For a while now, our reporting staff have been producing videos to accompany stories when appropriate, but until last week, they’ve always had to do so with either woefully substandard or mind-bogglingly technical equipment. That’s all changed now, because Sally managed to get them a shiny new digital camcorder.

After a couple of false starts, in which Larissa’s computer kept crashing, we managed to produce the first video using this camera, and so far it seems to be successful. If things work out the way we hope they will, then our reporters should be able to produce videos to accompany their stories more often.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t written an incredibly witty and entertaining blog post about Larissa and my trip to the Pismo Police Department, it’s because we haven’t gone yet. I’m beginning to suspect that maybe Larissa has something to hide, because all I’ve heard from her is that the chief is “out this week”. I think that’s a thinly veiled way of saying “we can’t go because I am wanted in connection with several unsolved murders/bank robberies/jay walking incidents”. Time will tell.

All last week, I was working on a new and (hopefully) much improved winery listing, which should allow us to provide more details about the wineries as well as information on events to be held there. I think I’m getting close to being done, so we should be releasing that in the next week or so.

A couple of weeks ago, a reader left a comment on the community site complaining about the Flash content on sanluisobispo.com taking too long to load. I’ve spent some time looking at this and we may have a solution. It’ll take a bit of testing to make sure it works correctly, but we should be able to make the Flash content load after the rest of the page, making the actual content load much faster.

We’ve just put a new Grudge Match on the community site in which we’re pitting the awesome Hannibal Lecter against the not-quite-as-awesome John Doe from Seven. This might be a closer match than the last one in which Poison took a pounding from Def Leppard.

Finally, congratulations to my sister (although she probably won’t read this because she doesn’t find my banal, sarcastic commentary entertaining), who gave birth to my nephew, Archie, on Easter Sunday. We’re all proud of you.