As often as I find myself feeling incredibly left behind by some new technology or other, I have to remind myself of the incredible strides my colleagues and I have made since I first became a journalist some 20 years ago.

We’ve embraced the digital distribution of the news, and luckily for me, I’ve always had a fascination with technology and was able to adapt (with a lot of bumps along the way) to most advances in the field.

Even so, my head spins with the frequency of new tech advances lately. It just seems that once you wrap your head around one thing, something totally new emerges to take its place or sit next to it.

So I feel better prepared after taking this class. I know that by the time it’s over, things will change once again, dramatically, but maybe I won’t have that moment of anxiety and denial and will be better able to embrace and explore new things.

Along those lines, it was exhilarating this past weekend to go to the Shinnecock Powwow with my new 360Fly camera and record some 360 video. I felt like a fresh, new, eager reporter again, with butterflies in my stomach and worrying about whether everything would go as planned.

The anxiety continued when I got home and looked at some of the footage. The quality wasn’t what I had hoped, but it was good enough. I trimmed a bunch of clips and joined them together using the Fly software, which doesn’t allow a lot of options. I would have liked to do more to “produce” the video, but maybe that’s kind of the point with 360–it shouldn’t look that produced.

And there there was utter frustration when I couldn’t get the video to upload to YouTube. The Fly software kept timing out. It’s a familiar frustration–one that I’ve felt every time some new software or technology doesn’t cooperate. And maybe that was a little exhilarating, too, one the video actually uploaded.

Overall, I liked shooting the 360 video, and I have to say, it feels pretty damned cool to have 360 video I produced up on the web. And it got a pretty god response in the newsroom, and I was flooded with suggestions about what we could use the camera for.

So I guess it’s part of my tool belt now. I’m the guy in the room with a 360 camera.