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Oakland's Fox Theater ready to reopen Friday - Inside Bay Area

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More at Oakland Tribune : “Oakland's Fox Theater, the 81-year-old grand dame of a movie palace, born at the start of Hollywood's Golden Age, is back in business. The downtown theater, closed since 1970, will host a $250-a-ticket reopening gala at 7 tonight (the show is sold out). Then on Friday, the venue will swing open its doors to the general public as it presents legendary SoCal punk band Social Distortion in concert. Thirteen other shows already have been booked for the Fox, including Michael Franti and Spearhead on Saturday, Modest Mouse on Feb. 22 and B.B. King on April 16. The musical acts will be only part of the draw for concertgoers. Some will come out of curiosity, for the chance to finally see the result of the $75 million restoration project. What they'll see should surpass all expectations, a theater that arguably is as grand and gorgeous as any in the nation. "Everyone who has put their blood, sweat and tears into this project can feel so proud in what ...
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Zennie Meets Renetto's Business Friend - Small Vlogger World

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This is right out of the small world file. I happened by accident to be sitting next to a friend of Renetto, one of the first "big" vloggers, or vloggers who got big, at Gaylord's Cafe in Oakland today. But we were talking about how small the world is, so I put it on video! What we talked about as well was the small world of video-bloggers and how much enormous potential the industry -- I can call it that -- has. We also talked about the ways vloggers were trying to improve the way community is developed among vloggers online and offline.
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Councilmember Pat Kernighan On Oakland's Economic Crisis

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At the press conference explaining the settlement between the City of Oakland and the Oakland Housing Authority I talked with District 2 Councilmember Pat Kernighan about Oakland's Economic Crisis. In our talk, she explained that $38 million was cut from the budget, but that she expects to see a shortfall of about $50 million by the spring of 2009. She explains there was "no choice" in the cutting decisions that were made. Either layoff people or everyone takes a paycut. They opted for the latter. On a happy note, we talked about how Lakeshore had revived, the Grand Lake Market on Saturdays as well as Trader Joe's and the number of new restaurants opening in downtown Oakland. This talk was before the BART shooting, as a note.
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Comcast Cable Has Terrible Service; Oakland Should Cut The Franchise Agreement

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Comcast Cable has enjoyed a long standing franchise agreement in Oakland, which is why it seems every apartment has the service at the exclusion of any alternative.  That monopolistic setup has led to some very bad behavior on the part of the cable giant.   For example, Comcast has a system where if one is late for a payment, then pays it to get current, they still count a penalty charge for the number of days the payment was late, which is charged on top of what is owed but does not show up until months later.   In other words, you could late pay, think your bill is current, then three months later be informed that you still owe them for past months, even if you thought and they told you that you were current. It's a very weird billing system that does not serve customers well and could cause customers to think Comcast was scamming them.   That's why I stopped Comcast and went to satellite service.  I'm of the view that I should not have to pay to get a c...
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