The Column
Motto: If You’re Going to Go, GoPro
Last week was a rare week.
Actually, expand that out to last month.
Actually, expand that out to the whole last year.
I’m going to work my way forward in time and tell you what I mean.
As of the moment I’m writing this, exactly 365 days ago I was waiting outside of KU’s dining hall for a shuttle bus to take my floor to showing of “The Avengers” on its opening night. It was the weekend before finals and it was the last hurrah for Templin 3. After we finally got on the shuttle and got our tickets in-hand - I had one of the most memorable nights of my life.
Fast forward exactly 364 days into the future (yesterday) and you’d find me sitting in a restaurant on Mass Street with many of those same floor residents, waiting to go to Iron Man 3. We went to the same theater as we did the year before. We sat a couple rows up from where we did the year before. It was all very nostalgia-ey and fun.
[I wrote the column up to this point 2 days ago, from this point forward I wrote today]
Six months ago I dropped Facebook. I wrote about dropping Facebook on November 30th of last year in Column #47. I can honestly say I haven’t looked back with any seriousness even once. The only motivation I have to go back are external motivators. If it were up to me, I would never go back - and it’s up to me. Facebook was not useful for me and therefore I did not use it. Not having it has turned out to be everything I hoped it would be. All the justifications I gave for not having one in my 47th column have really proven themselves true in my time without one.
I don’t miss it. Google+ is better.
Last week I splurged on myself. I decided it was high time that I finally got myself a couple of things I’ve had my eyes on for years, but have never had the money or the justification to purchase.
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I’ve been looking at televisions for forever. My computer monitor has a built-in TV tuner, so it is technically also a television - but it’s not big enough for conventional “sit across the room from your TV” style TV viewing. Televisions don’t shift around price much. They also don’t shift in technology. The 1080p standard is going to stay for the next 5 years (at least) until 4k really makes a dent in the market. To me it didn’t make sense to continue not owning a television.
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The second thing I bought was a GoPro Hero3 action camera. The camera is durable, high quality, and has several accessories for waterproofing and mounting. It does HD video recording, still photography, time-lapse recording, and burst photo taking. The reason I bought this camera goes back to Thailand, snorkeling with Melissa. I watched her dive down and get face-to-face with a Nemo fish. Seeing that, seeing my fiance eye-to-eye with a colorful clown fish in a coral reef in the ocean is something I will never forget. She will never get to see it, though. Neither will anybody else. I would pay more money than the camera cost me just to have had it for that one day. I refuse to ever make that mistake again.
Here’s something I made with my first hour or so with the camera:
[Editor’s note: This video was lost to time]
Wedding Stuff!
Not really. There is still nothing set in stone concerning the wedding. Melissa and I are working on what we can, but our current circumstances are limiting in that capacity. As more information rolls in it will be disseminated to the proper informational repositories (I’ll tell the people who should know).
The picture to go out on for this column is a picture I took of a page of my Moleskine.
I thought this encapsulated my personality pretty well.
Top 5: Plans for the GoPro
- Any/all future snorkeling/swimming/water-based activities/vacations that couldn’t otherwise be filmed/photographed
- Skateboarding super slow-mo (note: I don’t want to pick skateboarding back up… I just want to film things for a day)
- Filming my next paintball day with the boys and splicing together a highlight reel
- Discretely recording pranks
- Bike riding, sunsets, shooting, GIF making, dashboard mounting, snowboarding, documentary making, vacation vlogging, and filming myself tread water from under the surface so I can figure out just exactly why I’m so terrible at it.
Immature Internet Quote:
“That’s the main reason I take it. I eat tons of broccoli almost every day. Still take a little metamucil so I can knock out ninja (no wipe) poops on the reg” Redditor Khatib