sick (just getting over it), so the youngest went separately in our bed, and didn't take too long. Then downstairs to put the sickie down.
Around 11PM, I rolled out of her bed for a snack. Nothing wrong yet. Got to the kitchen, grabbed my glass (I eat cereal in drinking cups), poured some knockoff Wegmans brand of Cinnamon Life, got the milk, began to pour, then...I started to lose consciousness. Not straight-away faint, but light-headed, and the milk wasn't hitting its target.
So, I slumped down to the floor to give my head a rest, then rose a few minutes later and tried again, but now the carton was tipped over, the glass was tipped over, milk was everywhere, and my ass was wet. I grabbed paper towels, then towels from the dirty basket, then took off my shirt and wiped with that. I may have tried another few times to make cereal, but ended up just eating a few scoops of the dry stuff after sopping up most of the milk, then gave up and put everything away.
The light-headedness lasted for a few more hours. By Thursday, the next morning, it was gone, tested by my wet-shaving with the safety razor and taking a shower. I went to work, and all seemed well.
That day, I waited until noon for my first 10MG, then another when I got home, then another around 11PM. Today I did the usual 8/2/5 and I'll try the fourth as late as possible tonight. Maybe Sunday, when nobody has anywhere to go, I'll try the 2/2 morning/night schedule.
All this after I'd told the doc "No, no light-headedness at all!" when he'd asked about what is a common side-effect of the drug.
In any case, my mood does seem somewhat improved on it, and it's only been a little over three days since I began the initial 10MG/day dose. This is the worst side-effect I've ever had on an anti-depressant. Not the most interesting (that would be the chronic wet dreams), but the worst.
Maybe it was an empty stomach, maybe it was the combination of my nightly 1MG of Klonopin. I dunno. We'll see. I'll be careful.
Emacs Menubar Buffers List Format
And now for something completely different. No depression updates this time. A new "Hacking" category and a code tip on getting the full filenames in the menubar buffers list of Emacs.
I use Emacs 23.1.50.1 on my desktop, mostly for the kinds of things (quick copy and pasting and scratch pads) vim's modal model doesn't make altogether easy. I'm not a vehement advocate of either editor, but of both.
;; Copied from /usr/share/emacs/23.1.50/lisp/menu-bar.el.gz (defun menu-bar-update-buffers-1 (elt) (let* ((buf (car elt)) (file (and (if (eq buffers-menu-show-directories 'unless-uniquify) (or (not (boundp 'uniquify-buffer-name-style)) (null uniquify-buffer-name-style)) buffers-menu-show-directories) (or (buffer-file-name buf) (buffer-local-value 'list-buffers-directory buf))))) (cons (if buffers-menu-show-status (let ((mod (if (buffer-modified-p buf) "*" "")) (ro (if (buffer-local-value 'buffer-read-only buf) "%" ""))) (if file (format "%s %s%s" file mod ro ) (format "%s %s%s" (cdr elt) mod ro))) (if file (format "%s -- %s" (cdr elt) file) (cdr elt))) buf)))
Just add that to your init.el or wherever you put your emacs customizations, and you should see the full path and filename of files in your menubar buffers list instead of the basename then the directory.
Also gonna paste this into my flat-text coredump file, where I'll probably find I've already got some code snippet that solved it.
MAOI Stage 2
I ate one bite of the pesto, then went to check the jar. Grana Panado cheese. It seems to be an aged cheese, so I erred on the side of caution and didn't eat the dinner, which kinda pissed me off because the kids hardly touched theirs, either, and thus my wife's dinner-making effort was wasted tonight.
The one bite doesn't seem to have done anything. "Thank God I only took a tiny [bite]."
As I was Googling "Grana Panado", I found yet another MAOI dietary restriction list. This one included pickles. Pickles? WTF, man.
This is the last day of twice-daily. Tomorrow is thrice-daily, so I'll be filling up a pill bottle for work to take with my Provigil around noontime.
Nothing good or bad to report yet, except that the morning stomach upset seems to have gone away. As for the bad, I've been pretty damned cautious about what I ingest. As for the good, that can take weeks, as I well know from my decades of experience with anti-depressants, and I'm only now starting the full dosage.
MAOI Stage 1
The first four days are done. Tomorrow I start 10mg twice a day. Four days of that, then the (presumably) final thrice daily. I suppose I won't really have 20mg in my system until tomorrow evening.
So far, the only ill effects have been an upset stomach in the morning that goes away after breakfast and towards noontime.
I'm keeping track of my food and drink intake at the MAOI Ingestion Log above. No "hypertensive crises" yet, but I'm being pretty cautious about what I eat and drink. Still haven't tried the Pepsi Max. We ordered Chinese for the sickies last night (everyone but myself has a cold) and I was afraid to eat anything lest MSG or soy overload cause my head to explode. I had a few hot tuna salad sandwiches instead.
As for positive effects? None of those yet, either. I'm still feeling the SNRI withdrawal and a bit of anxiety and the usual depressive rifts in the fabric of sane reality. It takes a few weeks to see a change, so stay tuned.