Today is my first time flying Virgin America. I’m headed to New York from San Francisco. My final destination is Boston but I decided to route through NY and take the Chinatown bus to Boston just to try out Virgin America.

So far its great. Virgin America flys out of the international terminal at SFO. This is the closest terminal to where BART drops you off, so its more convenient than most other airlines off the bat. SFO still doesnt have a bridge from the skytrain to the terminal, so flying most domestic airlines you’ve got to trek up and down the elevator. Virgin America had the desks right next to security and had carpeting and flowers set out, which was a nice touch. There was not a line, and a man helped me through the echeckin while the lady at the first class checking waved a coach passenger to her.

The boarding passes are a sensible size, smslle than usual so they fit in your pocket. They also are very clear to read without many of the codes and lines you get on typical boarding passes.

There was no line at the international security checkpoint at 7 AM, so I was at the gate within 15 minutes of getting off Bart. The gate agent announced that anyone wearing red or with a red bag could board with first class. Because were in the international terminal there is ample seating in the gate area for this small domestic flight.
Virgin America is great thus far.

I looked at the facebook network for La Crosse, WI, my hometown and was impressed that there are 12,856 people on this network alone. People on facebook can belong to only one regional network at a time, so its likely that most of these users actually live in the La Crosse metro region. The city of La Crosse has a population of 51,818 and the metro region has a population of 126,838.

Surrounding cities, like Onalaska, WI don’t have their own facebook network, so people living in these cities are no doubt in the La Crosse network. Regardless, this means that 10% of the population of Metro La Crosse is on facebook.

La Crosse is not extemely tech savvy, but 10% is much higher than the New Orleans, LA facebook score. With 42,789 facebook users in the New Orleans network out of an estimated 1.2 million metro New Orleans population, New Orleans facebook score is a 3.8%.

San Francisco (city, not metro area) scores 15.4% (114,792 users of 744,041 population) and New York is 5.1% facebooked (425,963 users with 8,214,426 population).

It would be an interesting mashup to take facebook network membership numbers, us census data and put them on google maps.

For one of my clients I regularly deal with posting for sale and for rent listings on craigslist to test out formatting issues. Today, after I submitted one post, I got the standard post confirmation along with:

Paid to craigslist 2007-09-27 — paymentID

real estate for sale Total to be charged 0.00

Is craigslist setting up the infrastructure to charge fees for brokered real estate listings like they have in New York? That would be interesting.

Update 9/29 - I’ve also gotten this response from posting rental listings.

Preston and I had the opportunity to have dinner with two members of the freshbooks team. We both use freshbooks.com for tracking our work and billing our clients, and it happens to be one of my very favorite web applications.

Now we’re both pictured on the freshbooks blog. Preston and I ended up taking Mike & Sunir out to Zeitgeist, one of my favorite San Francisco bars, which is just down the street from Espetus, my new favorite San Francisco Brazilian steakhouse.

I went to the I pity the dolls show last month, Preston took this great shot of Lisa and I with a wall of handmade Mr T Dolls.