I've decided to move to San Francisco. Much as I love Boulder, over the past year I've found so many of the people I'm working with or would like to work with are in the Bay Area, I'm making the leap.

Being the data-driven geek that I am, I wanted to understand the rental situation for different neighborhoods before I chose an apartment, so I watched Craigslist for a couple of weeks and collected 160 properties from around the city that met my basic criteria of having one bedroom and accepting a small dog. Once I had those in a CSV file, I could then upload them to OpenHeatMap to get this visualization:

http://www.openheatmap.com/view.html?map=PlectrumsColeridgeDeming

This actually helped me narrow down my search, since it made it clear that SoMa and the Embarcadero area were too pricey, and pointed me towards Mission and Lower Nob as my main targets. Over the next few days I'm going to be trying to pick out an apartment, and then moving right after I speak at Defrag next week.

If you like this sort of thing, you should also check out PadMapper, a Y-Combinator startup that has a great apartment search interface. I need to get them using OpenHeatMap though, I'd love to see their data in a non-map-pin form!