To quote Sean Bonner, as he has summed it up well….

Our team of coding lolcats has been hard at work this week and after taunting them with many cheeseburgers we have two fancy new features to show off. Check out the bar just up top there - previously you’ve only been able to see the most recent post followed by the second most recently followed by the third and so on. Now you can see them that way, or by clicking one of the other tabs you can also see them sorted by what has the most active discussions going on in the comments right now, as well as what our fancy internal magic has determined to be the most popular. I can’t tell you exactly how we figure it out, but I also can’t tell you that it’s not 100% based on us throwing darts at our laptop screens or a triple blind survey of kids hanging out at Starbucks on Melrose. Enjoy!

Y’know there’s so much going on in town , I’ve never been able to figure out why when I surface at 16th St. on most every Thursday night there’s a group of hipster spoken word sorta performers & audience types gathered…

Here’s a crappy cell phone foto for proof:

Of course, being less a journalist, and more a shy blogger kinda guy I’m always afraid to ask ‘em, lest I seem an “unhipster” like “duh” dude…

I mean it is “the mission” after all…the kinda place you’re just as likely to bump into a crack dealer or the mighty hip Mayor on New Year’s eve, or maybe even the mayoral coke dealer…

uh, like, who really knows…

But, if you’d like to find exactly wassup with these yakking Bart Station frequenting ne’er do ‘ells and would like an obviously exposed to the various “elements” sorta entertaining time, there’s always a couple dozen verbose folks gathered betwixt 10:00-12:00 most Thursdaze at the stairs there

…go ask em yerself…

Me, I’m bloggin “live” from the Kilowatt and I’m more worried about Friday… and my picks and some MP3z fer yer rock n rollin entertainment pleasure are listed after the jump chump…
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I was driving up Larkin on Saturday around 2:30PM when several squad cars were heading into opposing traffic to corral this taxi full of young guys- like illegally full. I think it’s this robbery spree reported in this week’s blotter. Just imagine- nothing on TV, let’s grab some dough down in the Tenderloin. Oh, and get in a cab to escape. Which happened again this week- some criminals did some nasty stuff then, yes, got in the taxi line at the Hilton on Kearny. Don’t they know it’s impossible to get a cab in this town? Actually, kind of amazed in both instances that they did get one. Police details after the jump.
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kaliya’s laptop stickers

Originally uploaded by Liz Henry

There’s a lot of geeks in town this week; you may have missed them because it’s Pride week as well. Just fyi, the Web 2.0 hipster influx for Supernova & also for Foo Camp.

I had some serious laptop sticker envy at Supernova. Do you like the stickery punk look on a laptop? I had someone either east-coast or middle-of-the-US tell me that laptop stickering was an obnoxious habit of San Francisco / Silicon Valley brats, that it reeks of privilege, as if to say “Screw you people who don’t think of a computer as disposable, I can take a $2000 machine and crap it up with stickers, it means that little to me.” And in fact that just carrying your laptop everywhere is obnoxious and means your survival does not depend on your computer not being at risk for damage or theft.

This point had not occurred to me at all — since I *am* that brat. I love the stickery thing because it takes the uptight business appliance and makes it a beautiful collage. Fine, it’s mostly a collage of corporate logos… but not always. If you think of the laptop as already having a logo on it, why not deal with that ubiquity of branding by taking control of it and getting a handle on it through bricolage?

The criticism is also a bit weird to me because I’ve never heard anyone say that putting a bumper sticker on a car is an act reeking of privilege and yet a car is an even more expensive appliance. So the principle her is, take an expensive thing, and trash it to show you can, and then carry it around with you all the time as a sort of status symbol. I disagree with that perspective because I don’t think it trashes the computer; it decorates it. And I carry the computer around with me because I’m a geek who likes to be online and (often) because I’m working, so it is no more pretentious than carrying a reporter’s notepad.

I wish there were more people who airbrush and etch their laptops and arted them up. Since I am lazy, and also spent my teenage years making dorky “punk” collages, I’m sticking with the stickers.

If you look at the Flickr Laptop Stickers pool, I wonder how many computers there are West Coast, or specifically SF Bay Area?

What *does* it mean?

In the weekly blotter from Captain Dudley, Central District, he cites three common frauds that were run this week:

Guy packing a FedEx box full of catalogs, sometimes a loose wire creeping out of the top, and calling it a “cut rate laptop computer.”

Cantonese speaker selling a beetle that “cures cancer.” Artful moves involves running beetle across mark, then dropping into water where it turns black.

Fake valets. A friend from Seattle turned me onto this one- guys (they have a specific description of this particular guy) who stand with a shiny jacket and a clipboard in a free parking lot, taking money. Kind of brilliant in its simplicity. Quoted bits from the report after the jump.
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Heading out to buy some sweaters for a craft project, and thought I’d compile my planning here. If you have contributions & recommendations please add in the comments!

-Attic Shop-Saint Francis Memorial Hospital Auxiliary
UPDATE: Closed :(
-Bargain Mart NCJW
-Cathedral School Shop
UPDATE: This was the best of the bunch. Small collection with high turnover- they get donations every day it seems. High quality, and not picked over.
-Community Thrift
-Goodwill Industries- 11th St, Clement, Fillmore, Geary, Haight, Mission, Central sorting, Central retail
-Hospice by the Bay Thrift Shop
-Los Ninos Inc (no site avail: 4760 Mission. )
-Mission Thrift
-Neighborhood Discount Store
-Repeat Performance
-S F Tavern Guild Community Thrift Store
-St Anthony Foundation
-St Francis Churchmouse Thrift Shop
- The Salvation Army - Valencia, and Sutter
-ThriftTown - Mission St
Tools, chats & more info after the jump.
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Webcams, they’re not just for YouTube anymore. Justin of Justin.tv has been streaming video live from a camera mounted on his head for the last four days straight, and is roving around San Francisco at the moment. Like the camgirls of yore, the urge to keep watching until something happens is the draw. That, and that this level of hyperdocumentation feels so right at home in this town.

So far today, he’s hit the offices of Reddit, and now appears to be nerding out over Ruby on Rails and fiddling with safety pins. Will he check his email next? Zoom in on another laptop covered in topical stickers? Perhaps then venture outdoors?

If you can’t get through to the nearly constantly overloaded server to catch a peek of Geeks Gone Wild, Justin’s offered up his phone number (415-948-3219) and of course, he’s posting updates to a dedicated Twitter stream.

Now that I’m working in Palo Alto, Caltrain is my pal. It’s three blocks to the station and three blocks to work, with a 5 minute ride in between. The train timing in the morning, though, means that I have a 5 minute window in which both trains go whooshing by; so if I don’t catch the 8:13 or the 8:18 I’m screwed for another hour. The other trains until 9:13 are express trains that skip Palo Alto! Coming back at night it’s the same.

So I’m getting intimate with the train platform and its surrounding businesses. I can go to the drugstore at Sequoia Station and buy toothpaste or whatever, blow some money on a latte, or get a bagel. What I mostly do, though, is watch people and talk with people. This morning at coffee the most amazing woman in a tight puffy pink jacket with fur trim explained the mechanics of her hairpiece to me. There’s no way to describe the hairpiece without sounding melodramatic. It swirled, cascaded, shone, and made me want to twine my hands in her luscious chestnut tresses. Seriously, that was some pornstarlicious hairpiece! I forgot to brush my own hair this morning or even look at it. The other thing I do at the station in the cold grey morning is whip out my laptop and try to get on the Pizza and Pipes free wireless (like right now.)

No matter what, at the station there are always hunky guys in uniforms doing something. Police, security guards, dudes in orange vests and hard hats with a lot of things hanging from their belts like Harriet the Spy. Then there are smug-looking guys with manicures and nice haircuts with laptops and mountain bikes. There’s a category that I think of as “ladies in nurse shoes” who look like they’re going to work in a hospital or doctor’s office, where they’ll change into scrubs. The upper class looking women clutch their sparkly beaded handbags, lips pursed, brave and resolute, as if thinking “I can’t believe I’m actually taking the train!” Safari time, ladies. Me, I might look like I’m playing hooky from the alternative high school but if you look a bit more closely you will see the analogue to the mountain bike guys: a smug-assed GenX technocrat whose laptop bag cost more than the sum total of all the clothes I’m wearing.

On a recent trip to New York I noticed an odd synchronicity of shoes and bags. On the subway, people’s shoes always perfectly matched the social class of their carrying bags. Sneakers went with backpacks. Leather shoes (whether pointy or sensible) went with leather purses or classy-looking satchelly briefcases. And one category always had fancy square-bottomed twisted canvas-handled department store shopping bags, and the other had plastic bags from the drugstore. It was eerie. Here the rules seems a bit more mixed up.

Caltrain itself is lovely. Clean, bright, quiet, roomy, with comfortable seats. The ride through Redwood City reveals the interestingly squalid back of Cosco, a lot of grey-looking auto body shops in the very sweet neighborhood on the other side of the tracks in back of Target, and then the green, green, gated and walled backyards of people in mysterious Atherton. I think really rich Ents live in Atherton. Menlo Park has apartments, apartments, then a scrubby field, then the train station.

On the way home on Friday people all over the train (I walked from end to end) were drinking beer, kicking back, and talking to strangers. Was that special Friday night mojo? Or is Caltrain in the evening always like that?

I’ll have more to say about Palo Alto later.

While most of San Francisco went about it’s business unaware, one of the Bay Area’s most beloved and reviled software apps celebrated it’s 25th year today.

While it has changed the world of architectural & engineering drawings greatly, and saved thousands if not millions of manhours since it’s inaugural version in 1982, few on the streets of San Francisco seemed aware of it’s existence. Those that were aware seemed wary of another 25 years under it’s merciless rule.

In the shadows of the Bay Bridge, where AutoCAD is making possible seamless design changes to a future ” luxury living ” skyscraper now under construction, a muttering wet homeless man seemed unimpressed with the software’s supposed “commitment to visualization and collaboration technologies in order to accelerate the evolution of design”.

While Marin based Autodesk, the parent company, has pledged to “support corporate standards for design” a group of college age “activists” drinking fair trade coffee in a Haight St cafe mentioned “corporations suck” before leaving for Amoeba.

Despite the parent company’s attempt to put positive spin on the events surrounding the program’s birthday, many are dubious that AutoCAD, which dominates the design software industry, is a benign influence in their lives. Some cited this picture found on the Autodesk website as evidence of the program’s origins in an evil netherworld ruled by a cruel blue demon that consumes human lifeforces with a relentless fury.

A group of gun toting hooded “gangstas” that haunt a war torn Western Addition housing project seemed suspicious about the innovations in AutoCAD 07 which were proudly announced by the company’s PR flacks.

More of course after “The Jump”
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Friend sent that to me via chat the other day along with a link to the surreal story of an advertising campaign gone awry. Laughing Squid just posted a good round-up on the story. Wil Wheaton of blogging, Star Trek fame also has a good post. I guess some ad firm thought putting little electronic LED boxes on a bridge in Boston was a good idea, and in no way would trigger a terrorist alert from Homeland Security. Whoops! To m- funny that of all the cities that freaked, it was Boston. SF: no prob, NYC, no prob, Boston- yikes!

FYI this is an image you too can print out as a sticker and put on your laptop, but I would not disgrace my beautiful, pristine, new black MacBook with lowly adhesive.