Fnord.

One of the minuses of urban life is traffic. It can be hellish, even though the locally-absurd gas prices have reduced traffic a bit. In particular, I am of the opinion that few things are ruder, stupider and more dangerous than a sports fan on their way to a game. Except maybe that same fan returning home after a few beers and a big loss. Locally, any time there’s a Padres game downtown, the traffic backs up highways 163, 805 and 5 for miles. The Chargers aren’t quite as bad, since Qualcomm Stadium is east a bit, but still a problem, as are things like Fleet Week.

For whatever reason, web-based traffic feeds don’t have any concept of ‘monstrous event with traffic implications,’ though I really wish they’d get a clue. Maybe add a sidebar?

Initially, I had the idea to simply subscribe to their respective iCalendar feeds, and be warned that way, but that’s pretty noisy; all you really care about are home games, but there aren’t separate calendars for that.

Recently I found a solution that seems to work quite well called FuseCal. It can read all sorts of feeds, including graphical calendars (impressive, that) and allows you to filter them via strings. So I have three feeds right now merging into a tag of ‘traffic factors’

1. Padres + “at San Diego”
2. Chargers + “Qualcomm Stadium”
3. Fleet Week (all)

If you have any suggestions as to other events to add, leave a comment, also if you want I can make the feed public. So far I’m pretty happy - this is a free service, it works very well and the merge of feeds produces information that’s hard to get otherwise. Very cool.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 10:51 am and is filed under Geek stuff, Networking, Reviews and recommendations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.