It has been one year since we lost Zuri. I still miss her so very much.

Just looking at my logs for Friday it looks like I have:

• 5 subscribers on Bloglines
• 4 subscribers on Google Reader
• 2 subscribers on Newsgator
• 2 subscribers checking with Safari

There were a few more too that looked like they might possibly be real people, but I think it was more likely they were robots, so I ignored them. But in any case, at least 13 people subscribed via RSS. Kinda cool. Of course subscribers ≠ readers. Just like the 80-90 website visitors I get on an average day are not mostly actually regular readers of this blog, but rather are mostly people who stumble on old archived things via random searches. But the RSS reader to subscriber ratio is probably a bit higher than the visits ratio I would imagine. In any case, kinda interesting.

Sunday night a lot of people were running their fireplaces, so my allergies were pretty bad and I got almost no sleep. I dragged myself into work anyway. The breathing stuff was pretty much better by noontime, but very soon after that a familiar discomfort started building in my abdomen. There is no way to tell for sure just on the symptoms… but the symptoms matched almost exactly what I have felt every time over the past few years when I have been about to pass a kidney stone.

As the afternoon progressed Monday I was increasingly uncomfortable. I thought about leaving early a few times, but ended up putting in a whole day, although I must admit, as the discomfort increased, my productivity declined proportionately. In the evening at home, my discomfort stayed pretty constant for the rest of the night.

Tuesday morning I did a conference call from home first, then headed in to work thinking things weren’t that bad. But during the drive to work it got worse and worse, and I knew as soon as I got there that I would need to turn around and go home. After a couple of quick meetings, I headed home. I managed to do some amount of work from home as long as I stayed in very close proximity to a bathroom at all times.

At about 0 UTC today though, the discomfort spiked into pain… something I had been pretty much been expecting since the initial discomfort on Monday, but had been hoping would not happen. I took a Percocet clone I have around for exactly this reason, and almost immediately I started feeling better, and I did one last conference call with work that lasted about an hour. I had expected that the pill would knock me out and I would sleep the rest of the night. Instead, by the time I got off the call I was feeling no pain at all and was hyperactive. I ended up going downstairs and swaping out a bad head unit on our entertainment system and generally rearranging the room and such.

That lasted until about 5 UTC, then I started feeling uncomfortable again, but I fell asleep. I woke up around 8 UTC. The discomfort slowly started morphing back into pain. About 8:45 UTC it was bad enough that I took another pill. But it just kept getting worse. 20 minutes later, I was about to wake up Brandy to consider the possibility of heading to the ER if the pain meds didn’t kick in soon. At this point it was pretty bad. I was in the curled up in a ball on the floor swearing at the world phase.

I was just starting to feel like the pain killers might have been slightly working when all of a sudden I wasn’t able to keep the pill down. This worried me a lot, because I’ve only ever had to go to the ER for stones twice… once was the very first time, when I had no idea what was going on, and no pain killers to help deal with it… the second was when I couldn’t keep the pain killers down and had to go in so I could get pain killers in a shot instead of in a pill.

At this point Brandy had woken up. I ended up waiting about 10 minutes, then taking another pill, hoping this time I could keep it down. Between whatever part of the first pill had actually stayed in my stomach and the second pill, 20 minutes later I was no longer doing the writhing and swearing thing.

Now, as I write this, it is still pain, not down to just discomfort levels, and I’m not quite at the point where I can sleep. But I think (hope) it might be getting close. I suppose a third pain pill might be possible, but I’m not sure it would be wise. I prefer to take as few of these as possible. (And my supply isn’t all that large anyway.)

This really sucks. I hope this one passes quickly. The last set of tests I had (over the summer) showed all the stones that were sitting in my kidneys ready to drop were still of the size where the indication was take pain killers and pass them rather than lithotripsy or surgery. But the biggest one was getting close to the limit. (I believe they said it was 8mm in diameter… which seems pretty freakin huge to me and would be about double the biggest one I’ve passed previously, but they hoped it would break up into smaller ones on its own.)

So I imagine if this thing doesn’t pass on its own soon… and/or the pain killers stop being enough for me to get by… that a trip to the doctor and/or emergency room may be in my future.

Of course, all this is assuming that because all the symptoms match the other times this has happened to me (which started out being once every couple of years, but is now a couple of times per year) that this is indeed another kidney stone. If it is something else… well, who knows.

As for work tomorrow… I’m gunna try. We have a going away lunch for one of my employees who is leaving for a start up, and it would suck to miss that. Plus a couple of other meetings going on. But if I’m feeling like I do right now, even hopped up on Percocet, I’m thinking that might be unlikely. But I guess we’ll see how I feel in the morning… well, in about 4 or 5 hours when I should be waking up.

No idea at this point if I’ll actually sleep between now and then.

Well, there ya all go. TMI in the extreme I am sure. But at least this time I didn’t post any pictures… yet. :-)

I gave up on the blank screen on EC2 after plodding through some things for a bit, figuring that most likely it was a difference in configuration between the system there and my main system. I reinstalled mysql to a fresh directory on Cronus, then after “zapping gremlins” from the backup file was able to restore the database. I then had to go in and add permissions back to the relevant database user by hand. But then boom AbulWiki was back in business.

Woo.

Perhaps I’ll still spend a little more time trying to get it to run on the EC2 instance. Or perhaps not. If I don’t by the end of this weekend I’ll just kill the instance. But it was a fun exercise anyway.

I’m also going to make a couple updates to how I do the daily mysql dump of the wiki. Namely, make it save the backups indefinitely with date based names rather than only keeping the last two days worth.

I think I’ll go set that up right now.

But WOO! I got it back. And seemingly with no data loss, which is always a good thing.

So now I can hear Brandy say “I told you so”. :-)

On Wednesday something screwed up my mysql database that I have AbulWiki on. I didn’t notice until this morning though. By that time my daily backups had run twice, so I didn’t have a last good version. To say the least, I freaked out a little bit.

I’ve spent the last couple hours on it and I was able to start up mysql in a safe mode and do a data dump and I don’t think I’ve lost any data after all. Which is good. Very good. I also found a data dump I’d done ten days ago in another place. Also good. But what is bad is that I still can’t get mysql to start except in the read only safe mode. Which means I can’t make the wiki actually run of course.

According to the errors in the logs, the issue is a corruption in one of the InnoDB tables. The start up in innodb_force_recovery mode lets me do a mysqldump and get everything. And it looks like there is no actual data loss. But then it looks like the next step is supposed to be to drop the tables that are causing errors on start up, and then restore from your backup. But whenever I try to drop tables, mysql crashes and restarts and the tables are still there.

After running in circles, I’m starting to think I just want to wipe out mysql and reinstall from scratch, then restore my (hopefully) good dumps. The mysql dump I just did in safe mode is refusing to be read by MySQL Administrator due to character set issues. Hmmm…. The one from 10 days ago can be read. As can a backup I did using the Admin tool instead of doing mysqldump on the command line. Actually, both of those were done with the Admin tool rather than mysqldump. Sigh. In either case though, I can’t do jack until I can get mysql to start in regular mode rather than innodb_force_recovery mode.

And I am late to work. I need to go do work stuff now rather than bang my head on this.

But it seems clear what I’ll be doing tonight when I get home.

Fighting with mysql and hoping that these data dumps I’ve done are really usable and I haven’t lost anything (or at least not much). Looking at the mysqldump ones (which are human readable even if the GUI restore tool isn’t happy with them) they look OK, but…

Sigh.

Bleh.

Not happy Sam this morning.

Gotta go to work.