It snowed and you got no Emails

[Marc MERLIN]

Yeah, sorry about that.

Turns out Caltrans' online website is under maintenance, and has been
for a while now: http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/roadinfo/sr88

My list and webpage went up in 2010, it's been 9 years already, time flies.

In the meantime, a few things have improved:
- Caltrans will now give warnings at least half the time, usually more,
  before they're planning on closing roads for avalanche safety

- They have a twitter feed that's easier to get push notifications from 
  (sadly it also contains unrelated stuff, and my code filters those
  out)

- they have http://quickmap.dot.ca.gov/ and an android app to show you
  graphical chain controls, because seriously, where is Nyack anyway?

But outside of twitter, they still don't have a good push solution for
road info and impeding closures only, and twitter is not always up to
date with the main caltrans website.

My lists should have sent twitter warnings too, but did not. This was
because twitter blocked my server from talking to them as they
didn't like that I sent a few queries every minute (sigh). For bonus
points, twitter makes it possible to contact them through any means to
discuss the block and get help.
I seem to be unblocked right now, so I've reduced the frequency to 10mn
and re-enabled twitter. We'll see how that works.

For the caltrans site, seems that they silently moved their roadinfo to
https://roads.dot.ca.gov/ 
The way to query it and parse it is a bit different. I'll work on it and
make it work soon.

Marc
-- 
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R.
Microsoft is to operating systems ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/