Pristiq

So I’ve been battling depression, anxiety since about the age of 14 or 15, and also been struggling with untreated Attention Deficit Disorder since the first grade. It recently got so bad that a concerned friend decided to phone the police on me and I was sent to a local mental health facility. I figured maybe they will actually help me with my problems. Boy was I wrong… all they cared about was kickbacks from the pharmaceutical companies. They knew I was uninsured and unemployed, yet they prescribed me medication costing over $422.38. Not to mention they charged me $1,384.00 for just being there 3 days, eating horrible food, battling boredom and having trouble sleeping. So now I owe over $2062.81 to them, and $3054.00 for the emergency room visit.

Just so you know, 50mg Pristiq costs $133.54 for a months supply and 100mg Pristiq costs $154.85. They also prescribed me Gabitril for anxiety which isn’t even approved for anxiety, its an anti-seizure medication that’s been known to possibly cause seizures in non-epileptics. This term is referred to as off-label usage. What reason would any psychiatrist have for doing off label usage? Kick backs! ding ding ding. Gabtril came in at $281.67, and it didn’t even do anything!

I am writing this to notify everyone that I possibly can to never allow yourself to be prescribed Pristiq, Effexor, Effexor XR or any other anti-depressant that Wyeth pharmaceutical company produces. These drugs are nearly impossible to get off, and they have ruined many peoples lives. I was prescribed the drug by an greedy psychiatrist. I can’t stand having this poison in my body any longer and if I decide not to take it, I get horrible effects that never seem to end.

Don’t be fooled by the new name, Pristiq is nothing more then a patent extender for Effexor XR. Effexor is known by it’s chemical name as venlafaxine. Pristiq is known by it’s chemical name as desvenlafaxine. What does this mean? It’s the same exact drug, different name. When you take Effexor it gets converted into desvenlafaxine.

So what could be so bad about withdrawing from a seemingly harmless anti-depressant? Where do I start…It can cause insomnia, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, confusion, horrific nightmares, crying, and let’s not forget it’s most prominent withdrawal feature “BRAIN ZAPS!”. Although most doctors will deny the existence of these brain zaps, or deny there severity… lets just say it feels like someone is sending lightning bolts in through the back of your skull and it radiates throughout your body.

Ohh, and just so I can get more Google hooks… here’s some valuable links. I hope as many people as possible see this message.

http://depression.about.com/cs/venlafaxine/a/brainshivers.htm
http://www.join-the-fun.com/effexor-withdrawal.html
http://www.topix.com/forum/drug/effexor/TCDBCBLD99KUQ56BF
http://www.doctorslounge.com/psychiatry/forums/backup/topic-1013.html
http://www.healthcentral.com/depression/c/question/40158/25468
http://www.prozactruth.com/effexor.htm
http://www.drugs.com/pdr/effexor-xr.html
http://pointofreturn.com/pristiq_withdrawal.html
http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?nav=messages&webtag=ab-bipolar&tid=58227
http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?nav=messages&webtag=ab-bipolar&tid=58527
http://depression.emedtv.com/pristiq/pristiq-warnings-and-precautions-p2.html

Some updates to share with you all…

Well if you haven’t already noticed I’ve been in the process of changing the site over to WordPress which has been going pretty well so far. I also found almost every news post I’ve ever made on webarchive and attempted to create a historical record of this site. Anyway I’m switching over to WordPress to make content management a little easier and to make the site more accessible.

In other news I’ve finally decided to update Project Carbon a little, I call this little creation Beta 3. I’ve fixed a couple bugs, improved startup times, changed the interface around a little and added partial Vista support. I say partial Vista support because they changed the way the networking works in Windows Vista and that prevents my application from viewing packets that are sent out.

Any comments, suggestions, or bug reports would be appreciated. You may now leave comments on the news posts, you just need to register first. Or if you want to contact me directly you can head over to the contact page.

Project Carbon Beta 3 Screenshot

Download Link:
Click here to download

Ticking clock…

Wow, It’s been almost a year since I’ve updated the news on this site. I’m going to be honest with everyone visiting this site, I don’t really have my life put together at the moment. I’m slowly picking up the pieces and trying to put something together and figure it all out, but it’s a slow process. I hope to have some new source code examples up soon of some of the new .NET stuff I’ve learned. I’ll also probably put up my contact script because a couple people have asked for it.

I’ve decided to take down all of the AIM sections, so if you are coming here looking for AIM related material you will be sadly disappointed. I’m just trying to move away from that point in my life and leave it behind.

Anyway I hope to have more updates soon, expect some new programs possibly and definitely some new source code examples.

New server, new logo, and a fresh layout

Well if your wondering why the site has been down so frequently, having issues resolving, or had some page up explaining that I was moving servers you would be correct. Seven and I have been having some major issues finding a host that fits our stability and tech support needs.  Just as a little token of advice, hosting companies are very evil most of the time; they may refuse to give your files back, monitor all your activity, and have dirty little tricks in there terms of service.

As for my logo, I was thinking that every company needs a logo, and since I would like to be thought of as a company of some kind I figured I needed to make a logo.  So I decided to go with a symbol of power and protection, The Eye of Horus.  I also figured since I had a new logo I would create a spiffy new layout to go with it.

For anyone wondering, assuming I have any traffic left at all if I was coming up with anything new, I really don’t know at this point. I’ve been busy with other projects and just burning my life away at an incredible pace.

Anyway, peace out for right now.

Yawn………

Just to let everyone know, you may now access my site from 3 different domains, xeons.net, xeonproductions.com and xeonproductions.net. You can thank Seven for purchasing the two new domains.

In other news, I have no new project ideas and I’m really bored right now. If someone has any project ideas throw them to me. If you need a program built for some specific purpose, and have at least 50-300 bucks to pay (depending on size), I can probably make it as long as it doesn’t involve scamming, phishing, or fraud. I can also build website layouts and help with problems for $15-50 bucks. Need a script installed such as osCommerce, a forum script or something else? I can do that to! Otherwise I’m just going to continue having my brain turn to mush.

Have a nice day,
Brandon

AIM SDK VB6 AccCore Example

I’ve seen some requests around the internet for an AccCore example in Visual Basic 6. So I decided to make an example program that would use some of the features of AccCore and put them into an easy to use sample. Little did I know some things are just impossible with the way that COM and VB6 work, one issue that I encountered was while I was attempting to implement the email lookup VB6 has trouble working with an SAFEARRAY variant, I tried almost everything to access the elements returned by the function, including using CopyMemory and some other memory access functions. I failed to even get anywhere close to reading the damn SAFEARRAY structure, about all I got was the dimensions of the array and the number of items.

After giving up on that, I decided to attempt to implement the IAccPreferencesHook present in the AccCore. Due to VB6’s lack of the ability to return HRESULT error codes back to the AccCore without making VB6 throw a fit, I could not make that work either because of how VB6 handles HRESULT and COM errors.

So after banging my head against the wall, and waiting until this example became as old as time I have decided to release it.

Download VB6 AccCoreLib Example

Project Carbon Update

Well I’ve pretty much got everything finished on this new release of Project Carbon, plus or minus something I might have forgotten by accident. The packet filters are completely implemented now, including protocol and port filters. I have also took the liberty of adding in a DNS lookup tool, which let’s you resolve the IP’s for a given host name, or retrieve the host name for a given IP. You may now also minimize the packet spy into the tray, and the startup options all work now. I also finished the packet dumping feature, which so far looks pretty good. Anyway, I really want to get all the bugs worked out for right now before I try adding new features. So if you find bugs just report them to my email address. Also, if you saved packet dumps in the original RC1, it probably won’t work because of how lame .NET is… I might switch from using deserialize to some custom dump file format…

It’s written in C# 2.0, so you will need the .NET Framework 2.0 in order to run this program. I am also not responsible for any damage this program may cause. I highly doubt it would cause any damage though, I just have to say that for legal reasons.

Download Project Carbon RC1 Beta 2

Screenshot:

Yahoo Discovery

I figured out something kinda cool and useless while I was messing around with Yahoo Messenger, I figured out that you can change what protocol it uses. Say you wanted to debug the old YMSG9 login, even though it will spit an error back at you saying that you are using an obsolete client.

To change the version of the protocol in Yahoo Messenger just make the following reg key

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Yahoo\pager\test]
“ProtocolVer”=dword:0000000a

Now I have it set to 10, which I believe is the earliest version that still works without blocking you.

Untitled

I’m using Firefox 2.0 and even though it’s got all these great add-ons and stuff, its sucking up memory like a drunken crack whore. In fact I only had 2 websites open in Firefox and it was topping the scale at 80 MB of memory usage and over 120 MB in page file usage. I opened the same exact website in Firefox and Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox was using 30 MB of memory, and Internet Explorer was using 12 MB. Me and my friend zodiac where discussing how Firefox has went to hell and how crappy it is now a days. I miss the days when Firefox started up fast as can be, went to the pages fast, and the tabbing wasn’t as lame as it is now and it didn’t suck up so much memory. Just a message to whoever works on Firefox, fix the god damned memory leaks for Christ sakes!

Untitled

Some more news, I’ve been working on making a tracking system to track visitors coming to my site, and I’m trying to get some of the old sections up. You can see some of my work under the section “cms-dev”. I hope that by making everyone’s IP addresses public I am not violating any privacy or anything. I’m going to work on developing some sort of user based system along with a forum and private messaging systems. Maybe get some of my sections into database form instead of typing them out by hand. Just depends on how much I procrastinate and how lazy I am.