mm_throwaway

I've tried Remeron (Mirtazapine) which at low doses is a sedating H1 antagonist like Seroquel. It worked for about 2 years and then like an idiot I started playing around with the dosages and it stopped working completely.

Thanks for the suggestion though, much appreciated.

Here is one addiction I wish I could grow out of: benzos and other benzo like drugs such as Ambien (zolpidem). I've been on them for almost 9 years, and they are unbelievably hard to quit. I take them for my insomnia. I don't have to take much (10mg of Ambien for example), but without them I'll lay awake in bed for 8 hours not getting any sleep. I've done all the sleep hygiene stuff such as CBT or forced sleep deprivation, but it doesn't seem to work.

I've been through various doctors, and I'm seeing a psychiatrist right now to deal exclusively with the sleep issue. Apparently my GABA receptors are shot from taking these drugs for so long. Unfortunately I have but two real choices: taper quickly from the Ambien and deal with 3-6 weeks of little or no sleep, or do a slow taper with Valium which only has a 20% success rate.

Not sleeping for days really, really sucks.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't updating JSON properties one the big improvements of the soon-to-be-released 9.4 version?

Anecdata: I'm over 40. I interviewed with a well known VR company which, aside from the dev manager, was staffed by 20 somethings. I've been doing that kind of work for my entire career and have written a number of multi-million seller games as a lead programmer. Still, they didn't want me. It was 7 hours of mostly rapid fire technical questions, which aside from one whiteboard problem that I didn't really understand what they were asking, I felt I did pretty good at. Obviously they felt different. I did go into the interview telling them that given my experience and record of shipping quality titles I expected a higher level of salary. Maybe that did me in, I don't know. But I did sniff that they thought of me as the old guy, and why would I still want to be coding & not in management at my age?

The upside is that by not getting/taking that job my current job bumped my salary by 50%. I was already making a bunch before, now I'm retiring even earlier! So I guess it all worked out in the end.