Mostly Code Red — And That's a Good Thing

It's "Tier Tuesday" in California. That means an update to the state's Covid-19 risk assignment tiers. The headline this week is that most of the state has gone into Code Red... and that's a good thing! (Why? Because red is better than purple, and purple is the highest Covid level... for now.) Here's this week's chart:



Just from a glance at the map you can see that "most" of the state is now in the red tier. I quote "most" because geographic representations can be misleading when what we really mean to count is people. But look at the statistics block: now nearly 90% of the state population is in Red Tier or lower.

The second headline I'd give to this week's update is that one SF Bay Area county, San Mateo, has dropped to Orange Tier. With a population of over 750,000 they make up most of the state population that's in Orange Tier. Some news coverage, for example this KRON 4 article today (16 Mar 2021) calls this the first area county to reach orange, but actually Santa Clara (my county) was there before... back in October, before disease rates started climbing rapidly in November and basically the whole state went to purple— and worse.

Lockdown Day 365: One Year Retrospective

One year. One full year. We've been in Covid-19 lockdown for 365 days. A year ago today a first-in-the-US lockdown was ordered for millions of residents of the San Francisco Bay area. It took effect on March 17— Lockdown Day 1, as I called it in my blog.

One year later, where are we? Well, there's light at the end of the tunnel, as I've written a few times recently. What I mean by that is that there are vaccines. They've been out for 3 months now. Though distribution isn't ramping up as quickly or as orderly as I hoped 3 months ago, we're still ahead of where I thought we'd be a year ago. A year ago I thought it would take until at least now, and more likely this summer, to even develop a vaccine.

Dreamwidth and LiveJournal

I've been keeping up my blog on LiveJournal. I moved over to Dreamwidth a few months ago because friends were here and I could crosspost to LiveJournal (to maintain a consistent history of my blog). Now crossposting to LJ is temporarily broken. Each attempt delivers the following error message to my inbox:

Crosspost to canyonwalker@LiveJournal failed.

Failed to crosspost entry to canyonwalker@LiveJournal: Client error: Your IP address is temporarily banned for exceeding the login failure rate.

While at first glance the error message may look like a problem with my password— because it refers to "Client error" and login failure— it's actually something on the DW server side (the client that tries to login to LJ) that's screwed up and gotten itself on a denyList.

I filed a help request with DW two nights ago, noting the problem had already been happening for two days. I waited two days before opening a case thinking maybe the problem would clear up as getting denyList'ed would be temporary. But it's still happening. And DW staff have not responded to my ticket yet.

...Not that I expect much from DW at this point. My last ticket was "Feature X doesn't work as listed in the FAQ, how do I use it?" and took almost six weeks to be answered... with "It's actually not implemented at all." 🙄 And when I search for other tickets related to crossposting problems I find open tickets describing them same problem from as far back as 4 years ago that were never answered. 😨

I'm having serious second thoughts about sticking with this platform. It's got a feature set similar to LJ circa 2008 and volunteer maintainers who are mostly MIA.