New twitter road updates and reopening times now shown in hours, not minutes

[Marc MERLIN]

Dear all,

I've made a couple of changes to the code that runs this mailing list.

1) considering that we're again getting road closures of 3 days or more
on SR88, displaying closures in minutes wasn't very helpful anymore, so
they are now shown in hours and minutes.

2) more importantly, it has come to my attention that Caltrans, in its infinite
wisdom figured that it's ok to post road updates on twitter before or even
instead of their own caltrans site.
Specifically they have been posting estimated times of opening on
occasion (ETO) on twitter, and not the caltrans site.
Needless to say that I sent them an Email voicing how silly it is to
finally be nice enough to tell us sometimes when they have ETOs, and not
be able to post those on their official site, where people are supposed
to look.

Anyway, I've been running this list for around 6 years now, and I've
learned that things don't move fast at Caltrans HQ, when they are moving
at all.
Just reaching someone via Email just took me 6 weeks to get a reply
(Which at least was somewhat helpful), and phone calls went unanswered.

You are welcome to contact them on your own way and encourage them to
post more information on the caltrans site (when they have it), where it
belong.

In the meantime, after a few hours of work, I wrote new code to find
relevant caltrans posts from their twitter feeds, and include them on
this list.
This is beta, but hopefully it'll add more helpful information that
isn't currently present on the caltrans site without you having to
reload multiple sources every minute (my site updates every minute)

Below is the first example of new messages you'll get on this list.
This helpful message about projected closure has yet to be posted on the
official caltrans site. 

Cheers,
Marc

----- Forwarded message from Marc MERLIN <marc at merlins.org> -----

Subject: Caltrans SR88 twitter update

New post on http://twitter.com/CaltransDist10 :

Carson Pass will be closing at 5:30 pm for avalanche control. No estimated time to reopen.


----- End forwarded message -----

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                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/                         | PGP 1024R/763BE901