Articles
What to do in a power outage
You may remember the days of rolling black outs; geographic areas where the power is cut temporarily to give relief to the electric grid when there isn’t enough power.
There’s a cool website where you can be notified in advance of a burdening on the system so you can take action, turning down the power usage to help avoid the rolling black outs.
Go to FYPower.org to sign up for feeds AND get information on energy saving programs, appliances and rebates.
What happened to my car?
According to the parking guru, there is a little known law in San Francisco that cars parked for over 72 hours in one spot on the street, even if it is parked legally with a neighborhood sticker, is considered abandoned. Worse yet, the car won’t just sit in the impound lot indefinitely, it will get auctioned off!
Perhaps you’ve gotten lucky and not been towed and impounded after having parked for more than 3 days. This is generally because DPT doesn’t always enforce it unless the car stands out in some way; being stripped, burned, or stolen. A disgruntled neighbor can also report the car, so be careful not to block those driveways!
If you are going to leave your car for more than three days in a row, make sure you park it off street, or have a friend watch out for it and/or move it to avoid that nasty surprize!
Find a parking place in San Francisco
You might need this for Black Friday!
Here’s a cool app from SF Park that will give you a map of SF Park Garages, prices and availability. It’s available by text message as well as mapping on your smart phone, either iPhone or Android.
The app gives real-time information on available parking places and rates. Here’s where to find out more.
Spare the air
I’ve noticed in recent years that Spare the Air Alerts are happening a lot more often-that’s when air quality is poor and people are encouraged to stay indoors and reduce poluting activities such as driving and burning fires in the fireplace.
Rather than wait til it comes on the news, you can find out in advance by signing up for Spare the Air Alerts via email or phone.
Go to SparetheAir.org to sign up and find out when not to use fireplaces, when your car should be left at home. Winter Spare the Air season runs from Nov. 1 to the end of February, although, occasionally, a Spare the Air event can occur outside those dates.
The best solution is to be thoughtful about air polluting activities everyday, by cutting down on car trips, carpooling, taking public transit and reducing the use of fireplaces.
Search for property listings on your smart phone
I’m excited to announce that the Zephyr Real Estate Search iPhone app is now available in the iTunes store. Our MLS-powered app lets you search all available properties in San Francisco. It’s the ONLY app that allows you to search by specific neighborhood, rather than just by zip code. With our GPS-powered app, you can also search for homes near you, or set your own search criteria, and get full details on all the properties. Create a free account for even more features like saving favorites, getting new listing and price reduction email alerts, searching sold properties, finding additional properties not shown on public websites, creating a custom multi-property driving tour with our exclusive Home Tour tool and more.
Hey everybody, come on get happy.
Remember ‘The Partridge Family’? Here’s your chance to own your very own bus.
This one happens to be a SF Bus from 1969. But hurry. Only a day left.
Fight your parking ticket
Interesting news from the SF Parking Guru, David from FindingTheSweetSpot.com
With the City of San Francisco ramping up their efforts to raise capital by increasing their presence to write parking tickets, this news is 
particularly interesting. Have you received a parking ticket for not curbing your wheels? Seems that you can’t (or aren’t supposed to) get a ticket for streets that are a three percent grade or less. How do you find out what the grade is? Go to the surveyed streets of San Francisco at the DPW website.
For other tips, or to sign up for the monthly tip, visit Finding the Sweet Spot. It’s a great resource.
When to buy new technology
Here’s a pretty cool website decide.com geared to helping you decide whether to bite the bullet and buy that new TV, laptop or camera.
Decide.com home screen
You can also vote for new upcoming categories. It will let you know whether you should buy now, if prices are going up, or whether not to, if a new model is coming out soon. Check it out, it’s pretty neat.
San Francisco Crime Statistics
There’s a new spot you can check out crime statistics; Trulia. Trulia is a real estate website that caters to real estate consumers; giving them the chance to search listings, get real estate information and ask real estate agents questions.
As for the crime statistics, they pull that from the San Francisco Police Department, so it is updated whenever the police department does it. Each map looks a little different. The Trulia map is pretty well done on a citywide level-set up like a heat map that you can click on and drill down into specific areas. The other two, CrimeMapping and CrimeReports give information based on your input of an address onto the site. And then there is Megan’s Law where you can see if your neighbors are offenders.
Here are some sites to check out crime statistics;
www.crimemapping.com/map/ca/sanfrancisco
Cutting waste in government
Here’s a heartening story. Three Bay Area agencies are planning on buying a building together to save operating costs and energy. I sure the like the sound of that. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Bay Area Quality Management District and the Association of Bay Area Governments are teaming up to buy a building together. Now all that has to happen, is the board of each needs to approve the purchase. Formerly Pacific Postal Credit Union, the building is at 390 Main St. in San Francisco. As near as I can tell on Google street view, here is the building. Very convenient to the future Transit Terminal. 
