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!