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Bill Sodeman writes about management, mobile computing and information systems

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Entries tagged as 'seattle'

Welcome to the crosswalk

rant

Posted Sunday, 3 August 2008

More people are walking into downtown Honolulu these days. I’m seeing more bicycles, mopeds, scooters and motorcycles, too.

Seattle has started closing streets to cars, to help protect pedestrians (see Seattle Starts Car-Free Closures).

In most American cities, the car rules supreme, at least until Google reinvents the electric car (see Google Moves to Reinvent Transportation).

In the interest of public safety, we present the following two articles. Read and learn.

Memo To: New pedestrians, In re: Your skills provides a long and handy primer to basic pedestrian and mass transit etiquette and safety with tips like these:

  • The crosswalk will not protect you from cars.
  • Get a bus pass or have your change ready as your board.
  • Try not to bump other people with that big rolling bag or backpack as you…
  • Move to the back of the bus. Please, move to the back of the bus.

NY State Sen. Carl Kruger proposes ban on handheld devices addresses a new social problem: the distracted pedestrian.

  • Don’t send text messages while you walk.
  • Turn down the volume on your iPod so you can hear the traffic. Oh, I said, “TURN DOWN THE…”

Image courtesy of woesis through a Creative Commons license.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

Tags: bus, cars, driving, Honolulu, mass-transit, rail, running, seattle, walking

Honolulu LOLcats founder Kari Unebasami reveals herself

all

Posted Saturday, 26 April 2008

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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.

ICHC executives, courtesy of Wired

Tags: Google, Hawaii, Honolulu, lolcats, management, meme, privacy, san-francisco, seattle, startup