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Gavin Newsom
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i hate it here
The east coast's love affair with Gavin Newsom
Time magazine gives renewable energy credit to hunky God-mayor Gavin Newsom. None was due. The august journal hails our fair mayor for a nonexistent wind-energy installation:San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom may be known nationally as the patron saint of gay marriage, but back home, Newsom has built his career on things like buying fleets of hybrid vehicles and installing windmills near the Golden Gate Bridge.More »
Tim the IT Guy
Nuclear power? You're soaking in it
San Francisco alone consumes 850 continuous megawatts of electricity during the day. How much is that? The two supersized solar arrays planned for 2013 won't be enough to run SF — they'll produce 800 megawatts total. Gavin Newsom's pet project, the tidal power generator, will only piddle out 55 megawatts — one-fifteenth of the city's needs. Meanwhile, the Golden State's two operating nuclear sites each crank out more than 2,000 megawatts — day or night, high tide or low. What really drives the greenies crazy? They're safe. More »
politics
Gavin Newsom wants you to know he's busy having sex
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom can thank open government sunshine laws for breeding within every hack a dismissive boredom with official communiques, especially when they're delivered in proprietary binary formats within an email attachment. Thankfully, a young hack less jaded than ourselves bothered to open the latest PDF from our hunky God-mayor's communication staff and revealed the following about Gavvy-Gav's plans for today: More »
Mine Flies Higher
Google's other party plane revealed
How did invited guests from the Bay Area for the Newsom-Siebel wedding make it to tiny Stevensville, Montana on a budget and at the last minute? On a private jet from Google, of course. But not the Boeing 767 with the king-sized bed that you've all come to know and love — it was a slightly smaller 757 that revellers boarded at Moffett field. Besides the regular seats, there were reclining thrones and couches mounted along the side of the plane. Larry Page deigned to join the hoi polloi with his paramour Lucy Southworth on the flight back to California. "So warm, lovely and friendly," said our source of the sweet pair with their Hollywood dentistry. (Photo by Cubbie_n_Vegas)
wedding announcements
Gavin Newsom selects Jennifer Siebel as gubernatorial running mate
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is running for higher office again, so it was time for another wedding. The latest bride is actress Jennifer Siebel. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were happy to lend the Google party plane to ferry guests from the Bay Area, so apparently no hard feelings about that whole San Francisco-wide Wi-Fi thing. More »
recap
Jackson West, please come home -- all is forgiven
Why did I let Jackson West take a vacation? While our associate editor was away, we actually wrote something nice about Gavin Newsom — and he only had to save San Francisco from a rogue IT guy to do it! Microsoft's Windows chief, Kevin Johnson, ended up in Sunnyvale, Calif. — but not, as he'd hoped, in the corner office at Yahoo HQ. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg flubbed more media interviews this week, prompting us to suggest he get help. Maybe he could take tips from the Internet-famous Julia Allison, who crashed his developers' conference? More »
social engineering
Gavin Newsom's superpowers charm passwords from rogue IT guy
Remember Terry Childs, the guy who changed the passwords on San Francisco's government IT network the other week? The Chronicle reports that "a team of code crackers brought in from Cisco Systems had been working around the clock to try to decipher Childs' codes, but with only marginal success." Childs has finally given up the passwords — on the condition that hunky future governor (just you wait!) Gavin Newsom come down to the Hall of Justice and get them personally, and then deliver them to the Cisco consultants, not to the city's IT managers. For those of you convinced that taking back the network should've been as simple as rebooting your Mac with a paper clip, read the full anecdote: More »
cleantech
Steve Westly wants Akeena Solar to cash in on Gavin Newsom giveaway
Wealthy eBay co-founder Steve Westly, who campaigned for the Democratic Party's nomination to run against California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the last gubernatorial election, has kept busy by investing in startups like Akeena Solar, and he's not just helping with venture capital. He's also using his campaign's email database to promote the company to San Franciscans, urging them to participate in Mayor Gavin Newsom's solar power rebate program — by buying products from Akeena Solar: More »
Wi-Fi
Philadelphia's Wi-Fi network saved, for now, but the time for citywide wireless has past
After EarthLink abandoned a citywide Wi-Fi project for Philadelphia after only 6,000 customers signed up for the $20/mo. service. Now local investors Derek Pew of Boathouse Communications and Mark Rupp, a former Verizon executive, are planning to take over the network, which will be free and ad-supported. When first announced, the project was on of the largest Wi-Fi buildouts proposed. But after being completed, few users signed up because it was slow, didn't reach far into the city's signature row houses if at all, and was not much cheaper than adding Internet to your cable or phone connection. Earthlink had previously attempted to hand the network off an Ohio-based non-profit. But Wi-Fi was never a particularly good technology for these projects, and it's high time to abandon the pipe dream. More »
5:00 PM on Tue Jun 17 2008
By Jackson West
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3 comments
Latest by N/A: The key to designing successful ad supported wi-fi models is to ensure adequate inventory availability that is aligned with advertiser needs. more »
wi-fi
Gavin Newsom insinuates himself into latest San Francisco wireless Internet plan
The San Francisco Examiner was kind enough to add a quote from visionary God-mayor Gavin Newsom to a short article about Meraki's plans to provide a few free wireless routers to San Francisco residents in order to create free Wi-Fi hotspots in San Francisco neighborhoods. "People act as relays and they are able to be receptors of sorts,” Newsom told the Ex — in a quote that Gavvy-Gave also could have used to describe the local hepatitis epidemic. Meraki's plans, however, won't spread hepatitis-fast: More »
caption contest
The first rule of Hair Club is you do not talk about Hair Club
Hollywood star Edward Norton gleefully shakes hands with San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom at a hearing on green building practices today before the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming on Capitol Hill. Write your own caption, and the winner becomes the new headline. Yesterday's contest drew no winning entries, so do try harder, won't you? (Photo by AP/Lawrence Jackson)
cleantech
Google invests in BrightSource's steam and mirrors
BrightSource Energy, a renewable energy startup that wants to build solar thermal plants which use sunlight reflected from mirrors to heat water to steam and power electricity-generating turbines, has pulled in $115 million. The investment was led by Google.org, Google's quasi-nonprofit arm; VantagePoint; BP; Statoil Hydro; and Black River, and brings the Oakland-based startup's total funding to $160 million. The company has already signed a contract to supply local monopoly Pacific Gas & Electric with 900 megawatts of power by 2016. More »
cleantech
Mayor wants Israeli electric car startup to setup shop in San Francisco
On our hunky God-mayor's "Gavin Newsom for Governor" tour that included stops in donor-rich New York and Los Angeles, a stop in Israel got the excitable pol talking about Israeli startup Project Better Place. The company's plan is to build a network of charging stations for a fleet of electric vehicles in Israel. Of course, there's no actual money behind bringing the idea to our shores yet, so you can probably expect it to become a reality about the same time San Francisco turns on the free Wi-Fi network Gavvy-Gav promised. Can't get enough of the hair? Video after the jump. More »
party report
The future of Jonathan Zittrain (and how to stop it)
Really, I wasn't trying to be posh for the book party Arianna Huffington threw Saturday for Oxford scholar Jonathan Zittrain and his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It." I pulled up to Larry Ellison's Pacific Heights manse in a black Town Car because that's the only vehicle I was able to flag down in North Beach. Huffington, the pundit turned blog mogul, greeted me at the door and extracted a promise of my best behavior before allowing me in. (One wonders what these people think my worst behavior might be, and if they realize how tempting living down to their expectations is.)Stanlee Gatti, the former San Francisco arts commissioner, produced the event, which drew a crowd mixed with the Valley elite, San Francisco politicos, a gaggle of YouTubers, and oddball geek pals of Zittrain. Oh, and some grubby hacks like yours truly. Melanie Ellison, the romance novelist and wife of Oracle CEO Larry, went to high school with Zittrain, it turns out. That's the kind of it's-a-small-world connection the local press corps loves to make a big deal about. But even if Zittrain didn't have this chance connection to the Valley's movers and shakers, I'd think he'd be drawing attention from its inner circle anyway. More »
Gavin Newsom a simulacrum of himself
Art Bruzzone, long time local political commentator and host of SF Unscripted, when I asked what he thought of San Francisco's hunky god-mayor: "Gavin Newsom has become a Second Life avatar."
San Francisco famous is not New York famous
Vanity Fair PR reps hassled Billy Getty, the oil heir, and wife Vanessa, for tickets at the premiere of Gonzo, even though the two were on the publicity email. Billy is the partner of San Francisco god-mayor Gavin Newsom in the PlumpJack restaurant empire, and Vanessa Getty is "our Victoria Beckham," according to SFLuxe, but the well-connected pair went completely unrecognized. (Photo by Drew Altizer via 7x7)
san francisco
Gavin Newsom complains about his Yelp rating
Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman and Nish Nadaraja, marketing director of the local listing site, sat down with San Francisco's preternaturally hunky god-mayor Gavin Newsom. Newsom agreed to the meeting in order to convince Yelpers he's "more hip than the 3.5 stars makes me appear." Before they lobbed him softball questions in earnest, he got to pitch his environmentalist credentials, taking credit for a greener taxi fleet — though his executive order commanding municipal agencies to convert to greener vehicles has stalled, and it was the Board of Supervisors who passed the taxi legislation. All most voters seem to care about is The Hair:The days where I had a little dollop of gel are gone. I'm using quarter of a bottle at a time and I'm not proud of it. And I know that I need help!(Photo by AP/Eric Risberg)
