Technical Ramblings

In May, I said my next upgrade would be a GoPro. Last week, I confirmed that, as I bought a GoPro Hero 3+ Black. (Thanks to my employer, I even got a 40% discount.) For the first few days, I played with it — did a sunset timelapse, and contributed to the internet cat database by adding pictures of the kitties in a charming 2.7k video. (2.7k probably only available in Flash or Chrome.)

But in part, my reaction was “Enh. What did I think I needed this for?” After all, I already had a camera for my quadcopter (in the form of the A5-powered FC40 camera); I had a DSLR (which can shoot great 720p videos); I had my phone, which could do decent 1080p video, and I always had on me. Why exactly did I need *another* camera?

Today, I finally took the GoPro up on the Phantom, and that particular concern is no longer.

I was recording video, so I didn’t get any particularly high res stills — but that wasn’t really a concern. Shooting 1080p video, I was able to get great shots of both the storm clouds looking out west of town:

And another photo looking East towards Boston.

The colors, the clarity, the overall picture and video quality … this is what I kept seeing in everyone else’s photos, even though I wasn’t getting it in mind. I always wondered if the problem was just my tools… and now I know. As with everything, the user makes a difference… but the tools certainly help.

Google announced this week that they will be closing down Orkut at the end of September.

Most people reacted with “That thing still exists?” (Unless, of course, they are Brazilian.)

I was an Orkut hipster; I joined before it was cool. (Specifically, I joined back when the network actually wasn’t ~fully connected; my roommate in college and I had different ‘friend graph’ sizes, IIRC.)

Apparently, I used my crschmidt@livejournal.com email to join Orkut. I was able to login and see my profile, and see some of the testimonials that were left for me a decade ago, mostly from friends on LiveJournal.

The one that gets me, is this one (left by an anonymous user):

I would not push Chris Schmidt in to oncoming traffic. Normally when I say that about somebody, it has to do with my ethical code. In this case, though, it has a lot more to do with who Chris is as a human being.

At the time, I’m pretty sure I figured out who left this testimonial, but the cultural context in which it was left has been lost to me now. So I’m left with a vaguely positive testimonial from an anonymous source from a social network I abandoned a decade ago.

… Actually, that sounds about as positive as an end-of-life social networking experience can be. I’ll take it!