Look how great the Muni service was back then!

This video was allegedly filmed a week or so before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The filmmakers mounted a camera on a San Francisco streetcar and went all the way down Market Street to the Ferry Building. Aside from the obviously amazing things in this footage, I was also struck by how frequently the streetcars ran. They're almost bumper to bumper! Anyone who's ever stood i the wind on Market Street waiting for the F car knows that things have changed a lot since then....

A few notes about 2009...

I have mixed feelings about 2009. In some ways it feels like a lost year. It went by really quickly and I feel like I'm in the same place that I was last year...only with more clutter and less money.

Good things happened, but bad stuff happened, for sure. Let's get that out of the way first.

On the personal level, some of my friends died, some of my friends' parents died, I got ripped off by an evil businessman, I had family issues, I was often sleep-deprived due to a noisy downstairs neighbor, and my workplace was a tempest.

On the larger front, lots of people suffered financial hardships this year while others ran off with the money and got away with it. The war in Afghanistan got bigger. Services got cut everywhere while prices kept going up, and the "change we could believe in" from 2008 turned out to be barely noticeable nuances brought to us by the same people who gave us the last 10-15 years.

But now here's a few good things from 2009.

* Creative Commons music and netlabels are really flourishing. Take a look at Phlow Magazine's advent calendar (with guest music curators) for 2009 and sample the vast amount of good music that's coming out on the 'net. You really don't need radio anymore.

* My city (San Francisco) implemented a law that requires you to separate your trash from your compostable food waste with separate bins. I found this practice really easy to adjust to (though messy!) and along with recycling plastic, paper, and cans every week, I feel less wasteful. It was really easy to do.

* Several people that I know found their groove this year. They finally pursued their creative dreams and started doing what they felt passionate about, and it worked for them financially and psychologically. Kudos... I raise my glass to you.

* iPhone apps! Thank you for the second year in a row to the developers who made cool applications for iPhone...I can conjugate verbs in French, look up bus/train schedules, play word games, read Facebook and Twitter updates, tune my guitar, monitor my calorie intake, manage my project database, discover new music on Last.fm or Pandora, check news around the world, and of course send email, find maps, and all the usual wonderful stuff from the same little device.

* Farmer's markets -- they're nothing new, but in 2009, they started popping up in more neighborhoods and more towns than previously, and it's been a wonderful thing to go back to the basics and buy real food when it's in season from local growers.

These are just a few things I can remember that made 2009 look better than 1999 for me.

So here's to 2010, whatever may lie ahead. Onwards!

Things I Love About Living in SF

Tonight I was riding on the Muni metro and I was playing a game on my iPhone called "WordWhirl." It's one of the many free apps and you don't have to be connected to the Internet to play it...you just need to make as many words as possible out of a letter scramble in a prescribed amount of time.

Anyway...

The train was very crowded. Suddenly I heard a guy say ...."chosen."

And I realized that he'd guessed the 6-letter word that I was missing in my game. I had less than 30 seconds left. I looked at him. "Thank you," I said. "I couldn't help it," he said. We then discussed our favorite online word games until my stop came up.

This is one of the reasons why I like living where I do...

MuniMe

It's been awhile since I've had to take the Muni Metro system during rush hour, but today I needed to go downtown at the height of the commuter hours. And with the increased use of the transit system over these past few months -- that is, with people finally figuring out that public transit is a saner option than driving a gas-guzzling automobile around the bay area -- I was hoping that Muni was stepping up to accommodate the growing masses. You know, decreasing the time between trams, increasing the number of cars attached together during heavy commute hours...making the system more tolerable, rather than a chiropractor's dream come true. I'm a huge advocate of using public transit, having used it most of my life--I'm practically a cheerleader for trains, trams, and buses. And I want San Francisco to rise to a higher standard. (Think: Zürich.)

Here's a photo of what I was greeted with today when I entered the metro station....mind you, the tram cars were already full with passengers on arrival...let's hope there was a good reason for this.