One month ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD (or maybe just ADD) and have been prescribed Adderal. I'm 30. Hearing the doctor read off the symptoms checklist was honestly a little shocking in how fully it applied to me. I was prescribed "old school" quick-release 10mg pills and told to take them 'as needed', up to two pills, two times a day, with the effects typically being felt for 4-6 hours. This is my first experience with more 'hardcore' medication, and man oh man, it certainly makes a difference.
I've heard that people with ADHD commonly feel "calmed" by the Adderal. I'm not sure if that's the intended effect, but that's not what it does to me. I basically feel like I have the best coffee high ever. If I haven't had coffee for a long time, then have a good brew - or if I've been drinking shit coffee then have a venti Starbucks - THAT'S how I feel. I feel (way) more talkative. I can get on cleaning benders that make me feel like a tweaker. I feel more articulate, with the words coming more fluidly, and my vocabulary more accessible. I'm more productive at work and at home. It feels good. It's fun. I like it. I want more. And that is scary.
I've heard Adderal can be addicting. I'm seriously trying to be cautious, and keep that in check, by taking regular breaks (taking it on workdays, but not on weekends), and having either no pill or one pill on easy days, two to four on harder days (where I know I'll be working longer hours and be more physically active)). Part of me wonders: if it's not having a calming effect on me, does that mean I don't have ADD/ADHD? And if not, then should I be taking it? The other part of me feels like it's helping, and that's enough for me to want to continue use - at least for now.
There's been this little acidic fire in my tummy for over a week now. I wouldn't necessarily describe the sensation as painful, per se, but it is definitely unpleasant and it is always there. It feels much like I ate too many jalapeno peppers, only it never goes away.
Also, frankly, I'm not shitting very much. This makes me think it could be constipation, but I've never dealt with that before. I don't fully know what "constipation" truly entails. I always thought it just meant you couldn't take a poo, not that it also comes with a sensation.
I'm a little freaked out, because I've never had anything like this before. My mom called yesterday, and we talked about it, and she told me that my Uncle had an intestinal blockage that required surgery. My wife says that if it's a surgery; if it requires anesthesia, then it will always come with risks. Like, there's a super low chance that I could DIE. So she said maybe my Mom should come down and say her goodbyes, "Just in case?". What the fuck? Am I making something big out of nothing? Am I being a hypochondriac?
Well, I'm going to make a follow up appointment ASAP, since it's been 9 days now - and maybe end up getting a CT scan (which, thank god, is fully covered by my wife's awesome insurance). Wish me luck, send me vibes, pray for me, whatever. I'm suddenly feeling a lot worse. Bye for now.
UPDATE: Temperature was a little low, at 95.5, but the doctor and nurse felt that was completely within tolerable limits. I had blood drawn, my abdomen x-rayed, and was given over the counter generic Prilosec. Will know results tomorrow.
Sometimes, I just want to write. I'll be reading a book, or swept up in a sense of nostalgia brought on by a game or movie, and I'll have the impulse to 'WRITE'. But when it comes down to actually doing it, I can feel stifled by feeling under-inspired, or negative self-talk that doubts whether or not I actually have anything original, intelligent or worthwhile to say. Yet the craving to write will still be there, or it reemerges some time later.
I've thought an anonymous blog would be ideal for my intentions. Anonymous, because I wanted to write whatever I damn well pleased, without fear of offending anyone, being judged, or having concern over whether or not I was boring my reader. Another option, posting on Facebook, felt too much like a plea for attention (I do have this negative association with Facebook, where it feels like people are all about "Me, me, me!" "Look at how awesome I am!" "Look at all the amazing things I do, places I go, how much people love me, how many friends I have, etc, etc, etc"), and like I said, I do not necessarily think that whatever I may want to write about would be worth other people's time to read, and to put it on Facebook, I feel, would be a slight imposition on the people who truly care about me and are interested in my life and thoughts. I want to be able to ramble, to write shitty poetry, to make grammatical mistakes, and to write about what interests ME. I want to write for myself.
Blogger isn't a perfect fit, but I'm going to stick with it. If I made a brand-new "anonymous" blog, it would still be linked to my account. However, I can't be arsed to learn a new site, or create a new account. Finally, I decided that it doesn't matter. I should be able to speak my mind, and it's up to other people whether or not they want to read what I write. If they don't like it, fine. If it's bad, oh well. Life is short, nobody knows what it's really all about. We are biological machines who are, cosmically speaking, unimaginably insignificant. So, damnit, I'm just going to write - right here.
And another of me in a 20-foot drain approximately 200 ft below the city streets!
Anyway, I've been wanting an outlet to enthuse about my PC gaming interests, so I'm going to start a new series on here in which I highlight different indie games and why you should consider checking them out. Look for the first in this series very soon.
Disclaimer: This diary is being faithfully recreated, with all of the spelling and grammatical errors intact. Still, in defense of my 11-year-old self, some of the misspelled words are spelled correctly elsewhere, so I think I was simply hastily scrawling, and many of them are thus the equivelent of written typos. Enjoy.
I was going through my old filing cabinet today, when I discovered my diary from 1997. It follows the first 7 days of my annual Summer trip to see my father, which involved a coast-to-coast flight from Los Angeles to Greenbelt, Maryland. While rife with atrocious misspellings and terrible grammar (retained here), it is also highly detailed and contains some awesome raw insight and plenty of humor. While I don't know how amusing it will be to a complete stranger, it had me laughing, loudly and heartily, on multiple occasions. Yet, the best part about it to me is that it captures the wonderful magic and innocence of young love, and was both a touching and sad reminder of the purity and buoyancy that we all, inevitably, become estranged from. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did.
-J.W.Siegel
reCAPTCHA, a product of Google, is a freely distributed spam-fighting program designed to trick bots. It is becoming increasingly more popular on the web, and while reducing spam is certainly great, reCAPTCHA's prevalence has also led to it becoming slightly annoying.
Well, today I'm going to share a small, but helpful tip, that if used, will hopefully save you a bit of time as you continue to traverse the web: You only have to enter one of the two words. The second word is completely unknown to reCAPTCHA and it will accept any valid character instead (for instance "a").
The false word is quickly discernible to the trained eye, as there are a plenty of common identifiers, which I am going to teach you now.
Let us begin!
First, know this: The known, required words are always formatted identically; take a moment to familiarize yourself with their appearance:
These 'true' words (though they are not actually words at all!) all share the same font, size, and are always more or less vertically centered on the CAPTCHA screen. As you can see above, the only ways that they vary are that the first letter is sometimes capitalized, the number of letters range between 6 and 8, and they can appear on either the left side or the right side of the screen.
Now, I will show you the many attributes that guarantee a fake.
These highlighted itemsdo not need to be entered:
Any items containing numbers, including roman numerals:
Any names or words, whether in English or any other language:
Words that feature any punctuation, or accents:
As well as any variation from the standard format of the 'true' words (as seen above), including words that are...
Unusually big, or small:
Remarkably low, or high:
Or any words of a different font!
Now you should know everything you need in order to identify the fake words, and with some practice, you'll be whipping through those CAPTCHAs in nearly half the time, all while smugly smiling to yourself in the knowledge that you've beat the system!
However, before you run off, there is something you should know. The reason one of the words is unknown to CAPTCHA is because the 'fake' words have been scanned, and Google is actually using your input in an effort to improve Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems.
That is why you'll occasionally get some really wacky results!
This is described in further detail at Google's CAPTCHA website, and according to them, it is for a good purpose:
"About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher"
So, if you'd like help in this goodwill work aggregation project by continuing to type both words, well then more power to you! But personally, I don't agree with having volunteer work forced upon me, and would rather get through these pesky verification programs as swiftly as humanly possible (pun intended)!
Check out this awesome musical trailer for Portlandia, a new series on the Independent Film Channel about my current city of residence, Portland, Oregon:
I actually recognized two people in this video; One of them, the guy on the big bike on the right, wearing the multi-colored fuzzy pants, is my neighbor!
Shortly after crafting my first iron sword, equipped with a full set of iron armor and more than a grip of pork, I set out for my first taste of Minecraft PvP. Oh, what a joy.
First, I raided a huge square, stone house, floating high in the sky, having no idea who it belonged to. This guy had a chest with literally nothing in it except for an amusingly large collection of raw pork flanks. There was like a dozen of them; It was the most pork I'd ever seen in one place. So I hastily and giddily snatched them up.
I was about to leave... when I noticed that not one, not two, but three people had suddenly arrived below the house. Using Sun Tzu's strategy of funneling a greater number of enemies into a focused point, I waited for them to come up and poke a hole in the floor.
The first brave soul to breach the walls bore a diamond sword, but I had the advantage of height and a free range of motion, and after knocking him down a few times, he boldly died. I then heroically jumped down and dispatched with the other two, using my newly acquired ultimate weapon!
Man, my blood was pumping and the adrenaline was flowing! I hadn't been so riled up from a video game since bounty hunting player-Jedi in Pre-CU/NGE Star Wars Galaxies (when Jedi were rare, powerful, and extremely hard to become).
I was on my way back home when I saw someone else mining underground, and snuck up on him from behind. Score! Diamond shovel, diamond pick, obsidian, a bunch of redstone dust and iron. I frantically tried to make room in my inventory (all spoils), fearing that someone might come to take their revenge. After a bit of this, I heard water splashing and teleported home in panic.
A few people had become quite hot in chat by this point, and were trying to goad me into a rematch. My nerves were fried though, so I needed a breather. I cooked my pork over the fire, and rested up for the night, waiting for my hands to stop trembling. Finally, after stashing my spoils, I set out to for this most honorable rematch....
My safehouse is way far out, and in an effort to avoid being discovered, I circled around in my approach to the spawn point and our predesignated fighting ground, nearby.
After a while, my opponent, Bamfo, and an onlooker, Sniper11, met me. Bamfo came to win: He was decked out in full iron, iron sword, with a bow and a full stack of arrows. However, I had my sword out, and he seemed to prefer melee, as he charged head on. When he was about 5 paces away, I switched to my bow and unleashed a hellfire of missles upon him... this seemed to cause him to falter in his step, but he quickly returned with several blows which made me fear for my life. Swiftly chowing down on my grilled pork, I restored my health and then unsheathed my diamond sword...
Oh, sweet victory.
At the end of the day, I walked away with a kills/death ratio of 13/0 , and a huge mound of booty: 3 iron swords, multiple sets of armor, a ton of arrows, plus the aforementioned diamond gear, obsidian, redstone dust and iron ore...
What a rush! I'm still feeling pumped, haha.
Update:
Later that night, I returned to the house that was "floating high in the sky" (which belongs to Bamfo)...
Also, this:
If this sounds like fun, buy Minecraft here, for only €9.95: http://www.minecraft.net/prepurchase.jsp
The game is finally entering Beta on December 20th, at which point the price will go up to €14.95.
The PvP server I play on, which is, by far, the best I've found so far, can be reached at: play.minecraft.cc:23456
