Views from Medina Road

The wind died to almost nothing today, which is good news since that removes the major cause of the fires' spreading. But, as I drove home from work around 5 p.m., the radio traffic reporter noted in passing that "I'm getting reports of a new fire breaking out in Woodland Hills" -- !!?! -- "near Ventura Blvd and Shoup, no details yet" -- ??!??

That would be about a mile and 1/2 northwest of me. I continued driving home examining the horizon for obvious plumes of smoke... nothing. I even drove up onto a ridge near my house to get a view to the west-- nothing. At home, nothing on the news, or on the SigAlert traffic map, which might indicate a slowdown in the event of some major fire... nothing. Perhaps it was a small brush fire quickly contained? A car fire on along the Ventura Freeway? Don't know. Enough to provide a bit of a scare, though. A prompt to actually do some disaster planning.

Earlier today I saw newsgroup posts to the effect that David Brin, who lives down near San Diego, I'm not sure exactly where, was in an evacuated area but has since returned home.

Meanwhile, the CI Host folks responded in a bit more detail this morning, to the effect that the problems with our e-mail service, due to the 'var partition' filling up, is due to the enormous volume of spam e-mail that's coming in; it overwhelms the server. Mm-hmm. I've wondered for a while now if our explicit posting of e-mail address on the homepage of our site isn't an increasingly foolish practice, *inviting* spammer robots to add us to their distribution lists... And so now I've started removing explicit e-mail links, and have updated the Contact page on the site with roundabout text descriptions of the e-mail addresses to use should anyone who hasn't already dealt with us wish to do so... If that doesn't work, we discontinue the locusmag.com e-mail accounts altogether, and switch to something else -- that's relatively secret.