Words On Wednesday

Some life lessons come pretty easily, but others require a little bit of painful personal experience before we catch on. Normally, I’m pretty quick on the uptake for a lot of lessons. Touch something hot, you get burned. What goes up must come down. I may not have a lot of common sense, but I have enough to realize the basic stuff without a lot of difficulty. Even caution is normally something that comes natural to me. I do a whole lot of things “just in case.” Data backups, an extra layer of padding, and 911 already dialed on my phone are just a few of the things I’ve done because I know things don’t always go as planned. One specific example is the floaty back door for my GoPro. This floatation device ensures that if you lose a grip on the camera in water, it will float to the surface. If I’m getting in water any deeper than a swimming pool, I’m using the floaty back door. I don’t care if it’s just a few shots, I know how clumsy I am, and I know that it’s safer to use a flotation dev...

One of my favorite pastimes with my family is watching old VHS home videos. I want to generate that same experience for my kids, but today's media doesn't really seem to have the same sensation. These videos of my childhood all have a sort of specific feel to them. Long form movies, these typically took up the entirety of a VHS tape, about 80 minutes or so if I recall. Scenes might run for several minutes of us just doing household things. Maybe it was a birthday party, or it could be the one time my cousin tried to make a documentary about trees. In any case, it was a live action glimpse into that period of time. I still need to digitize those videos. We have tons of them somewhere or another, and I know that tape media will most definitely degrade over time. If I can convert those to mp4 now and properly store them, they’ll be preserved for years into the future. I might just burn them to DVD and watch that instead of the original VHS. Who has a VCR nowadays anyway? Fast forw...

If you look at my GoPro playlist  on YouTube, you’ll notice that I haven’t added a new video since  23 June 2017 . Honestly, I find that a little depressing and frustrating. It isn’t that I haven’t wanted to add new videos, or even that I haven’t recorded footage to make new videos. It’s that I just haven’t had time to edit them together. Between work, school, raising kids, and writing articles for my side gig, I really don’t have time to sit down and create a video. Looking back, I sound like a broken record because I’ve mentioned not having enough time to make videos before . Still, as much as I love creating content, I have much bigger priorities at the moment. In addition to my lack of time to work with videos, I also don’t have time to learn a new editing software right now. Microsoft discontinued Windows Movie Maker , and if I’m going to learn a new editing software, I may as well go with what a lot of videographers use with DaVinci Resolve. The problem is that Da...