I have put up a photoset on Flickr of the Balmy Alley murals in San Francisco’s Mission District.

I got a kick out of this great idea for a benefit concert – Sock It To Me: a sock and underwear collection for San Francisco’s homeless program. The only clothing that can’t be given as ‘hand-me-downs’ are socks and underwear. This is where you come in. Check your sock drawer and look for anything with a tag on it, or pick something up at the store on they way.

As part of a unique partnership, AIGA SF and Apple Computer, Inc. have teamed up to give AIGA members the opportunity to show the business community the power of graphic design.
JULY 20: STONE YAMASHITA PARTNERS

I’m way interested in SYP and what they are about, so I’ll be heading to this. Anyone else?

The photo is definitely quaint but still matches our iconic image of how trading (whatever that is; most of us have little understanding of the mechanics of markets or the activity of trading). Maybe we picture men in jackets with numbers on ’em, holding phones and throwing pieces of paper and yelling and yelling. But that era has disappeared as technology has eliminated the need for a central place. Trading takes place in distributed facilities, owned and operated by “banks” (including Morgan Stanley et al) not in centralized facilities owned and operated by exchanges. The Chron today considers the history of the exchange in San Francisco, now a gym.

A 1999 article in The Chronicle reported that only about 5 percent of the 17.5 million shares traded daily there involved personal interaction on the exchange floor.

The romance was ending. Warren Langley, president and chief operating officer of the exchange from 1996 to 1999, wrote in an e-mail that those who had devoted their lives to the exchange “really were in pain as the world of technology and telecommunications made floor-based exchanges obsolete (and made the value of their jobs go away).”

In 2001, the exchange announced a merger with the electronic marketplace corporation Archipelago, eliminating the need for brokers to interact face to face, and sold the trading floor in 2002.

Taxi cab riders in S.F. to get smart ‘passenger’ in back

Starting next week, the first of 200 taxis will hit the road with computer screens offering riders news and listings for restaurants, bars, movie theaters and museums.
The touch-screen terminals are intended to be a convenience. Use is free of charge.
“You can be in the back of a cab and say, ‘Hey, where can we go to dinner?’ ” said John Lazar, president of Luxor Cabs.

Huh? So people get in cabs without a destination in mind, and then they’ll use this system to figure out where they want to go, while the cab is doing what? Idling? Just driving? Sounds like the scenario isn’t well understood by the customer.

Finally an explanation of what the heck those colored sections of water around the SF Bay are – every time I fly in I wonder what it is and how I could find out…

I mentioned to Andy that when you drive around the Silicon Valley you see shallow areas of the San Francisco bay evaporating down to salts and he showed me this cool section of the bay. Now this is a bit different, the red and green colors appear to be due to algae blooms, and since they appear to be in contained areas, they’re purposefully there in order to help ‘scrub’ fertilizers from agricultural runoff heading into the bay. When runoff high in nitrogen or phosphorus hits these ponds, blooms form and the algae consume the nutrients, leaving cleaner water to pass back into the bay. Without this kind of cheap natural wastewater management, the blooms would happen in the main areas of the bay, choking out oxygen and often leading to fish kills and other problems. Red and green algae bloom in response to varying levels of nutrient load and temperature, so I’m not sure if the green algae blooms are in deeper pools or less nutrient rich ones, but that’s my guess as to why the big colored pools are there.

SFist writes about a party I was at! Adaptive Path’s Fourth Anniversary Party…I feel so incredibly cool.