Things are moving along well enough this week. I’m feeling relaxed and well rested. Taking some time to reflect on things and hike around Rocky Mountain National Park was a good idea. For the most part during the hikes I listened to nature and did not even have an earbud going playing music in the background. A 58 minute video of that trip was shared on YouTube yesterday. Using the Sony ZV-1 camera with the Sony GP-VPT2BT wireless shooting grip worked out well enough for the trip. For the most part even without a gimbal or any type of external stabilization the footage turned out well enough. You have to really make sure not to rapidly pan or swing the camera around or things will either blur or become disorienting for the viewer. Even footage of very dynamic nature features like a waterfall turned out better than I expected. 

Editing the video was easy enough with PowerDirector 365 on my Windows 10 powered desktop. Shooting all the footage on a phone and using the PowerDirector application for Android was functionally easier to edit, but the size of all the 4K video was problematic to manage along the way. Managing a stack of memory cards much is easier than having to manage a daily cycle of editing and cleaning up video on a smartphone. Each 128 gigabyte memory card in the stack is the same size as the entire storage capacity of my Pixel 4 XL smartphone. 

Today I’m going to finish up working on the slides for that virtual presentation next month. It is time to get those slides into a shareable shape. My goal for today is to close out the slides and have them pretty much ready to go by the end of the day. I’m sure some tinkering will occur along the way. Building a PowerPoint presentation of slides tends to be an iterative process and every time the slides get reviewed a little bit of tinkering occurs until they end up being locked down into a final version. That is normally by deadline not by choice. Given more time more tinkering would probably occur. 

My thoughts took a turn toward the best use of my time for a few moments. That is always a dangerous fork in the road. Typically when I start thinking about the best possible use of my time, things either end up focusing on writing code or The West Wing (1999) style political speeches. Sitting down to write soaring political prose is one of those things that I am fully capable of doing, but is not generally where my time is spent. Maybe that is a mistake on my part and that is something that is a part of my writing skill set that I should focus on nurturing. On the other hand the more time I spend actively coding my skills will continue improving. Learning and using coding skills are one of those things that improve with practice. 

My focus today will be on finishing up 7 slides and running through that virtual presentation a few times before lunchtime. Earlier this week the talk got outlined on the whiteboard with time values assigned to each section and the stories that section contains. At this point, I’m feeling pretty comfortable with being ready to complete the presentation. Next week the audio part of the presentation might be solid enough to share.