The best advice you got from successful entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel? "Don't spend." Good luck with that if you're living in San Francisco. Bootstrapping entrepreneurs and everyone else have to live somewhere and if its in the foggy city its getting yet more expensive for many. San Francisco rents increased 10.3 percent in 2007. According to Curbed, that's the highest rate increase in the country. Rents increased only 7.7 percent in 2006 and a mere 3.8 percent in 2005. Over 60 percent of San Franciscans rent, and it may be time to look into buying for those with savings — on the flip side, home prices fell. Remember the good old days before Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion? (Photo by greencandy8888)

Why should the Chinese government shouldn't worry about protests during the Olympic torch run. Local media would much rather cover low-effort displays closer to home, like these activists scaling the Golden Gate Bridge. KPIX has live coverage. [CBS 5]

Blogger Christian Lander, self-appointed arbiter of Caucasian tastes, needles San Francisco's inferiority complex when it comes to New York — as a former Toronto resident, he can certainly relate. Google's algorithm suggests Chinese mail-order brides. True enough.

Jackson West, reporting live (don't tell my boss!) from downtown San Francisco: War protesters have shut down Market Street between Sansome and Montgomery, with smug Berkeley Hills residents gleefully getting arrested. The cops expect to clear it soon. Police have shut down San Francisco's old-money corridor of power, Montgomery Street, between Sutter and Bush, but except for the private building security having upped the menace-level of their sunglass stares, it's business as usual — the House of Shields is already serving drinks. If the protesters were smart, they'd concentrate their efforts at AT&T headquarters on Folsom and 2nd, where stopped traffic could snarl the 101 and totes disrupt your meeting in Multimedia Gulch. That might actually generate some Twitters.

An outrage, a crying shame: Moose's is closing on April 1. The North Beach restaurant and bar facing Washington Square Park is being replaced by some abomination called "Joey & Eddie's." Valleywag is not taking this sitting down at a bar, ordering a Juniper Breeze. We're packing up and moving Valleywag Fridays to an undisclosed location starting next month. Until then, you've got four more shots at our Moose's happy hour, an enduring tradition since January 2008. We'll make our last one on March 28 a blowout.

My gripe about Web 2.0 invites has prickled a few PR 2.0 types who fervently believe that my career will just explode if I sign up to get spammed on Eventbrite. Look, people: In one day, Valleywag nitpicker-in-chief Owen Thomas will typically contact me through (1) email, (2) SMS, (3) IM, (4) voicemail, (5) Campfire, (6) Facebook, (7) Movable Type comments and (8) Tadalist which he uses only because it sounds gay. Usually he wants to remind me that we're supposed to use an <em> to italicize words in posts but an <i> tag in comments. (And I had to fix his HTML in this post, too. - Ed.) So if you sent me a Super Press Release on Facebook, I was too distracted to notice.

Dear Web 2.0 cool kids: I'm one of those people you like to call "OLD" and whom you're sure "doesn't get it." Still, for some reason you want me to write about you for those doomed East Coast newspapers I hang out at. If you want me to attend one of your events, just put the time and place in an email. Don't send me an easily-lost IM that links to a page on Facebook, which requires me to create an account to see the event info. Don't then send me from Facebook to Eventbrite to RSVP, forcing me to create yet another account just to acknowledge that I'm coming. Great, now I receive colorful HTML email daily from these and a dozen other sites that buy exclamation points in bulk: "Shameless Networker is your friend! You have 28 new alerts!" How about if you just write up your next shmoozefest yourself and post it to Digg? That seems easier. (Image by americangreetings.com)

In our "Googler's vent: working here sucks too" post, commenter tengallonhero does some venting of his own:

Last quarter, Google hired 889 people, bringing the total headcount to 16,805. What do all these new employees do? Stab each other in the back, apparently. A tipster writes: "The management within Google, especially AdWords and AdSense (the money making machines of the entire company ... engineering gets the glory but advertising brings in the big bucks) are completely disorganized and chaotic (in a BAD way- because Google sometimes tries to spin the whole 'chaotic' thing in a good way)." There's much more:

The San Francisco Chronicle must be shedding readers even faster than staff. Reportedly, it was losing $1 million a week before shedding 100 employees last May. In order to maintain circulation, the Chronicle is engaging in an extensive telemarketing campaign. For the last few weeks, I've been an unwilling target. I've been called almost daily by an incoherent newspaper peddler who greets me with the gruff demand, "Where do you live?" and offers either a six-week or six-month trial — the mumbling made it unclear. After the trial, the Chronicle is asking a measly $3/week for home delivery. Why not stop badgering me and drop the newspaper off at my door for free, like the Examiner? That seems easier.

San Francisco is the city every manchild with a wee knowledge of Ajax and a penchant for dropping vowels from proper nouns flocks to in the hopes of striking a venture capital goldmine. It's not exactly a revelation that you're all a bunch of greedy louts, but Forbes, in what is no doubt a highly scientific study, has determined San Francisco is the country's second most avarice-riddled city — beaten only by its brethren in San Jose. It's also happens to be the most proud. Who's surprised that Oakland turns up as the sixth most wrathful — that is, gun-toting — place in the U.S.?

An investigative reporter at the Chronicle reports that Burmese pythons could slither their way from Florida to the Bay Area in just 12 years. The 250-pound, alligator-swallowing snakes find our climate congenial, and could arrive sooner if introduced here by irresponsible pet owners. What the Chronicle missed: Unlike other cold-blooded threats to our way of life, Burmese pythons won't drive up rents.

Coddled by close-hovering helicopter parents, Generation Y (of which I'm a proud member) is incapable of taking initiative. (This very post was "suggested" by Owen Thomas, yet I get to take all the credit.) We never had to struggle up multiple hills, in the snow, to get to school, so we lack any true sense of accomplishment. To help managers deal with our overweening self-importance, BusinessWeek has come up with a bullet-pointed Generation Y workplace survival guide. No, it doesn't include anything helpful, like how to use Facebook or Twitter as management tools. It does suggest exactly the kind of boss behavior Gen Y will see right through, once we learn to recognize it. So how do you know if your boss is trying to game you into productivity? Here are the signs:

It's all Scoble's fault. Instead of holing up to write O'Reilly books, software developers are now wasting their time filming themselves talking — awkwardly, unclearly, and usually too fast — about their latest world-changing innovation. How convenient that keeping it real means putting yourself on camera. The result: Dull videos hogged by rambling "geek rock star" narrators waving at blurry whiteboards. Sure it's cheap, easy, and most of all ego-gratifying for the (cough) star. But what about the viewers?

Entrepreneurs. Engineers. Bloggers. You keep asking: Why does a writer like me hate people like you? Nick Denton's new traffic-based pay scale has backfired wonderfully, giving me a few minutes to explain it.

Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's freshly reelected god-mayor, descended into the bowels of Second Life for a quaint fireside chat with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab. What lofty matters could a city mayor and the chieftain of a seamy virtual world possibly have to discuss? Why, the parallels between the "two famously diverse and tech-savvy communities with global profiles," of course. As Newsom said during their discourse, "We're all geeks." But the comparisons don't stop there. San Francisco is exactly like Second Life.

I swear the San Francisco Chronicle updates its front page by replacing the words "Cosco Busan" with "Tatiana" and running the same damn angles again. The Chron's reports on failed systems, beleaguered bureaucrats, and oh-the-humanity handwringing are all framed by the big question: How could this have been prevented? I keep hoping some rival paper will court Valley engineers with a headline like TIGER IN CITY, WHAT A STUPID IDEA.

Save for one very special correspondent's valiant efforts, all was quiet on the Internet at the beginning of this week. The Christians were busy celebrating the birth of Jesus, and the rest of you, your new JesusPhones. It's not grown much louder since. And some, including professional echo chamberist Jeremiah Owyang, are having trouble dealing with the change in pace.

Our article about Peter Thiel, the Facebook investor and rare gay venture capitalist, drew much response. Many noted that gay and lesbian entrepreneurs are not the only ones shut out by the old boys' network of Sand HIll Road. One correspondent, though, captured the experience of being gay in technology's heartland. The problem isn't that Silicon Valley is homophobic — it's that it's suburban. He's not the first gay entrepreneur to file that complaint, but his story's well worth reading. Here it is, verbatim.

A San Francisco woman reported her Honda Civic stolen to the San Francisco police. A few weeks later, she got a parking citation in the mail for her stolen car. Then she got another. And another. In total, her car got ticketed 29 times while being listed as stolen. She called the police and the city's Department of Parking and Traffic, but didn't get any solid answers about the whereabouts of her car, nor why it was being ticketed after being reported stolen. Eventually, she and a friend decided to drive around locations where the car had been ticketed to try to find it.