Views from Medina Road

The winds abated somewhat in my area today, though devastating fires continue to burn down in San Diego County and in the mountains around Lake Arrowhead to the east of me. The easing winds meant all the smoke isn't blowing quite so rapidly out to sea; instead it spread a pall of brown overcast over the entire San Fernando Valley today.

So what's the skiffy, utopian solution to this recurrent problem? Non-flammable, indestructible, houses? That are affordable? Most houses, at least in this part of the country, are still built with wood frames (bricks, obviously, are too prone to earthquake damage), as if inviting to be burned down, eventually.

In other news, Locus is having problems yet again with e-mail service, which keeps dropping out due, it keeps turning out, to some problem with the 'var partition' on our dedicated server at CI Host, that's C I Host, to which I pay a handsome sum annually to maintain said server. These days, a phone number is impossible to find on their site, and their Live Chat never seems to be online, so I resort to posting 'trouble tickets' and sending email. Tell me what I can do if anything to keep this from happening again, I plead with them. They close the trouble tickets with a cheery "thank you!" and never answer my questions. And the intervals between recurrences of this problem are getting shorter and shorter.