Server stuff augh!

Yesterday morning I tried to get Postfix to work, as mentioned in the comments on my earlier post.

I failed and reverted to sendmail. But I wasn't happy about failure, so I took mallen's suggestion and I grabbed the source rpm and made a tweak.

Well that didn't work either, but it got me closer. Once I remembered that postfix operates in a chroot jail, I made a change, and...that didn't work either. But it did get me closer.

Turns out there's a bug in postfix. I hacked in a fix and recompiled and now it seems to work ok; but man, upgrading postfix, if I ever need to, is going to be exciting.

What if? When. Nothing is bug-free =)

Oh well. Most of the major articles are finally done (and most of them proved to be a pain) so I think I'm getting close to ready to cut over to the new machine. Can't wait to do that and see what survives.

Medicinal side effects

I take claritin to help keep my sinuses under control. I don't really have the normal allergy problems (though I suspect I'm developing them too) that most people do, however I demonstrably get stuffy at night and this leads to sleep apnea. I also use a HEPA filter which helps a lot too. esmerel really notices when the filter is dirty, because I snore louder, though I can never tell myself.

I get my claritin at Costco, and usually I buy a 40 pack for $28 -- not a bad price I suppose, but still quite a bit more than I paid while it was under insurance. Like the HEPA filter, I notice the difference btwn claritin and not claritin a lot less than esmerel but that's fairly normal with sleep apnea. Well, this costco trip they didn't have the 40 pack--but they did have a 30 pack of claritin D for $27. Which is definitely a worse deal. But claritin D includes a decongestant (which is the same decongestant in the 24 hour non-drowsy Sudafed, I found out--240 mg of pseudephedrine) and so I figured I would try it and see if it had any effect.

Well, it did. The first night I tried it I woke up at 4:30, dozed a little until about 6, and then laid there for a bit and got out of bed around 7. I was tired, but I didn't really feel exhausted like I would have expected to, waking up early like that. For comparison, I ordinarily sleep until about 10 if I don't have to get up for anything, which amounts to 10 hours of sleep as a rule--and I often don't feel refreshed, likely due to the apnea.

This morning I woke up at 6 and couldn't get back to sleep; I laid there until esmerel's alarm went off, and then just got up. Like yesterday I don't feel exhausted, I feel a little tired but I almost always feel at least a little tired. I'm perfectly functional and I'm having no problems focusing on my tasks for the day (which has been the server hacking).

When I looked up pseudophedrine, it's known that it can cause insomnia in rare cases.

Now, the thing I can't tell is--am I getting less sleep because it's causing insomnia, or am I getting less sleep because it was the push that made my apnea level low enough that I'm actually getting more restful sleep than usual.

I suspect I'll know more in a few days; either lack of sleep will catch up with me, and I'll switch back to regular claritin, or it won't and I'll stay on claritin-d. Here's to hoping that I'm sleeping better and therefore need less sleep.

Left/Right/Auditory/Visual

Unfortunately I tend to find some of the pattern recognition things a little random, but I suppose they're 'carefully' chosen to see what patterns people see first. I saw conflicting patterns in various questions and in a couple of cases I could determine which one would steer toward one result or another.

( My result )