HeadChange

Scheduled Maintenance

Ever since the upgrade to Word­Press 3, the Head­Change back and front-end have been behav­ing very strange. Over the next few hours, I will be opti­miz­ing data­bases and such to see if I can fix the issue. If it can­not be fixed, the down­time may stretch through­out the day.

Thanks,
Ed

I Am Shaman Review

When it comes to pur­chas­ing herbs online, you should really trust the ven­dor you are pur­chas­ing from. I have used IAmShaman.com for my exotic herbal needs for over 4 years now and have noth­ing neg­a­tive to say about them. The prod­ucts are very high qual­ity, just as promised. My orders have always been processed quickly (within a day if placed dur­ing busi­ness hours) and I receive my order within 3 days of plac­ing it.

I Am Shaman offers plants and herbs that can­not be pur­chased from health food stores, actu­ally nowhere locally in my town. I com­pletely rec­om­mend I Am Shaman if you are look­ing for qual­ity prod­uct from peo­ple you can trust. With this ven­dor, you can pur­chase prod­ucts like kava, kratom, blue lily, amanita, fly agaric, san pedro, morn­ing glory and any other entheogen you can imagine.

Per­son­ally, I have pur­chased their Kratom (which they are very well known for), Kava Kava, Aman­i­tas and Blue Lily. I was very pleased with the qual­ity of all the prod­ucts a numer­ous amount of times.

Tags: blue lily, botanicals, entheogens, herbs, iamshaman, kava, kratom

A month full of sobriety, kind of

Unfor­tu­nately, my detox from detox did not go as planned, but it’s no biggie.

It’s been a month since I decided to jump off the wagon, a few days ago, I had some Sub­u­tex in my reach and ate it up. In no way am I look­ing at it like it was a waste of time, because it was not, but it was a card I wish I would have never played. It didn’t lead to much of any­thing but shit-loads of relief. I’m pretty sure my brain still does not know how to han­dle pain yet.

Any­way, my point of this post is sim­ply more encour­age­ment and some clo­sure I guess. I wish that I would have updated this mini-blog a bit more, but it is what it is. If you want to take con­trol of your life, you CAN do it. With some brains and resources, it’s a walk in the park.

Wrap­ping up, here’s a few tips to help you kick sub­ox­one in the teeth:

• Stay strong, it get’s a lit­tle better
• If you can make it the first 5 days, you can make it forever
• Insom­nia is one of the biggest fac­tors, no sleep = feel­ing like shit. Get some herbs or some ben­zos for that.
• Don’t tell your­self you can’t. You know you can, I know you can.
• Do it for your­self. Take control.
• When in doubt, just let the lovin’ take a hold.

Tags: crap, detox, insomnia, sickness, sobriety, suboxone, tips, withdrawal

Alright… Day 10 — Suboxone / Bupe Detox

I totally have not been updat­ing this as much as I planned to in the begin­ning, but hon­estly, it’s okay. I have proved my point, which is that it is not impos­si­ble to step away from Sub­ox­one (buprenor­phine & naloxone).

The past few days, I’ve felt bet­ter than ever. The morn­ings have been tough, espe­cially around the time that I would nor­mally take sub­ox­one. I’ve cre­ated a rou­tine for my morn­ings though, instead of hang­ing myself up on how I feel worse than I could, I do what I can, specif­i­cally tak­ing a nice hot shower. It’s amaz­ing how you notice the most sim­ple things in life when you have a clean head.

Any­one can do it guys… All you need is two things:

1. The drive to bet­ter your life, and take control
2. The will to never look back

Life is way too short to be hung up on phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ren­der­ings… Like a wise man once said “Life is too short, so you gotta love the one you’ve got, you might get run over or you might get shot.” Life is hard enough as it is, there is already enough stress in the world we live in for twice as many people.

I guess my point is not that sub­ox­one is hor­ri­ble, or that it is the mir­a­cle drug. I feel that it has taught me a lot, but also made me strug­gle just as much as I did before I started tak­ing it.

Over­all, I feel fuck­ing great. If you want to stop tak­ing that tangy orange pill, just do it.

Hiding ads and promo images in JustHost cPanel

As I have stated before in my JustHost review, JustHost is an excel­lent host­ing com­pany for most inter­me­di­ate web devel­op­ers. They pro­vide a great ser­vice at great prices, but let’s just say that they take mar­ket­ing their other ser­vices and fea­tures a lit­tle bit far. Even after you’ve paid for your ser­vices, JustHost’s cPanel is filled with lit­tle adver­tise­ments that get pretty annoy­ing. I really don’t like how they do this, but the way I look at it, it’s all good thanks to Grease­mon­key, an addon that allows you to mod­ify the way web­sites behave.

Before attempt­ing to remove the ads from your cPanel, you must make sure that you are using a com­pat­i­ble browser. As of now, Grease­mon­key is sup­ported in Fire­fox, Flock and Epiphany. There are equiv­a­lents for other browsers, this arti­cle focuses on doing it with Fire­fox. Google Chrome has native sup­port for GM, Opera 8 is capa­ble of run­ning scripts, and is able to make it hap­pen with Inter­net Explorer. Okay, here’s how it’s done:

1. 1. Assum­ing you already have Fire­fox installed, install the Grease­mon­key addon from the Fire­fox addon data­base. If you don’t have Fire­fox, down­load it here, or check out another sup­ported browser like Flock or Epiphany.
2. 2. Once the addon is installed, restart Fire­fox like you nor­mally would.
3. 3. Grab the cPanel cleanup script from Userscripts.org (by click­ing the install but­ton on the link provided)
4. 4. You’re good to go! You might see the ads in your cPanel for a split-second when you first load it, but GM will take care of it quickly.

If you have both Grease­mon­key and the user­script installed and the ads still exist, make sure it is enabled by right-clicking on the mon­key icon in FF and make sure that JustHost cPanel clean up is checked (in the menu). If a check is present and it’s not work­ing, go to man­age user scripts in the Grease­mon­key menu, click the cleanup script from the list and make sure that within the included pages area, those URLs match the actual URL of your cPanel.

Nor­mal cPanel with ads:

After Grease­mon­key killed the ads:

Tags: advertisements, firefox, greasemonkey, justhost, promos, userscripts

Day 5, Still going strong

So it’s been five days… It feels like it’s been two hours, I feel great, well not com­pletely great, but what I expected to feel like. I’m still going through aches, I’m sleep­ing a lot bet­ter though which is help­ing me out a lot.

I fin­ished up the Kratom I had yes­ter­day, I actu­ally had some doubts about today, but I can really see the light at the end of the tun­nel. There is hope. Damn do I feel good.

It made me really happy today to see all the views that these posts are get­ting, it also made me really happy to see another blog that was ded­i­cated to pro­mot­ing hope and is actu­ally a whole WP blog about their expe­ri­ence with quit­ting. Amaz­ingly, it really com­pares to what my expe­ri­ence is like. Check it out: Diary of a Quitter

Tags: buprenorphine, day5, detox

4 Days without the Bupe (Suboxone)

Life has sure been chal­leng­ing over the past few days… I’ve been keep­ing myself so busy that I really haven’t made as many posts as I would have liked to on here. For the most part, I feel really great, well… really great for being addicted to some­thing for 2 years and just jump­ing off the wagon.

The first two nights and morn­ings were the worst part. I’ve been keep­ing it mostly herbal, using Kava Kava and a blend of chi­nese herbs called Seven Flow­ers to help get me to sleep. The prob­lem is that I can’t stay asleep for long at all, I do more toss­ing and turn­ing than any­thing, which really sucks because it’s hard to get your­self up and mov­ing in the morn­ing when you’ve just laid there for most of the night.

Through­out the first two days, I ingested about 6 grams of 10x Kratom extract, it didn’t help as much as I thought it would, but it was sure as hell bet­ter than noth­ing. On day 3, I tried upping the dose of Kratom to about 6 grams which pro­duced some nice, relax­ing effects and most of all, some relief.

As I’m writ­ing this, com­pletely sober for 4 days now, I feel pretty good. I have this uncom­fort­able feel­ing inside me, which almost feels like high blood pressure.

Besides Kratom, opti­mism, kava or any­thing else, I think that music has helped me through this the most. Well, and the fact that I can­not be sick, stay in bed or be lazy at all.

Through­out the past few days, the one thing that I have noticed is that I did not tell myself that I need that stu­pid fuck­ing orange, fruity pill. Instead, I have been telling myself that I want to be in con­trol of my life.

This is a good exam­ple of how your mind can over­power any­thing. If you want some­thing bad enough, you can have it. If you have faith in your­self, you can make it happen.

Don’t browse the forums if you’re look­ing to quit, that will only intim­i­date you. Feel free to post com­ments on any of these posts, or go to the con­tact page and ask me for some advice, I will hap­pily help you out.

Here are my sug­ges­tions for those of you look­ing to drop the bupe.

• Stand tall. Be strong, keep your head up.
• Get some seda­tives for sleep­ing, you don’t need diazepam, alpra­zo­lam or any­thing like that… Kava works the best, along with valer­ian, hops, skull­cap, cat­nip, 5-HTP.
• If you can’t sleep, don’t keep try­ing for more than an hour or so. Get a shower, try again.
  
• If you still can’t sleep after show­ers and seda­tives, get busy. Clean, go jog­ging do any­thing that involves you being active. Your body freaks because it doesn’t have what it’s used to, don’t let it bind up on you. Exercise.
• Don’t browse the web for help, it’s not going to help, it’s going to scare you. The weak-minded have cov­ered the inter­net with bull­shit. Which is why I have posted this, and which is why it out-ranks all the other top­ics of it’s kind.
• DO NOT call your doc­tor or look for a fix.  Stay strong, it gets a lit­tle better.
• Talk to me about what to do. I’m no expert, but I have learned a lot from attempt­ing this sev­eral times. Use the com­ments at the bot­tom of the page (our dis­cus­sion will be pub­lic) or go to the con­tact page to speak pri­vately.
  

Tags: buperenorphine, day 4, sobriety, suboxone

The Buprenorphine (Suboxone) Detox Diary — Wise words, intro

Sorry about the ram­bling guys, I like to give a nice back­ground when post­ing things like this. It is infor­ma­tional, the next post will be less rant­ing and rav­ing. Skip the sci­ence stuff.

In the USA, an esti­mated 2.4 mil­lion of us unlucky cit­i­zens have prob­lems with opi­ate addic­tion. Ever since the devel­op­ment of opium and mor­phine, these drugs have been hit­ting us like a plague. The point of this mini-blog/category is to inform those who are on a buprenor­phine detox plan and those who need help with their addic­tions to opioids.

There has been tons of talk recently about how ter­ri­ble it is to stop tak­ing Sub­ox­one or Sub­u­tex after detox­ing from other drugs like heroin, oxy­codone, mor­phine, hydrocodone etc. This talk about how you will be sick for 2 months, or how you are going to go into with­drawal so bad that you can’t move, is not going to help any­one try­ing to stop tak­ing the subs. I’ll be cre­at­ing daily blog posts about my expe­ri­ence with sub­ox­one recession.

Before mak­ing the deci­sion to quit, it’s a good idea to learn about the drug and how it works (if you don’t know already). Buprenor­phine is a semi-synthetic opi­oid derived from the­baine. It’s chem­i­cal name is 17-(cyclopropylmethyl)-alpha-(1,1-dimethylethyl)-4,5-epoxy– 18,19-dihydro-3-hydroxy-6-methoxy-alpha-methyl-6,14– ethenomorphinan-7-methanol. It has obvi­ously gain some rep­u­ta­tion for it’s abil­ity to help those addicted to opi­ates detox with­out feel­ing with­drawal symp­toms. The drug is mar­keted and sold in a few dif­fer­ent forms includ­ing Sub­ox­one (buprenor­phine & nalox­one), Sub­u­tex (buprenor­phine) and Temgesic.

When­ever you become depen­dent on opi­ates, the struc­ture of your brain under­goes vast changes. When a per­son uses any kind of opi­oid drug, the drug trav­els to the brain and sat­u­rate those recep­tors result­ing in eupho­ria, basi­cally stim­u­lat­ing your opi­ate recep­tors.  The more you take opi­oids, the more you mess up those pre­cious opi­ate recep­tors. Buperenor­phine is said to acti­vate those recep­tors, mak­ing you feel… not sick. Sci­en­tif­i­cally, the opi­ates you take does not cause sick­ness or with­drawal symp­toms, it’s your brain.

Since Buperenor­phine was approved by the FDA, it has been help­ing us unfor­tu­nate ones with over­com­ing opi­ate depen­dency. Most doc­tors will tell you that you will not undergo with­drawal symp­toms after tak­ing Bupe because it is not a full-antagonist like heroin, mor­phine etc., it’s only a partial-antagonist, but the inter­net com­mu­nity will tell you dif­fer­ently. If you do a search for “sub­ox­one with­drawal”, you will find tons of forum threads that say the same thing. None of them are any help, they will all just dis­cour­age you to jump off the wagon.

Alright, with all the sci­en­tific stuff behind us, let’s get to busi­ness. I’m a 21 year old male, Cau­casian, about 150 pounds. I’ve been tak­ing var­i­ous amounts of Sub­ox­one tablets for a lit­tle over two years now. Most of this time, I self-medicated, some of the time, being pre­scribed by a physi­cian. Over the last year or so, I’ve been prepar­ing to stop tak­ing the evil orange pill by taper­ing down from 8mg a day to about 0.5mg a day.  I have tried to quit about 10 times through­out my few years of using Sub­ox­one, with no success.

Each time, I’ve learned more and more about the drug. This time (already at day 3), I have a cou­ple other strate­gies. First off, I have been exper­i­ment­ing with Kratom (Mitrag­yna spe­ciosa). Kratom is an opioid-antagonist which has been used since the 19th cen­tury for opium sub­sti­tu­tion and opium addic­tion. I have tried Kratom a few years back, before my affair with hydrocodone, oxy­codone, mor­phine and hydro­mor­phone. I bought an ounce of leaf from one of my trusted ven­dors (Oh yeah, Kratom is legal, unsched­uled, except Thai­land). After brew­ing up the nasty tast­ing Kratom, it pro­duced the same effects as I had pre­vi­ously felt after tak­ing 14mg or hydrocodone. With this in mind, I picked up some higher qual­ity, Kratom extract for this journey.

Also, I plan on con­tin­u­ously hydrat­ing, to keep my body cleansed and refreshed. I’ve been think­ing about herbal detox, but I’m still unsure about that. Before even think­ing about stop­ping the flow of buprenor­phine, here’s a few things you need to keep in mind.

1. It’s going to be hard to sleep. Pre­pare to sleep in small intervals.
2. You’ll be in pain for at least a cou­ple days, so if you work, it would be a good idea to take the first few days off.
3. You are in con­trol. If you keep telling your­self that you feel ter­ri­ble, that you need the pills, that you can’t do it, etc… You will most likely fail.

Even after feel­ing like utter shit, you can make your­self feel bet­ter with opti­mism. Con­stantly tell your­self that you can do it, this is noth­ing, I can­not wait to be free from this drug. If you lay in bed all day, you are going to feel like shit. You need to be active, if you need to take a shower every time you feel like your mus­cles are tied in a knot. If you can heat up your mus­cles (with a hot shower) and con­tinue to be active, you will feel much better.

One of the worst parts of the with­drawal is the insom­nia. It’s impos­si­ble to feel any bet­ter the next day if you were toss­ing and turn­ing in bed all night long. If you can, get some type of seda­tives to help you get rest. Ben­zo­di­azepines will work the best, but not every­one can get access to them. Per­son­ally, I use Kratom, Kava Kava, Valer­ian, Cat­nip and Mela­tonin. Really, any type of seda­tive will help you out.

No mat­ter what, don’t com­plain to your doc­tor or try to score an 8 off your buddy. Stay strong.

Most doc­tors will tell you not to worry about with­drawal symp­toms, they will tell you it’s all in your head. I think this is par­tially true, when your body is depen­dent on a drug, it is going to freak out when it doesn’t have it any­more. It’s nat­u­rally going to depress your mind and body. Espe­cially in the case of buprenor­phine, once you are done tak­ing it, you’re not going to feel com­pletely okay. The rea­son you were given bupe is because it fills a void in your brain that opi­ate use cre­ated, so, once you are com­pletely with­out any type of opi­oid, your brain will not remem­ber how to pro­duce the hor­mones and chem­i­cals that it nat­u­rally makes, mak­ing you feel like shit.

The biggest thing about quit­ting is that no mat­ter what you’re try­ing to stop doing, you are not going to feel great for a while. For exam­ple, in my sit­u­a­tion, my brain has not pro­duced it’s nat­ural opi­ates in over 3 years, so when I stop tak­ing sub­ox­one, I am going to feel ter­ri­ble for a long time (That’s just the truth. It’s not pes­simism, it’s real­ity). This would be the same if I had been doing heroin for 3 years, it’s all the same con­cept, think back to one of the first para­graphs, opi­ate addic­tion changes the struc­ture of your brain.

Any­ways, by the end of the day I will have a new post here that is actu­ally describ­ing how I am feel­ing and what I am doing to feel bet­ter. I just feel that the more you know about your enemy, the bet­ter off you are.

Tags: detox, heroin, hydrocodone, kava, morphine, opioids, oxycodone, wild lettuce, withdrawal

Cooking up WordPress comment spam, nice and hot!

The inter­net is not only a place for infor­ma­tion, it’s a spam­mer heaven ever since peo­ple real­ized that they could cre­ate com­puter pro­grams to gen­er­ate mas­sive amounts of links to help improve PageR­ank and search engine posi­tions. Lucky for us Word­Press users, it’s the eas­i­est plat­form to spam.

Ever since the spam rev­o­lu­tion, search engines have changed their rank­ing algo­rithms try­ing to stop the spam­mers. The fun­ni­est thing about Word­Press spam­mers, is that they are wast­ing their time. Even if they do suc­ceed in blast­ing links all over Word­Press blogs, it doesn’t help their search engine rank­ing at all. At one point, this was a suc­cess­ful Black­Hat SEO method at one time, but Google no longer fol­lows or indexes com­ment pages. In an unlikely sce­nario, the spam­mers link could get clicked on if the blog owner did not remove the spam com­ment, so I guess it’s not com­pletely pointless.

Plu­g­ins to help stop the spam
The absolute best tool I have found for fight­ing spam is Akismet. This plu­gin is present in all new WP installs. With Akismet, you still have to do some spam sift­ing, but the more times you mark com­ments as spam and not as spam, the more Akismet learns. The plu­gin has been around for a long time, mean­ing that it has got­ten pretty good at detect­ing spam. Most of the time, it does a very good job at detect­ing spam (by cross-referencing the IP of the author and words in the comment).

When I notice that the same IP or range of IPs are attempt­ing to spam my blog, I pull up the good old handy WP-Ban tool, copy the IP, add a wild card if nec­es­sary, and keep them from ever spam­ming my blog again from that IP or range. This can some­what be done within the Word­Press core, but it is not nearly as pow­er­ful as WP-Ban. This plu­gin allows you to ban IPs, IP ranges, refer­rer URLs, host names and even user agents. Unlike when ban­ning IPs within the Word­Press core, WP-Ban does not let any machine that meets any part of the blacklist’s cri­te­ria even access your blog. It also keeps stats of each item such as how many spam attempts were made and whatnot.

When using the WP-Ban plu­gin, be very care­ful when ban­ning cer­tain IP addresses, espe­cially your own. If you acci­den­tally ban your IP address, you won’t be get­ting back into your blog until you acquire a new IP. Block­ing cer­tain ranges of IPs can block poten­tial read­ers. Only ban IP addresses that you know are spam­ming your blog (ie. Akismet shows mul­ti­ple spam attempts from the same IP. I have com­piled a list of spam­mer IPs, click here to see them. If you’re unsure if the IP is a spam­mer, you can check it against the Stop Forum Spam data­base. This site reveals a lot of infor­ma­tion about spam­mers includ­ing IP, email, user­name, host­name and more.

One of the best ways to keep spam com­ments from being dis­played on your WP blog is to require that all com­ments be approved by an admin­is­tra­tor before they are shown on the post (This can be done in Set­tings > Dis­cus­sion > Tick ‘Admin must approve’. You can also set up a black­list for cer­tain words, ip’s, emails and user­names. This has some dis­ad­van­tages though… When a spam­mer hits your site, they nor­mally try to send hun­dreds of com­ments, so sort­ing through all of the com­ments to find legit ones will be a task.

List of IP addresses that spam Word­Press blogs:
91.214.45.169
213.5.69.40
41.72.219.79
80.73.82.193
121.138.130.145
200.238.102.162
66.232.107.104
66.232.102.40
200.209.174.181
88.102.213.218
81.95.149.42
218.140.138.174
66.232.102.40
125.140.41.45
198.151.39.35
89.108.89.42
213.149.167.23
221.115.163.221
74.52.90.234
200.238.102.162
66.232.102.40
200.118.113.210
210.126.24.39
58.103.65.153
81.95.149.42
66.232.102.40
61.222.136.70
193.202.63.138
220.124.118.104
202.28.27.3
121.138.130.145
200.67.147.101
121.131.155.98
194.105.214.178
80.73.82.193
121.138.130.145
200.238.102.162
66.232.107.104
66.232.102.40
200.209.174.181
88.102.213.218
81.95.149.42
218.140.138.174
66.232.102.40
125.140.41.45
198.151.39.35
89.108.89.42
213.149.167.23
200.238.102.162
74.52.90.234
203.75.169.162
202.149.216.154
66.232.102.40
202.66.107.7
190.7.79.254
61.73.146.1
206.222.198.98
210.4.3.66
193.251.9.73
59.12.215.88
202.166.170.6
125.137.127.45
66.232.102.40
201.80.174.111
194.105.214.178
212.1.105.94
200.55.215.83
66.192.6.131
66.232.102.40
200.238.102.162
190.7.79.254
200.21.91.107
203.211.151.251
200.238.102.162
190.7.79.254

Tags: nofollow, Respected Sites, search engines, spam, WordPress, wp-ban

A little history about April 20th or 420

For most peo­ple, today might as well be listed on the cal­en­dar (I’m sure some peo­ple do have it on their cal­en­dar) as a reli­gious hol­i­day. For years, April 20th (4/20) has been a day of non-stop pot smok­ing cel­e­bra­tion. Cel­e­bra­tion for what?

There’s a lot of con­fu­sion about this day. Some say that 4/20 is related to Hitler’s birth­day and the Columbine shoot­ing that occurred in 1999. The fact is; Hitler made no asso­ci­a­tions with mar­i­juana, just because his birth­day is on April 20th, doesn’t mean that he smoked pot.The Columbine shoot­ing also had any­thing to do with the date. The term was actu­ally never heard of until 1971. There have been many of things that hap­pened on April 20th as well as the birth of many well-recognized peo­ple, the com­mu­nity has com­piled a list of events, births and deaths that have occurred on April 20th.

It all started back in 1971 at San Rafael High School in San Rafael, Cal­i­for­nia. A group of kids who called them­selves Waldo’s, started using the term as a code-word for a time to go get stoned after school. The code described the time of day (4:20 PM) that these Waldo’s would meet to get their buzz on, there are more details from recent inter­views of the group of nearly a dozen kids, but who really cares about that?

Since the start of the term four-twenty, it’s mean­ing has changed quite a bit. Con­trary to what most peo­ple think, the orig­i­nal term was not describ­ing April 20th. What the Waldo’s prob­a­bly didn’t know back then, was that they were start­ing a huge trend for those who enjoy marijuana.

Even know that today, the mar­i­juana cul­ture doesn’t use the term exactly as it was cre­ated, it’s still a really big part of many events relat­ing to Earth Day and mar­i­juana decrim­i­nal­iza­tion. I think that most of those who par­tic­i­pate on 4/20 would find it inter­est­ing to have some back­ground on it.

Tags: 420, April 20th, holiday, marijuana, pot, weed