It's been several years since we went to the Rose Parade float viewing.  To be honest, I was OK with not going since I don't really like thick crowds, and there were a LOT of people there last time.  92.4% of those people either stepped on my right foot, or stepped in front of me to get a better view (a better view than me, that is)  This year it was not bad.  There seemed to be more open space, so I only ended up pushing a couple of people over and accidentally standing on their backs.  Of course, I did apologize and wipe the dirt off of their shirts when I was done looking at the float and stepped down from them.

Getting to see the floats at the viewing is much more impressive than seeing the parade or watching on TV.  You may be able to imagine the size of the floats, the amount of flowers and plants, leaves, and seeds being used.  But to see the detail up close, like the orange peels that make up an eagles foot, or the pampus grass used as the hair for so many animals or people, or just the shear scale of things like the bugle player who stood 60 feet tall.  That is something you have to be up close for.

  

I created a job tracking site for myself today. I'm already following several RSS feeds of job listings from good job sites, but I thought I'd make a new site that would watch twitter for job listings in my area. I think I like what I've created so far. I'm considering adding an RSS feed and some other navigation features to the page. This is the Inland Empire Job Track Site

I've been working on a new Twitter gadget over the past couple of weeks. It will eventually be the next version of BeTwittered. It's currently available on iGoogle as zoop. It's already a useful gadget, I'm using it as my primary interface to twitter. It's pretty nearly feature complete in comparison to the current BeTwittered, but I'll be getting it up to the exact same feature set, and then adding more. My goal is to make the new version cleaner and to make it simpler to maintain and upgrade. So far I've actually gotten it to work better on very small screens (including my iPhone) and worked out some bugs that BeTwittered still has. The bug I'm happiest to have crushed is in handling tweets-with-very-long-words-that-didn't-fit-in-the-gadget-window. With betwittered, when someone posts a tweet like that, you end up with a horizontal scrollbar and you have to scroll around to read messages. With zoop, only the "offenders" message extends outside the gadget area. More to come as zoop progresses. If you use it and have any complaints or wishes for features, please let me know. Leave a comment here for me. Any suggestions at all are welcome, don't be shy!

A Star Wars nerd, you are?  Enjoy this article about LucasFilm christmas cards, you may: Cool Stuff: 30 Years of LucasFilm Christmas Cards | /Film

Here I am posting about Drupal on my Wordpress based site. Probably ironic only if you are a geek and know what they both are. Anyway, I'm seriously considering moving my sites to Drupal, including this one. Among other options such as cackePHP and CodeIgnitor, I checked out Joomla and Drupal.

I'm really disappointed in all of the options I found.  None seem to be a really nice way to quickly build a site or app while keeping the server and client sides separated cleanly.  I currently write javascript for the client (The view in an MVC) and PHP for the backend and the API's (The controller in an MVC)  I'm really wanting a platform to build on top of, so I'll see how this goes. Drupal simply seems the most promising and the most flexible.

I'll be starting out by simply moving my sites over, which will essentially be blog migrations.  From there, I'll be working on creating modules or modifications that are AJAX and REST API oriented.  I'll probably soon be giving up and learning how to write crap that generates sites from PHP, just like everyone else.  Blech.  Oh, well.  that appears to be the direction of the universe.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in an incredibly small minority that thinks web pages should be written in their native lingo of HTML/CSS/Javascript and that the backend should just be  a service.  Would that entirely destroy the MVC framework economy?  I mean, isn't using the browser as a client view and the server as a REST service an MVC model inherently?  Maybe I'm wrong?  Then comment and start a fun argument with me here.

I'm experimenting with the twitter streaming API. BeStream is currently a real-time stream of everyone I follow on Twitter and all messages sent to them (Not including messages from people with private timelines) It's archiving everything to sqlite database, so I'll have a copy of my twitter stream even when twitter doesn't keep it anymore. There is no admin type interface yet.

TwitterTrak made it into the appStore yesterday. It was really fun to write, but was also an ordeal as learning experiences go. The learning curve was steep going from web apps to iPhone development. It included learning Objective-C (tough, but I now really like it), the basics of how iPhones work, the MVC framework Apple created for iPhone development, and Apple's Objective-C API. I learned a LOT in the month it took me to put together TwitterTrak.

This morning, besides the normal work search routine I've developed, I've updated 32hours.com to include TwitterPing, updated Wordpress and some modules here and on 32Hours.com. I've recently written a couple of new gadgets/apps, and was a bit surprised to realize I'd never linked to my little utility of choice (TwitterPing) to check out Twitters health. Have a nice day on the internets Robert

TwitterSearch was approved by Google and showed up in the iGoogle gadgets list last night. I've been using it a while, and my favorite search is currently "metarobert" (my twitter id) Because keeps up with all of my conversations with people, it has turned my iGoogle page into a bit of a dashboard since I'm also running BeTwittered.

Besides looking for work, I've put in a bit of time writing some code over the past week.  I added a search tab to BeTwittered and fixed some bugs, last night a wrote a little app called BeTrendy that will be a google gadget (waiting approval), and now I'm starting to think about the AIR version of BeTwittered again.  That would give me some wanted exposure to writing desktop apps on Adobe's AIR platform.  I've already written quite a bit of it, and I was def