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The vog (haze or volcanic fog) has been very heavy here on Oahu for the last two days.

This morning’s Honolulu Advertiser has a good article about where the vog came from, and how the haze is affecting local residents.

I was on the North Shore yesterday, installing a VoIP phone system for a client. I took these pictures from their site, which has an excellent view of the North Shore and the Pacific Ocean. The horizon is almost completely obscured, which is very unusual.

I have larger versions of each image on my Flickr gallery.

This is what the view usually looks like. I took this picture on 24 August 2007.

From Wired: one of the founders of ICanHasCheezburger.com has revealed her identity, as part of the annual ROFLcon festivities in Cambridge, Massachusetts this weekend:

Until this weekend, [Kari] Unebasami had always elected to remain anonymous, preferring to operate under the pseudonym Tofuburger. “We were getting all these threats from users at [forum] 4chan,” she explained, referring to 4chan’s attempts to claim the cat macro phenomenon. “I didn’t know how seriously to take them. But I’m officially ‘out’ now, and ready to embrace everything.”

Kari and her partners, co-founder Eric Nakagawa and CEO Ben Huh, are preparing an LOLcats book for the holiday season, so her identity would have been revealed on Amazon.com anyway. A quick Google search reveals more information about Kari Unebasami, including her previous employer (Pacific Basin Communications) her Amazon profile, her TechHui profile, and this picture from MidWeek’s night life section.

Kari is from Honolulu. I expect the Star-Bulletin and Advertiser will run the usual “local makes good” stories when they get the time.

Business Week discusses the design process behind the Flip video camera, which has become an unexpected hit. Engineers started with the most basic design they could imagine, and added little else. Users who want a cheap, simple camcorder and who don’t want cables or complicated documentation are buying Flips. It’s the best selling camcorder on Amazon.com.

David Pogue of the New York Times discussed the Flip a few weeks ago, also.

• There’s no power adapter or rechargeable battery. Regular AA batteries are used.
• Want to expand the onboard memory? You can’t. There’s no memory card slot. Flips are sold with either 30 minutes and 60 minutes of storage.
• Downloading the video is easy: an on-board USB jack plugs directly into computers, and built-in editing software pops up to help the user.

Howard Owens has posted a brief review with two videos he shot with a Flip.