"Akit is the man. He knows Clipper." (spenta)
"It’s a fantastic blog for any San Franciscan."
(Kevin)
"Your blog is always on point, and well researched!" (Nina Decker)
"Everyone's favorite volunteer public policy consultant..." (Eve Batey, SF Appeal)
"You are doing a great job keeping on top of Translink stuff. Keep up the good work!"
(Greg Dewar, N Judah Chronicles)
"...I don't even bother subscribing anywhere else for my local public transportation info. You have it all..."
(Empowered Follower)
"If anyone at City Hall wants to make public transit better for all San Franciscans, it would be wise to follow Akit religiously...
or, better yet, give him a job."
(Brock Keeling, SFist)

Saturday, February 7, 2009

It's Akit's Complaint Department's Birthday TODAY!

It's a big happy birthday here at Akit's Complaint Department! Actually, its the birthday of my domain name: Akit.Org.

I started Akit.Org on February 7, 2002, and ran it through a simple Geocities web site program. But after many years, the website was total junk, and it really had no real potential.

So, on February 17, 2007, I decided to dump Geocities and started a blog on Blogger. I was really becoming an accomplished opinion writer, and was frequently getting my "Letters to the Editor" published in newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the Golden Gate [X]Press.

I could not really think of a name in the beginning to call my blog, but I thought... well, I do have a lot of complaints that I wanted to express, and influences like George Carlin, and Penn & Teller's Showtime program made me decide to start up "Akit's Complaint Department," literally home to San Francisco's complaints and sarcasm galore.

My first posting on February 17, 2007 was towards the local TV station I hated so much for their crappy programming... KRON channel 4. But a rookie Blogger didn't get much attention those days.

So after two years of writing and 165 postings (not including this one), what's the two most frequent topics I write about?
  1. Muni
  2. Translink
Public transit... if it worked so well, I wouldn't be writing about it! But since it's going so badly, there's always a good posting to write!

Here are some of my proudest moments with Akit's Complaint Department:
  1. Literally being the place to read all the negative reviews of the Outsidelands festival in August 2008.
  2. Making public a disgraceful letter from a condo developer and condo owners association president against a community festival in Japantown.
  3. Targeting government waste, like the anti-Halloween campaign to get people to stay away from the Castro.
  4. Being an "insider" of the Translink program. I was a pilot tester and knew all the ins and outs.
  5. Being featured on SFist, Curbed SF, Eye on Blogs, N-Judah Chronicles, and many other local blogs.
  6. Making a policy change on SF Muni with help from Phil Bronstein of the SF Chronicle about my article on why Muni will not accept "Muni to BART" discount coupons after baseball games. Then catching MUNI in the act ON VIDEO (see below).


I'm happy today that my blog has grabbed a lot of attention. I'm appreciative of the readers who use RSS, Feedburner, Google Feeds, and even e-mail subscriptions to read my insane and sometimes nutty opinions and thoughts.

Thank you to all you readers! Keep on reading!

And oh... I earned my M.A. degree!!!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Congrats on everything! You know that saying, the squeeky wheel gets heard! Terry