I took Sertraline (one kind of SSRI) to treat anxiety, never had depression.
No panic attacks anymore, sexual drive was still good, after 3 months I felt superhuman and like my life changed, 3 months after that the suicidal ideation started.
I thought it was something I could power through, so I gave it another three months before it became unbearable, and I couldn't book an appointment with my treating doctor for another two months so I quit cold turkey.
The withdrawals were so terrible, I was basically a zombie for two weeks.
Took me a few months until I felt like myself again.
I no longer experience anxiety to the same degree I did back then, no use of other SSRIs or any other drugs.
This isn't meant to scare people into not trying SSRIs, just sharing my experience.
I think had I been more informed of the potential risks and changed my attitude of toughing it out, it could've probably been more beneficial.
I found that dosage of Sertraline made a notable difference for me. Too high a dose would get me in a hypomanic state. That may be where you were at when feeling superhuman. But mania can't last forever and is inevitably followed by a low.
Stopping cold turkey was bad news for me, too. I got the "zaps" any time I turned my head. So, I decided to taper down, which worked fine.
I had exactly the same side effect when turning my head, and 150 mg would also make me agitated. Also, my vision worsened a bit. But without sertraline, depression wouldn't have gone away, so the drawbacks were worth it.
For the US you sometimes might get a visa that's valid only for a year, and in some extreme cases I've seen people receive visas for 30 days surrounding a specific event they were traveling for .
Funnily enough those instances I described are based on Israelis as well.
From what I gather it mostly depends on how the person reviewing your application thinks it's likely you might break your visa terms (stay longer than you should, work when you're not allowed to).
Usually happens for younger people or people involved with problematic industries (military etc)
I had a 5-year F1 visa for what would normally be a 2-year graduate course.
I was under the impression that 5 years was the norm, considering a lot of undergrad courses (in engineering especially) take about that long to complete.
Grad schools too can take that long if you're aiming for a PhD.
(Although, when you graduate your F1 expires even if there's still time left on it; so you can't continue staying in the US after graduating without obtaining an OPT, or a different type of visa, PR or whatever).
To play the devil's advocate here - I do the same as you, but last month when I booked a 3 week vacation Booking offered better prices than the hotels themselves.
They also didn't pull any stunts like other hotel aggregators do (show you a price and change it when you get to the checkout).
I also had a single instance in the past where I wanted to prolong my stay at a hotel, and the hotel clerk told me I'd get a better deal if I booked through Booking, which I did.
Generally I think you're right, but I guess it depends.
A "traditional" hotel will (should) have a proper "bookings/reservation" procedure a "modern" one may well rely entirely on booking.com or similar.
Moreover it depends on the "incentives" (or lack thereof) of the actual people at the reception, in large hotels (or chains of hotels) why employee/clerk - say - #215 (possibly a low paid intern) would want to actually work to make your reservation (as you can do it yourself online, less work and responsibilities for him/her).
If you think a bit about it, when you book on one of these sites, you take all responsibilities about dates (arrival departure) people (number of people in each room) types of rooms (like two/three bed, queen size or king size bed, etc.) type of accomodation (with/without breakfast).
It is not entirely uncommon that people arrives on the "wrong" date or has miscalculated the days of stay (rare but happens from time to time), or - this happens quite often - having booked a single use room for two people or similar, simply because of a slip on the finger or not having read the whole page of info on the accomodation.
If you write or (when possible better) talk with the reception, usually they can verify your request and offer you more options (like - say - a "family room" for 4 people instead of two doubles, or a room with a large balcony if you are traveling with a pet).
My guess is that they have some separate incentive from Booking.com etc to drive bookings through those platforms. The same places usually have a proudly displayed bullshit "9.9 average on Booking.com" somewhere in the foyer.
It’s because booking purchases the rooms wholesale, and typically well in advance of the stay dates. They can offer you a lower price because hotels use them to make their business more predictable.
Highly doubt any Zen master would reprimand you.
Any habit you want to keep needs to be sustainable, if it doesn't fit the way your life works, you probably won't keep it.
They would however most likely encourage you to challenge yourself from time to time when possible to see if you can get comfortable doing a longer session once in a while.
That's a really interesting point. The startup I currently work for only uses a single AZ due to financial concerns (and some performance as well), but I assume we'll have to move to more AZs for reliability.
Would you advise the same for clusters of RDS and Elasticache?
I'm wondering how you would even go about having two separate data sources, how would this be manageable?
Before assuming that your reliability would be increased by adding more AZs, verify where the problems of reliability comes from in the first place. I find more times than not, the down times comes from people applying changes, not when you just leave things running like they are. It's only if the AZ or underlying machines has troubles, that you should start thinking of expanding to other AZs
I've found that for RDS, a writer instance and a hot standby reader instance with automatic failover work pretty well. When a failover happens, you're usually looking at about 30 seconds of downtime, which is "good enough" for most purposes.
30 seconds is pretty good. I worked on an "enterprise" system running AIX and HACMP (IBM's HA software.) A failover event would take minutes... and this was on the same local network.
I no longer experience anxiety to the same degree I did back then, no use of other SSRIs or any other drugs.
This isn't meant to scare people into not trying SSRIs, just sharing my experience. I think had I been more informed of the potential risks and changed my attitude of toughing it out, it could've probably been more beneficial.