Ivan Sagalaev @isagalaev@social.seattle.wa.us

If you've been to San Juan island your probably heard the story of an orca mother grieving about her stillborn baby. Well, looks like she's okay now :-) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/07/tahlequah-the-orca-famous-for-carrying-her-dead-calf-for-17-days-gives-birth-again

… and so I'm a Comcast customer now.

Seeing how my ADSL connection effectively stopped working with the school year about to start, it looks like I'll have to succumb to Comcast. After 15 minutes on their site I'm already livid with rage at the sheer arrogance of their "offers". Fuck monopolies!

"Seattle will permanently close 20 miles of streets to most vehicles" https://electrek.co/2020/05/08/egeb-seattle-close-20-miles-of-streets-vehicles-coal-creek-power-station/

I don't live in Seattle itself, but I remember those narrow streets. They are a bitch to drive through, and I wish my GPS navigator wouldn't use them at all. So yay!

Hey, I'm looking at donating somewhere north of $1000 and I need suggestions as to where it might make the best impact. #covid19 related, of course. My first idea was https://philanthropynw.org/wa-food-fund which is Jay Inslee backed initiative including several food-related funds (AFAIU). What do you think?

Rain, finally! It's good to be able to skip watering my garden patch for a day :-)

Also, this is the second month in this year, along with February, which is said to be the most dry over some dozens of years. Is t climate change or just a coincidence?

"WA, OR and CA will work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies."

https://twitter.com/GovInslee/status/1249777159339511808

This sounds rational and sane. I kinda like where I ended up within this country by a complete accident.

Washington Department of Health explains problems with their #covid19 page. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/DelayDataPosting.pdf

Apparently there are way more difficulties apart from a bloated dataviz tool, although they specifically mention this problem: "We are also working to optimize the user experience for this data, including for those without a high-speed connection or those working from a mobile device."

So despite fancy graphs on DOH #covid19 page kinda-sorta slowly working, the main problem is that data stopped being updated. Today on March 31st it's still showing data from March 28th. Before the dataviz change DOH updated the stats at least once a day, and sometimes even more often.

https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus

To be fair, it did load after a while. Still, it would work way better if it were static data on the page, transformed into graphs with JS. But at this point I have to admit that I can perfectly well understand that it might have been the only way to deliver it quickly, rather than teach whatever system DOH runs on to consume generated data automatically.

Washington department of health used to have plain tables with numbers on their #covid19 page: https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus. They *worked*. It's hard to make a static table not work.

They just replaced them with something dynamic subtitled "Microsoft Power BI". I say "something" because it doesn't work, and I don't even know what it is.

Probably someone at Microsoft scored some contract though… Well, good for them.