Honolulu Managing Director Kirk Caldwell phoned me at home last night, about an hour or so after I received a message from his attorney, Lex Smith.

Kirk just wanted to make it clear that he was taking vacation time and on a personal trip when he attended a fundraiser in Washington last week for his potential Honolulu mayoral campaign.

Apparently someone read Wednesday’s posting here about the fundraiser and thought I said the trip had been paid for by the city or was part of as official trip. I let Kirk know this was not the case.

Caldwell freely acknowledged the event and noted that it had been disclosed in a filing with the Campaign Spending Commission, as required. Of course, that notice was my source on the matter.

Fair enough.

If you missed my little radio essay this week on Hawaii Public Radio, it’s now part of their archive that allows you to listen online.

I’m looking forward to doing more of these in the future.

And about those videos…It’s clear, from the several comments received, that there are several layers of issues. First off, many people were unable to view earlier videos if they didn’t have the correct combination of computer and software. To make matters worse, I’m not really sure what the correct combination would be.

I’m hopeful that problem has been solved now that I’m routing the video through YouTube, which somehow solves that particular technical issue.

But the deeper explanation for why there have been few views of recent videos has to do with quality, I’m afraid.

Let me put it this way. I’m a pretty good still photographer with a lot of experience. My photo galleries tend to attract a lot of eyes.

But in video, I’m a rank amateur, a total learner. What I’ve been sharing are essentially video snapshots, nowhere near the equivalent of my much more refined still images. The videos just aren’t as good, even if you’re interested in the subject matter. And if you’re only marginally curious, the snapshot quality undermines the experience.

So I’ll just have to work to improve the quality, and I’m starting to do that. Step one–learn to use the video capability of my Canon 5D, which can capture full HD video using the range of available lenses. Up until this week, this was a total mystery to me. Now, after studying the manual and fiddling with the camera a while, I’ve at least figured out the very basics, like how to use auto focus while in video mode, how to start and stop recording, etc.

Now to see if I can put together a brief video with this step-up in quality. I’ll try. Stay tuned.

And yesterday’s photo glitch turned out to be an excess of “/”s.

Yup. It seems that when I copied and pasted the links to the single photo and the Kona Hilton gallery, they ended up with an extra slash. It seems that Macs don’t have a problem coping with a little error like that, but most PCs seemed to refuse to open the pictures.

I was traveling without computer all day, and didn’t have a chance to trace the problem until we got home last evening.

Sorry for the inconvenience.