My ISP has warned me that we'll be down for about 20 minutes some time tonight after 10PM PST. Apparently they are going to physically move the server from point A to point B.
If you just have to know more, there is a status page is at their blog, and I'm hosted on “millhouse,” yes, as in Richard M. Nixon [spelling, yech].
Consumerist blog: Southwest Nearly Lets Liver Transplant Patient Die Because He Wouldn't Buy 2nd Ticket.
Yes, you read that right.
Richard Brown nearly died on Sunday, January 21st, thanks to reckless indifference by a Southwest Airlines ticket agent.
A dying hep-C patient, Richard, secured an appointment at the Mayo Clinic. After getting turned down, he was referred to the University of San Francisco.
When he went to board in Scottsdale for California, the ticket agent refused to let Richard fly unless he bought another ticket, due to his weight.
The weight gain is due to water retention because of his failing liver. Richard lives on California Disability Pay and had no funds to pay for the extra ticket. The flight was not sold out.
The ticket agent didn't care when shown Richard's medical papers, saying, “each airport has their own rules and these are ours, no extra seat, no boarding.”
…
Richard, not having access to readily available funds, could not afford to purchase another seat. Indeed, various family members contributed the only spare change they had to give Richard a mere $300 for meals and incidentals. Again, the plea for help fell on deaf Southwest ears.
Richard contacted his mother via a collect call, who in turn immediately called Southwest's customer service, which turned out to be a myriad of transfers and wrong numbers. Customer service agent after customer service agent, each Southwest agent transferred Mrs. Diffey to a wrong number and refused to help, even once to the baggage department in Texas.
Until finally, an agent in Dallas named Becky offered to pay for the ticket herself.
I tried to watch the state of the Union, but watching all the Democrats clap for lines about health care, when the real awful plan is based on robbing working people and defunding public hospitals in NY (where Senator Clinton is from, hmmm) to make tax breaks for healthy yuppies, well, that was too much.
But if you missed the real one, this summary goes down somewhat easier, although it's also painful:
Here's a table, filched from the county elections office:
| 744 of 744 Precincts Completely Reporting |
|
|||
| Percent | Votes | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| YES |
|
56.48% | 84,351 | |
| NO |
|
43.52% | 64,984 | |
| Total | 149,335 | |||
Wait a minute….
Ballots Cast: 150,399. Votes total 149,335.
More than a thousand people turned up to vote for this (or submitted absentee ballots) and voted blank? What's up with that? Isn't that a remarkably high rate of spoiled e-ballots for an election with exactly ONE question on it?
Early voting and absentees broke about 2:1 in favor of the “strong mayor” but the actual number of votes cast was minuscule. Out of 1,050,581 eligible voters, only 42,171 voted in favor, and 23,197 against, for a spread of under twenty thousand. Today's voters should be a little more numerous, but with 281 of 744 precincts counted, we're only up to a total of 95,987 votes cast, and the election-day vote is split almost 50/50, with a slight edge to the “no” side.
If this trend were to speed up just a bit, it might become another nail-biter; at present rates, though, the “no” vote isn't catching up quite fast enough. Since the votes are not evenly distributed geographically, and I have no real sense of who has reported and who hasn't, I don't think the trend means much, so anything could still happen ….
Update: With 5/7 of the precincts reporting, the yes vote is now slightly ahead even with today's voters. The spread remains small — about 22,000 votes — but that's out of only 126,000 or so cast. Voter turnout is well into double-digit percentages, though, so that's something.
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