SF has a public transit problem. Muni has great coverage, but travel times across the city are unbearably long. BART and CalTrain are OK for getting to the burbs, but what if you want to go to the beach? Taxis are only for the incredibly wealthy, and they won’t come to my neighborhood on weekend evenings.

That’s why I created the San Francisco Subway. Completely underground, the SF Subway never gets held up in traffic. I can get from my house to the gym in one stop, or to the datacenter in two. Dogs are allowed, and Fort Funston is only a 12 minute ride from Bernal. Instead of traveling at Muni speeds (5.3 mph!), the SF Subway reaches speeds of 75mph between stops!

I drew the map in Gliffy, so let me know if you want to add a stop or a line, and I’ll send you the edit link.

Filed under: cartography, san francisco, transportation | 1 Comment
Tagged: map , subway

Here is a map of the places the TR crew went in 2007! Let me know which cities I missed!

Filed under: cartography, excursions, transportation | 7 Comments
Tagged: map , subway

This map shows the number of inhabitants per doctor in different parts of the world. In Cuba, the ratio is 170 to 1 and in certain parts of Africa, the ratio is 50,000 to 1.You can see a larger map here.

(via strange maps, which contains lots and lots of interesting maps).

Filed under: cartography | 0 Comments

I’m afraid these images speak for themselves … gotta love Vegas.

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Filed under: cartography | 0 Comments
Tagged: wtf???

They say a picture is worth a thousand words … it’s closer to a million for this map I made illustrating where my college friends live:






I’ve known forever that I’m somewhat bicoastal, but I’ve been lazy about flying and I hate airports. But looking at this map a few times reveals the undeniable truth: I’m bicoastal forever and there is no way for me to be happy without traveling a lot. In terms of center-of-social-gravity, it looks like NYC is the place to be. Luck you New York friends! That’s where we’re gonna party ….

Link to Friends map on google maps

Filed under: cartography, lifehacking | 0 Comments

I’ve always been looking for some way to store, display, see and manage my maps so they were stored out of the way but not hard to get to. And no folding. I hate folding. This has been for years and last week I threw up my hands and just decided to order the first thing I found on the internet.

I had to back down off of that because the first thing I found costs $1249. It was then that I began to understand that this might get a little pricey. Even finding poster display hardware was a pain. Google search “poster display” and let me tell you … you’re not going to find anything that helps you display your posters.

So I opted for the EB-200 “Econobin” at a mere $200. I know as soon as I post this someone is probably going to tell me I can get the same thing at IKEA for $79.99, but whatever …. I like the industrial look. And this thing is built to last, it’s going to be the only thing left in my apartment after The Big One

The ECONO BIN arrived wrapped in so much packaging I had to play like a field medic and cut it all off. It’s made up of decent square and round powder coated steel tubes.

Here is The BIN assembled with the copious packaging in the foreground. I bet the UPS guy was glad I came downstairs to meet him and drag these boxes up myself.

And here are some extremely organized maps. Shown here are the SFBC Bicycle Map, The NYC Subway Centennial Map of 2004, and the AAA Baja California Travel Map.

Naturally I was kind of smoking crack when I bought this thing. It’s way too big, awkwardly shaped and doesn’t fit anywhere. But I like it and I’ll get to see my maps a lot more now. And I have a map bin in my house !!

Filed under: cartography, lifehacking, no code | 0 Comments
Tagged: toys

So I’m kind of bummed that I missed all the bikes that zipped through the Bay Area for the Tour of California last weekend (my mom was in town and it was Chinese New Year so there was family stuff to tend to) but I just discovered that I can follow all the other stages live from this nifty web app. I don’t actually follow cycling and have absolutely no idea what’s going on (there’s some information overload happening on this app)…but I like looking at photos of the landscape because it gets me psyched for June when I’ll hopefully make a similar (but shorter and muuuch slooooowwwer) trip down the coast. It also gets me psyched for the weekend so i can go on a bike ride!

Filed under: cartography, cycling, design | 1 Comment

I’m not sure why I don’t read the Wooster Collective blog every day. Every post is a work of art! Some of my recent favs: huge pieces, small pieces, post-it note jesus, paper sculpture, and this beautiful story:

Yesterday, Nico woke up in his flat in Split Croatia. On his closet door was a map created by his girlfriend, Andrea. The map showed different places for Nico to look as his took his usual route from his apartment to the academy where he studies.

What Nico found was an elaborate love poem done on the streets of Split by Andrea. She had put up stencils, paint, aerosol, collage wheat pastes etc. with last piece reading…. “i love you”.

Link to pictures of Andrea’s project.
Link to Fly me to the Moon on the wiki.

Filed under: cartography, inspiration | 2 Comments

I received a curious email today. This morning his website said “I am the 5th …” but now it says “I am the 6th known person to walk around San Francisco Bay.”

Link to some pretty cool info about the Yay Area

Filed under: bay area, cartography, excursions | 2 Comments

Map from CNN, via a deleted mefi thread.

Filed under: bay area, cartography | 1 Comment

Shag noticed that someone had used a bit of tape to alter the street sign for Dore Street (parallel to 9th and 10th, and between Folsom and Howard) to read Dope Street. He then noticed that Google, Yahoo, and Mapquest all mark the street as DOPE in their online maps! In fact, if you lived on Dore, you could tell people you lived on Dope St and they could use Google Maps to get to your house :)

Dear lazyweb: Can someone with a functional camera go take a picture of the Dope Street sign? Thankee!

Filed under: bay area, cartography | 6 Comments

Here’s a neat app I found on O’Reilly Radar today. Rentometer is a Google maps mash-up that tells you what the average rents are for your location and the type of apartment you have. It’s got a really clean UI and is super easy to use.

Speaking of apartments, I finally found a new place after weeks of stressful searching! It’s smaller than my current place and needs a bit of fixing up…but it’s in Bernal (on Park and Andover) and also ridiculously inexpensive, so I’m happy. yay! i get to play with zara more often! :-)

Filed under: cartography | 4 Comments
Tagged: apps , neat

according to this neat applet that lets you visualize your website as a graph. I forget what these types of graphs are called (tree graphs? it looks kind of like a dandelion to me) Anyways, here’s what the dots represent.

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
grey: all other tags

Some graphs for other sites are over here.

(via Drawn!)

Filed under: cartography, design | 2 Comments
Tagged: neat

ZeroOne is an international art & technology festival that’s happening in San Jose this week so my office is taking the day off tomorrow to check it out! Since I was enlisted to organize the day out, I thought I’d post some of the things I culled over here too (these are sort of biased towards location based, sound, and telephony projects, cause well, that’s what we do at work. But there are lots of other neat projects to check out!)

At the San Jose Museum of Art as part of the Edge Conditions exhibition

• Listening Post
  is an “art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.” Sort of like We Feel Fine but amplified!

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Filed under: cartography, design, science, tronix, upcoming | 6 Comments

As a bit of Blatent Self Promotion, I’ve uploaded some pictures to a Slide Slide Show :-)

It’s good to be back! I had a fantastic time with Sati and Melody in the Escalante National Monument. Even the bad stuff was good :-) Thunderstorms came in and washed out huge chunks of Hole in the Rock Road (which we now call Hole in the Road Rock), we had to dig Sati’s CRV out of mud, water and even quicksand. Yes, real quicksand!…..what fun!

Link to Los Pares Extremos.

Filed under: cartography, inspiration | 2 Comments

This looks interesting. Bio Mapping is a project by Christian Nold, an artist in London, that “allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)… a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location.”

This can be used to plot a map that highlights points of high and low arousal. By sharing this data we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.

David Smith, a writer for the Guardian, has an account of how it works over here. Maps like this become even more interesting I think when you begin to overlay information from other maps like this one.

(via SmartMobs)

Filed under: cartography, design, science | 1 Comment