Our Free Coffee February campain has been going... not so great. Business is up a bit, but still not enough to put us in the black during morning hours even if we weren't giving away the product for free. Most of our new customers are the local homeless, and a big portion of the rest seem to be Groupon-trained bargain-hunters who are unlikely to convert to paying customers once it's no longer free.

So that's frustrating.

Construction has actually begun -- slowly and tentatively -- on the second floor of the pizza place. So far that has just been the installation of sprinklers and the re-locating of some ventilation ducting, but hopefully real construction, meaning the new bathrooms, will begin by the first week of January, uh, this week, uh, maybe next week.

There has been no recent progress on getting the permit that will allow us to open up a door in the wall. We won our hearing with the Planning Department last month, and today was the day that the "appeal period" expired, so presumably that stack of paper will now slowly and laboriously wend its way from a desk at Planning to a desk at Building Inspection, where it will sit in various piles on a series of desks for several months until it is properly seasoned with dust and shame. Only then -- which will probably be late May -- will it have the series of rubber stamp marks on it that will allow us to get a construction permit for the doors and various related things.

We started this process in February 2011, you will recall. It is now February 2012, and we have only just been allowed to swing our first hammer.

So that's frustrating.

Here's an article about SFPD and the Entertainment Commission talking (vaguely and very passive-voice) about possibly some day more heavily regulating party busses.

"If they regulate, there's going to be a loss of revenue in San Francisco because people will start going to San Jose and other areas like that," Bhullar said. "They have to find the buses that are illegally operating. I think you will get 30 to 40 percent less party buses if they check whether they have proper licenses to operate."

Good riddance? This wouldn't make any difference to us, because we don't ever allow them to stop at DNA in the first place. Party busses are a blight. Their passengers are always complete amateurs who arrive not only drunk, but drunk beyond their abily to handle it; they don't know how to behave in public, since they do not go to clubs regularly, meaning they will irritate and alienate all of your regulars; and they expect to get in free. So, they make a mess and you don't make any money on them. Any venue that allows a party bus in is crazy.

Recent photo galleries: Death Guild's h.Naoto Fashion Show; Mortified's sold out Doomed Valentines Show, and Blow Up's Stretch Armstrong, Drop the Lime and Classixx parties.