Been spending a lot of time lately with two new toys: a GoPro Hero 2 camera and an HP laptop computer running Windows 8.  Love them both, but the key words for the last month have been “learning curve.”

For the last few years I’ve usually taken photos with a Canon S5 IS, which I still have and love.  It’s problem is that it’s a bit large and I’m a bit paranoid having it around water.  Enter the GoPro.  Tiny, and safe around water.  Getting it tiny though required that all the switches and dials and screens be gone.  It has only two buttons, and a small LCD indicator.  No view finder, no image preview, just point and shoot in one of the different modes.  Once it’s set up it’s great to use, and I’m having a lot of fun with it, both for video and still photography, but it’s certainly taking some time to learn what it can do with it.

The same for the new laptop.  It’s faster and has more memory, and well, it’s a laptop with a docking station for when I need a full-size keyboard and mouse (like processing photos) which my previous workstation was a big clunky tower about four years old.  It’s also running Windows 8, which I think has gotten a bad rap.  Similar to the switch from the Canon to the GoPro, there was a learning curve when I first encountered Windows 8.  It was steep, with new commands and new options.  After a month though, I don’t miss the Start button, and wonder if I could ever go back to not having the live tiles keeping me up to date.  It could certainly use a few improvements, and I look forward to having more software completely integrated into the start page rather than having to switch to the desktop environment, but especially when I’m at my desk with a couple of monitors running it’s a vast improvement, and I’m very happy I made the leap.