lines of flight

Aulani Magazine volume 1 issue 1. Four-page story about Keali’i Reichel’s musical compositions for the lobby of Disney Aulani Resort. This is cool. PDF. Japanese summary.

that’s pretty cool, right?

The video is a basic home aquaponics how-to. Aquaponics is increasingly popular as people learn about the benefits of locally grown produce, food sovereignty, all that good stuff.

I researched, wrote and voiced the script and interviewed Clyde (in an unfortunately poor audio situation). It really needs some images and illustrations in the beginning to explain the basic concept of an aquaponics system. Something like this neat :40 animation maybe?

We got over 104,000 youtube views and another 2,200 on vimeo, but who’s counting? :~j

Spent some time trying to figure out how to post pictures via email, then I realized, there’s an app for that!?

One two, testing, testing, testing…

A lovely sunset after a thunder-filled rainy day.

We knocked out a few more “web extras” for Mālamalama magazine this summer.

My main job is to shape the features through the interviews. Then I suggest (kindly dictate?) the edits and give feedback on how it fits together with the visuals. Still not sure what that job is called, but it’s kind of like writing except with pictures and sounds. lol.

We hosted these all on YouTube but have since switched to Vimeo (much better!!).

Three videos and some brief commentary after the jump.

Honolulu is under a smoggy, gray haze again. Only it is not smog, or haze. It’s vog. This picture was taken today around noon.

Whether arriving via airplane or cruise ship (both pictured above) or living la vida local, these noxious natural fumes fill the lungs. There is no daily vog index popularly reported. Who is studying vog? Is enough being done to warn people of potential dangers?

Here is what our view towards Diamond Head looked like at noon today:

How is it possible that the Air Quality Index for Honolulu today is “good” when it looks like this?!

In comparison, see how clear the horizon is in this sunset video from the same vantage? Even as night falls, you can see a striking difference.

=_=

Recently I was doing research on the 90s music scene in Hawai’i.

I found this guy JonHawaii2003 had posted footage of Tool and Stone Temple Pilots at the first Big Mele—an alternative music festival that ran in Hawaii for seven years—on YouTube. Turns out Jon was one of the sound guys for the show, and knows a thing or two about getting quality concert footage.

I contacted him to thank him for the hard-rocking flashback, and a week later he reuploaded the Tool footage in even better quality!

Here’s the link to the entire 10-part playlist, or if you just want to hear my favorite (aka most popular on Radio Free Hawaii) song of the day, that’d be Opiate featuring a surprise guest appearance from singer Layne Staley of Alice in Chains:

The one thing you can’t see here is the waves, they are going off(!!) in an area of the island where huge surf is not that common. Despite Kualoa being a Ranch and having an abundance of ranchly things like cow poo (and the fungus that grows upon it), I can hardly imagine a more beautiful backdrop for a killer music festival.

I wasn’t even a huge Tool fan until that day, when the bass in my face—an emotionally blown state since I’d just been dumped that day—rocked my world. Other artists that played the Big Mele were Stone Temple Pilots, Fishbone, Violent Femmes and Primus.

No subsequent Big Mele ever packed as much of a punch as this one did, for me. They lost even the little bit of diversity they had, becoming way too alterna-punk-heavy for my tastes, tho I did go in ’96 (No Doubt! plus Cypress Hill and their ginormous inflatable Buddha) and ’97 (Wu Tang, sorry guys, that is *not* Wu Mountain behind us). Lineups of all The Big Mele festivals on hawaiibase.com.

Two Beer Queers is a podcast about beer, from Hawaii. These guys have a great balance of raunch and refinement–they take their beer very seriously, but get in plenty of off-color silliness as they pour, observe, sniff and drink(chug!) each brew.

TWO BEER QUEERS EPISODE 09 – OLD RASPUTIN & PARADOX.

Hosts Bully O’Sullivan and Russel Kealoha taste test all the oddball beers that I would like to try, if I weren’t reaching for familiar brands. Even tho I consider myself a discriminating beer-drinker, the beers featured on this show make me want to challenge my palate.

I really love how the Two Beer Queers keep in mind the masses of BudLight and Heinekin drinkers, constantly encouraging everyone to try something new. At the same time, they let us live vicariously through them, since my wallet already knows that a $13 bottle of stout is not gonna happen anytime soon! I can’t imagine what a 20-something(??) oz beer would have to have in it for it to be worth so much. Breastmilk? Miracle anti-oxidants? sheeeeeit. But watching you drink it is fine with me, 10% ABV would put me down too quick anyway.

Cheers, fellas! I am officially a fan. Keep up the good work!

This three minute, 50 second video was featured as a web extra to accompany a story about seahorses in the January 2009 issue of Mālamalama online.

My job was to coordinate the production, do the interviews, edit the spoken audio and when we didn’t have all of what we needed, to do some narrative voice-over. The decision to add the voice-over was last-minute and it ended up being recorded in an empty office with leftover fake Xmas snow used as sound insulation(?!).

This web extra has had over 400 views on Vimeo so far; that’s the version embedded into the story, but you have to go to Vimeo to see the glorious HD version. We used Vimeo because we were having some problems uploading to our Mālamalama YouTube channel. Now YouTube is cooperating, so I’ve embedded the HD version here.

Splitting our views between different video hosts is obviously not ideal. YouTube is less elegant than Vimeo, but it has a *much* larger community. Vimeo looks awesome, and for a small fee, we’d be allowed to embed HD video on our site, but no decision has been made yet.

I welcome any feedback and opinions on the issue of video hosting and playback.

Double rainbow at dawn on New Year’s Day in Honolulu, 2009.

Can you take a bad picture of a rainbow? I wanted to share this, but I could not for the life of me figure out which of these photos is best.

there are rainbows

12 Photos

So I’m adding them all but justifying the lack of editorial eye by using this as a chance to play with the NextGEN photo gallery plugin (again).

This time it needs to be a sidebar with a thumbnail that launches the whole photo gallery, from alongside a larger story. This is a functionality that has been requested at Mālamalama, just testing it here.

By the way if anyone else is just getting started with NextGEN Gallery plugin, there are some helpful instructions available from this guy.

UPDATE January 12, 2009

Doing this all kinds of wrong, ugh. Using the compact view album instead of a link to a gallery that has it’s own page(!!). Makes a lot more sense… I think? Only thing is, I can’t have words wrap around this because if I put it in a narrow div then the gallery and slideshow try to open within it.

Now to figure out why the captions don’t show in the slideshow…

lately, workwise

Malamalama, the magazine where I have been a writer and online editor (content manager) for the past several years, is being cut back from three to two print issues per year.

However, they’re adding 4 web-only issues to the production schedule–in addition to weekly updates–which means more online content is needed, especially audio and video. As a feature journalist and content producer the chance to work with an enthusiastic team on new media projects is super fun, even with the increased workload(!).

So far we’ve taken a collaborative approach to the producer’s role of these web extras and are improvising and learning with every assignment. I’ve mostly been the one to collect and edit the interviews (with sound help as needed) while magazine art director Rowen Tabusa and photographer R. David Beales handle the visual content and editing. Then I write the meta data or descriptions, upload the content and often do some online promotion.

Links to our web extras with a few notes on productions are below.

Feedback is very welcome!

Web Extras

• Bamboo Ridge: Celebrating 30 years of local writing and writers written by me, picture by Cory Lum, audio and video work by Rowen Tabusa. The Bamboo Ridge package was for the first online issue in the new magazine layout–why yes, it *is* built on WordPress heh–a whole other accomplishment of which I am proud and enjoyed working on.
• From Page to Stage, a behind-the-scenes look at The Little Snow Fox and Other Tales of the North Pacific. This was put together in lightening speed with almost no advance planning — whew!
• Homecoming 2008 cute slideshow put together by David and Rowen.
• Our best work came next, the Writing with Thread feature about a world-class textile show in the art gallery. This one hit a minor chord with YouTube commenters.
• Most recently, Newcomer Butterfly has a Light Footprint is one I wrote and did an audio extra recorded over the telephone (photographs by lepidopterist Jim Snyder). This is my most self-contained web extra and even includes my voice sounding goofy as usual. I do like that Yahoo audio player that comes out.

NASA called it a “spectacular conjunction.”

Taken Nov. 30, 2008, off an Oahu lanai with a pocket camera that doesn’t begin to capture the color and texture of this beautiful evening.

According to the tv news, tonight was supposedly the best night for this biyearly phenomenon, but it was cloudy where we stood and only the crescent moon managed to break through, for a short time. Maybe tomorrow will be good.

^ This stuff is mildly addictive for some of us

Carousel Candyland in Kahala Mall is the only place in Hawaii with a reliable source of black licorice and most importantly, the salty salmiak kind. Above are the four strong ones they had earlier this week.

The kitty kat one is very mild and sweet with a hard, gummi texture but sort of a waxy, shell coating. The diamond and the coin are Dutch, very salty. Both are usually chewy, but unfortunately this double salt coin is hard and stale. The lil gumdrop is somewhere in the middle flavor-wise, sweet but with a definite tang.

Course there is a blog devoted to salt licorice now. LOL. I’m adding this important resource to the blogroll.

Also happy to report I’ve got a lead on a place in SF that supposedly has “17 different kinds of salt licorice”?!? This I must see.

Yesterday there were two serious accidents involving bicyclists on Oʻahu, both before dawn, one a fatal hit and run. With bikes sales increasing as people try to work around the laughable rise in gas prices, this is definitely a cause for concern and perhaps the start of a disturbing new trend.

Last year, I gave up my parking pass and have been biking to and from work. I live about 10 minutes away from my job so it’s not like a Herculean feat, tho I do sometimes do it in a skirt and heels. And then it starts to rain! But for the most part, I think it’s actually easier than driving. Plus it’s fun, good exercise and there is no sticker shock at the pump, cuz air is still free. But commuting by bike has given me a perspective on how bike-unfriendly the city can be.

For example, the ridiculous bike lanes that put cyclists in glass-strewn gutters alongside cars rushing on and off the freeway, like on University Ave. going up to UH. I don’t go that route. It sucks. The lower part of University is better, but even still, a line on the ground demarcating a narrow path between a row of parked cars on one side and careless drivers on the other is kinda sketchy. Luckily I don’t have to go that way too often; day to day I ride side streets instead.

The problem there is that some drivers don’t seem to think that the rules of the road apply between them and bicyclists. They often don’t bother to signal, and if it is a narrow street where two cars would have to squeeze to get by, they just stay right in the middle if I’m coming towards them on a bike. Not cool!

There are definitely more people of all ages biking around town these days. Yes, some of them are inconsiderate and stupid. But in the end, more bikes = less cars on the road. We all agree that’s a good thing, right?

Queen – Bicycle Race

The Cool Kids – Black Mags