Check out my guest post at Ciao Bambino!

I wrote about vog recently and the article is out in the current (August 2009) Honolulu magazine.
Here’s how it starts:
It comes on the Kona winds—the dreaded yellow-brown haze of vog that makes eyes burn and lungs protest. On the Big Island, of course, it has done far more damage. How bad could it get? And what do we really know about vog and its effects?
Three-thousand, eight-hundred people lived on Miyakejima, a small island off Tokyo, until one day in September 2000, when the Japanese government ordered the island evacuated because …

Oh my, how fun to read.
From the New York Times:
Poetry in Motion
By DANNY HEITMAN
Published: August 15, 2009

Baton Rouge, La.
IT seems that we’ve done just about everything to get the American auto industry out of the doldrums. We’ve forced bankruptcies. We’ve exchanged cash for clunkers. But have we tried poetry?
The question is brought to mind by the story of Marianne Moore, the famous American writer, who served for a brief season as the Ford Motor Company’s unofficial poet laureate…. (Read the rest here.)
Imagine, Ford Motor Company called up the poet Marianne …

Wow, this article, which my Twitter friend Pierre Omidyar posted about today,* really resonated with me.
It’s called:
 
and it’s by Paul Graham, and it starts like this:
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several …

Today is Day 2 of working outside of my home. I got a lot done yesterday, and am working on doing the same today.
I hope that in my last post I didn’t give the impression I have just been waiting for my daughter’s first five years to fly by so she’d be in kindergarten. They have been the best five years of my life, and I have so enjoyed being with her, watching her learn, playing with her.
In fact, I am a little bit mourning the loss of our …

My daughter went to her first-ever day of kindergarten today. It’s actually a sort of kindergarten orientation — two weeks of mandatory summer attendance where the kids get accustomed to their teachers, their classrooms and the routine, before jumping into school when it starts in August.
But it sure felt like real kindergarten this morning, as I walked her into that bright, cheery and busy classroom, and we put her change of clothes and sleeping blanket in her cubby, and learned where her box was for messages from the school. 
“Hi!” said …

Have you looked at my category at the top of this site? You know, where it says Copywriter?
I’m  never quite sure what’s best to call myself. Elsewhere, I have “writer and editorial consultant.” Which is clearer?
What I do is write for businesses.  

Here’s what you’d find if you read my Copywriting page:
These days it’s especially important that your business stands out. That it gets noticed. How do you make that happen?
We work together and make sure your potential clients know your story.
When there are two comparable brands of the same …

An article in tomorrow’s New York Times is titled ‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers.
If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.
A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.

It’s very much like what has sprung up over at FBI blogs, to which I belong. (And when I …

It’s almost Merrie Monarch week here on the Big Island. I love this week, when Hilo town shimmers and comes alive with people and flowers and hula everywhere.
Over at Big Island On The Cheap, we are going to be hitting Merrie Monarch hard. We’ll have a bunch of features — where to eat, half- and full-day trips to take around Hilo, all the exciting things going on with Merrie Monarch itself, some great local coupon deals that are exclusive to our readers (whether residents or visitors),  and some other surprises, …

We went to Hilo Bay Cafe for dinner the other night while my mom was here visiting. That is such a great restaurant - inside it’s really got the ambience happening, in spite of its unlikely location in a strip mall adjacent to Wal-Mart, and the food is always so fresh and good.
While there, I talked with them about getting some recipes for an author I’m working with. Stephen Grogan, a Las Vegas author of a previous book called Vegas Die, is, interestingly enough, writing a culinary/mystery novel set here on the …