That decaying building on the corner — haven’t you wanted to report it to someone? Those idiots speeding down your block — can you get the city to install a speed bump? How about that gaping hole in the sidewalk outside your neighbor’s house — somebody could get hurt. Why doesn’t someone do something?

If you’ve ever wanted City Hall to work like tech support, your dream has sort of come true. A new website, SeeClickFix, will take your complaint and create a trouble ticket. More than that, in San Francisco they’ll automatically forward the problem to the appropriate SF Supervisor’s office.

more after the jump

Many San Franciscans have waited a long time for utilities to move underground, at great expense of time and money to each homeowner who was lucky enough to have the utilities undergrounded in their neighborhood. The effort to underground utilities has made the city safer and cleared the skies of overhead wires.

Now AT&T would like to nullify that effort by “upgrading” their services and placing utility boxes above ground, in every neighborhood of the city. AT&T intends to upgrade its telecommunications network to a high-speed data transmission technology referred to as “Lightspeed.” In July 2007 AT&T posted flyers in the Inner Sunset neighborhood notifying residents of its intention to install above-ground utility boxes.

Subsequently the San Francisco Planning Department issued an environmental impact report finding that AT&T could move forward with its plans. AT&T immediately requested a permit from Public Works to begin installation. However, the permit was appealed by a neighborhood organization forcing a hearing before the Board of Supervisors. The Board will hear the appeal at its meeting on Tuesday, July 29th. The Board has the authority to deny the appeal or refer the matter back to the Planning Commission for review.

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San Francisco coder Alex Payne’s downforeveryoneorjustme.com gets a plug in the New York Times tomorrow; the piece went online an hour ago. Payne’s site answers that nagging question “Is there something wrong with (insert favorite website) again?”

In a blog entry in which he discusses that and other side projects, he calls the site “a quick hack” for which “I don’t have the time or resources or desire to build the ideal solution. I hope that some big ISP or networking outfit takes the simple design and puts it in front of a proper setup.”

If that concept sounds familiar, not surprisingly Payne works at Twitter.

With a shoulder that feels ripped apart courtesy of Chrome (that sounds very Valencia Corridor-esque), I’ve been looking for something to carry my items around SF in that won’t require Ibuprofin. That’s right: a backpack. No more shoulder bags; this time around, it’s an off-to-third grade two strap style. I noticed a heavy duty one from Freight Baggage at Freewheel, but the white would last about a week before I tried to leave for work with coffee before getting caught off guard by a stop sign.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time yesterday afternoon trying to track down Freight Baggage’s creator, Travis Poh. An online search for freightbaggage.com turned up one of those pages with a photo of a random lady and an offer to buy the URL. Uninterested in freight shipping quotes as well, I started asking strangers and messengers. “Oh yea,” one told me. “Travis. You can find him on Vallejo toward North Beach. By that cafe. Tell him Frank sent you.”

My fault for not getting enough information (or maybe the fact that it sounded a bit too much like a drug transaction). A Freight Baggage MySpace page says Mr. Poh is 100 years old–no big shock there. I was also told that he’s elusive and overworked. I could order one through a bike shop but it could take more than a month to arrive. Is it so wrong to want to end my search and find the maker in our seven-by-seven mile city?

All I want is a backpack, preferably in primary colors and within the range of my tax refund check. It doesn’t have to be big enough for me to fit in. You can stick that logo with a train car anywhere you want on it. But please, let’s end the search.

I saw that occasional SF Metblogs contributor and relentless self promoter and sex book author Violet Blue is the latest recipient of the tempest in a web teapot award. The LA Times website has David Sarno covering a fracas in which any Violet Blue mentions or posts have been deleted from Boing Boing and it’s archives.

Writes Sarno:

“I’ve been wracking my brain thinking of what issues I might’ve come down on the wrong side of,” Blue told me on the phone. “There’s been no argument, there’s been no disagreement, no flame war, none of the usual things.”

Could Boing Boing really be a Stalin era throwback that wants to erase it’s own history, and somehow have the world to believe the widely read SF Gate columnist doesn’t exist?

At AdRants they speculated a possible conflict with blog ad provider Federated Media, which seemed somewhat unlikely to be involved in editorial concerns (IMHO ) since they supply ads for dozens of popular sites including the Metblogs network.

BoingBoing eventually issued it’s own terse comment and explanation after the web “sh*tstorm” lapped up on it’s serenely acerbic shores:

“[Violet's] posts were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.”

Read the LA times blog, or for a more concise semi ad biz related wrap up read more at AdRants.

Forest Hill Station when it was brand-new in 1917, courtesy of the Western Neighborhoods Project. Sometimes I think one of these would be faster than the 36.

Across the street from Forest Hill Station, there is a damp, cave-like bus shelter with a stone bench inside. One afternoon a few weeks ago I was waiting inside that shelter for my bus, the 36, and not too far away was another regular of the line, an older Chinese man with a casually dapper style. He’s pretty recognizable, as his outfit is consistent from day to day: in his slightly worn suit, his durable leather vest zipped up under the coat, that awesome beret pushed back from his forehead, and the large bifocals that cover half his face, he gives you the impression that he takes care to look good, but not to excess. He’s really got more important things on his mind.

For instance, the likelihood (or not) of the 36 ever arriving on time.

You see, the 36-Teresita is one of those lines designated by Muni as “community service,” which in polite English means “unpredictable.” Unfortunately, it’s the line I live on, so I spend a lot of time waiting on that stone bench inside that shelter, repeatedly prodding my BlackBerry for the next arrival time. Nextbus.com sometimes predicts that I have twenty minutes to wait, but then the next time I look, it predicts forty minutes — meaning a run has been dropped in the meantime.

I poked the BlackBerry: this time it predicted ten minutes to go.

Soon I noticed our man in the beret was talking to a beautiful dark-haired woman. She was slightly distracted by her children: with one hand she was preventing her restless older daughter from wandering into the path of the oncoming buses, and with the other she was giving additional support to the sleepy infant strapped to her chest. I recognized her: as it happened, I’d seen her at Tower Market several months earlier, when she was pregnant with that very child. It was definitely her: she had an unforgettable face.

I checked my BlackBerry again: eighteen minutes to go. So I started eavesdropping on their conversation.
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With all the video games, cell phones, vending machines and ATM’s in our midst, many people would argue humans have lost touch with their wild side forever.

I’ve spent most of my life in metropolitan areas. Though I’ve spent some time on horseback, I’ve spent 95% of my time riding urban public transportation systems instead. I buy my food in boxes, in bags, and heat it at home. Hell, for lunch, I even graze at a salad bar.

A train takes me to my job, which is as far from harvesting my own food and repairing my homestead as a job could possibly be. I work with digital media. CDs and DVDs and the computers that record them are my daily companions. I have an iPod, a few computers, a cell phone, a personal organizer and automated payments. I’m the perfect example of the city-dwelling, half-woman, half-machine that has every day of the week organized to an annoying level.

You could say I’m far from my roots as a savanna-loving homo sapien… you could say that of my co-workers too. So it was pretty interesting to see something quite to the contrary in the middle of my day-to-day technology bustle. I heard quite a ruckus on the bottom floor of our brand-new, giant-sized office. I gazed down from my loft to see a fork-lift pushing a giant machine into the corner of the production area.

Diagonally across from the machinery was the entire assembly crew, staring in wonder. I went downstairs to check it out. A brand new machine that resembles a yellow submarine attached to complete photo-developing station was being hoisted into our midst. It’s a massive tangle of steel and gears, still shining from the factory and looming large over every other machine in our company. I hear tell this was the major reason for moving to our new office. The gaggle of human assemblers were still staring at the great beast.

That’s when I realized what seemed so odd about the bunch…

they were afraid.
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Noc Noc

When my friend told me he wanted to meet up at Noc Noc, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I didn’t think anything of it until I started asking around to see if anyone I knew had been there before. I started to get really excited.

I wanted to know what this cave-like burningmanesque bar located in the Lower Haight that only served beer, wine, and sake was all about.

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We’ve all heard variants of this story before, this time the details are flowing from the courts. If you haven’t seen Pacific Heights and you are a renter in SF, you need to check out this older film. The film’s tagline is: “It seemed like the perfect house. He seemed like the perfect tenant. Until they asked him to leave.”

Now this story from the Chronicle yesterday, SF Landlord Couple plead not guilty…

A San Francisco landlord couple who are accused of waging a campaign of terror at a South of Market apartment building to drive out their renters are the victims of a lawsuit-happy tenant and did nothing wrong, their attorneys said Friday.

This gets interesting in this notable exchange where the landlords attorney ask for a reduction in bail.

“There were no actual threats of injury,” Whelan said, adding of Nicole Macy, “She’s clearly not a safety risk to society in general.”
Peltz said cutting out Morrow’s floor supports put him at risk of injury. He also said the couple had made death threats against tenants.

There was a developer who would burn his own buildings to the ground to get around the permitting process in SF a few years back. This doesn’t seem beyond comprehension that these owners would start to dismantle their own building to get their tenants out.

h/t to SFGate.

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There’s nothing wrong with brown hair, except when it’s on my head. I feel like body parts are customizable cartoon avatars. If my online self has pink hair, then I should too.

There are a few stumbling blocks to procuring your pink hair, though. Drug stores typically only carry colors of the “natural” variety. One must trek to find the pink hair.

In my quest for pink hair, I was pleased to find a weird store, right in my neighborhood, with pink dye and more. Westwood Beauty Supply carries pink dye in many brands, including my favorite, “Special Effects”, and everything else under the sun as well.

These people have extensions in every variety imaginable, belly button rings, eye shadow in bizarre colors, purses, tiaras and just bins of crazy trinkets.

The trinkets look cheap, but they glitter. The owners don’t speak much English, and they don’t know much about hair. But if you know what you’re there for, they might have it and you don’t even have to go to a mall.

And hell, if you’re lucky, their resident copper chihuahua, Cookie, will be on-hand to greet you.

1524 Ocean Avenue
(between Capitol Ave & Miramar Ave)
San Francisco, CA 94112
(415) 586-1421

The MUNI K line stops right at the corner.
They are typically open from 10am-6:30pm, give or take…