In January, I wanted to die so bad I stayed in bed the whole month taking Benadryl every time I woke up. It was bad.

While waiting for the Benadryl to kick in, I studied suicide and learned the most peaceful method involves an oven bag and helium. Beyond my religious baggage, the thing that kept me hanging on was a belief that I might be able to work on something that matters more than GeekBrief.TV did.

I want to be doing GeekBrief.TV. Since it was my idea and I wrote all the shows, I can’t come to terms with losing it. It should be mine. I invented my dream job and I don’t want to do anything else. Life says, I don’t get the option I want.

Luria and I agreed before mediation, I would get GeekBrief.TV and she would get Cali Lewis. To me that would be the best, bad end of our marriage and business relationship. When we got to mediation last November, she changed her mind. She was suing Mevio for reasons I can’t even begin to comprehend. Mevio’s lawyer, Bobby and mine said let her have GeekBrief.TV. Mevio told me that they would win and give GeekBrief.TV to me to control. The mediation process is HELL. Mevio told me I would earn back equity based on performance of the show. Having my baby (GeekBrief.TV) messed with by outside forces wasn’t okay, but I trusted Mevio at that point more than I trusted Luria. Right now, I barely trust even best friends. I made a huge mistake trusting Bobby at Mevio, but I don’t think it was the biggest business blunder I made.

In February, the depression burned off like fog does in San Francisco. I went from feeling doomed to feeling excited about my future. It happened over night.

I was taking care of my grandmother and her sister until the family could get them in a better, safer place. I started reading my home town paper and creating a vision for something I could do there. There was an article about Let’s Think Productions shooting a short film there. That gave me huge hope. I made a list of people in my home town that were making a difference, and I worked on getting to know them.

All that, and I still haven’t gotten to my biggest business blunder! When depression went away, I was open to any opportunity. The opportunity to produce the “Making of The Bloodstone Diaries: Thief of All Things” happened and it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in my life. I got to work with talented and nice people who produced very cool things for me to shoot and edit. From that, I made this …

My best friend from growing up has a daughter who is an amazing ballet dancer. She asked me to shoot photos and film the annual recitals. Intrigued by the opportunity to produce something I haven’t produced before and looking for ways to make money, I thought it would be cool to shoot the three recitals like a film and offer DVDs for sale to parents. The ballet school has around 500 students, so on the surface the idea seemed solid. It’s easy to shoot. It’s easy to edit. It’s easy to make DVDs. If I sold DVDs for $20 each, I figured it could be a nice bridge between GeekBrief.TV and what I wanted to do next.

There were three recitals. There was a gymnastics show, a dance show and a ballet show that took place over the course of a weekend. I heard from parents the event was torture, but for me it wasn’t. Okay, some of the gymnastics recital was torture, but the dance recital was an amazingly entertaining show that I would have paid to see and the ballet recital was beautiful.

After shooting the first show, I had to go to Office Depot and get an external hard drive because I realized I was capturing a LOT of data. I shot with two Canon 5D Mark IIs and rented a $5000 lens for tight shots. When we finished, I had over 20 hours of footage to edit down to half that. My promise to finish in a month was not even close to possible.

After syncing the two shots, I started cutting. I made a huge mistake. One camera shot 30 fps and the other 24 fps. The result of that mistake cost me a huge amount of time rendering to verify my cuts. In theory, it should have taken me about a month to edit what I shot. In reality, it took the whole Summer. Stumbling blocks continued to arise and it wasn’t until Monday that I got to get that haunting Steve Jobs quote out of my head: “Real artists ship.” I shipped.

I spent $30,000 to make $2,000, but beyond the cash, I put a massive amount of effort into the project. I hope some kind of karma is involved. I wanted to make recital films that are better than any other recital films ever made. When I see what I made, I think I failed. I don’t like the end result because my wide lens wasn’t good enough and I had to compress for standard definition. In HD, it looks better, but that’s too complicated for average moms and dads to grok.

Producing these DVDs was my biggest business blunder because it was a one off opportunity to make survival cash when I could have been working on something that would have provided on-going revenue. Caring about friends is a great way to be happy, but it isn’t the best basis for making business decisions.

Starting today, I’m looking for an opportunity to pour myself into someone else’s dream for Internet TV. I want to continue to be a pioneer in Web TV, but I’d like to take a break from being the primary dreamer (unless the dream is funded).

If you’d like to work with me, even though I made a huge mistake, I’m neal at neal.tv.

Last night I was flipping through channels and landed on a biopic about a woman named Temple Grandin. Claire Danes played the leading role. I’ve loved Claire Danes since My So Called Life so I started watching even though the movie was already half over. Now I can’t wait to go back and see the whole thing.

From my perspective, movies hardly get any better than when they tell a real life story about a person who struggled through life to make a difference. Temple Grandin is now a Doctor of Animal Science and professor at Colorado State University. She also has autism.

Because of the way she was rased, she pushed through limited expectations to do something that changed the way we treat the animals we eat. Autism gave Grandin the gift of thinking different. As a grad student, she had to visit a stockyard where cows were being prepared for slaughter. She reacted to the stress the cows were going through and went to work figuring out how to alleviate the stress. She says, “I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we’ve got to do it right. We’ve got to give those animals a decent life and we’ve got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.” She designed a system that not only got cows from stockyards to slaughter peacefully, it also saved money.

In addition to her work with animals, Temple Grandin is also an advocate for autistic children. She’s been able to explain to worried and confused parents of autistic kids what the kids are experiencing when they spin in circles, put their hands over their ears or rock back and forth.

I’ve never heard of Temple Grandin before last night so I figure I’m not alone. The movie I watched is in rotation on HBO, but if you care about animals, you might want to order it from Amazon. She wrote a book called, Thinking in Pictures, one called, The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger’s and another one called, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals. I can’t wait to learn more.

Here is a video of Temple Grandin speaking at TED. Tech people need to see this!

We got home, Cali took medicine to help with the itching, and we put in the movie 300 based on a Frank Miller graphic novel. This genre isn’t our taste, but we LOVE Sin City.

That we love the movie Sin City surprises us to no end because we hate violence in movies. We don’t oppose it, we just don’t want to see it. The violence in Sin City rises to the level of art, and somehow, it’s beautiful.

300 didn’t quite work for me on that level. It succeeds in looking different than any other movie I’ve ever seen. Some of the erotic black and white scenes are as beautiful as scenes from Sin City, but I still found myself wanting to fast-forward through the battle scenes.

If it hadn’t been for Sin City, I wouldn’t have watched this movie at all, and I’m certain I would have enjoyed it more if I was more interested in that period of history or war movies in general. It just wasn’t my thing.

Tonight we’re going to watch Brick. I’m extremely excited about this movie. It’s a modern film noir set on a high school campus. I can’t wait!

It’s a coming of age movie…probably my favorite genre. My favorite coming of age film is Just Looking. It was directed by Jason Alexander from Sienfeld. Saint Ralph is turing out to be just about as great. Plus, it has Campbell Scott in it, and he just happens to be one of the coolest dudes on the planet because he narrates the Hermux Tantamoq audio books.

They say that Heaven’s pretty and livin’ here is too,
But, if they said that I would have to choose between the two,
I’d go home. I’d go home, where I belong.

The song is talking about home being Heaven. In my head, home was just home, and it’s good to be here.

After we crashed for a day, we started back to work. We shot a Brief yesterday and two more today. Now we’re watching an Anthony Hopkins movie called, Fracture. It’s one of those quiet crime dramas that remind me of a rainy afternoon in the fall. There is no rush or dependence on noisy action.

Usually films like this are set in New England. This one is set in Sunny L.A., but it still feels rainy.

This is Anthony Hopkins at his best. The character he created is brilliant and confident. He is evil and lovable at the same time.

These moments when we put work aside for a couple hours to watch a movie…that’s home.

Due to music rights issues, the first complete season of Ally McBeal has not been made available on DVD in the United States (only 6 random episodes can be found on the R1 edition), though it has been available in Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Japan, France, Germany, the UK, Mexico, Australia and Brazil.

I still don’t like that it’s not available, but I can understand how it would be difficult to clear all the wonderful music used on the show for a DVD release. That’s a lot of people to pay. I’m wondering how difficult it would be to convert the Region 2 set to Region 1.

There are players, like the Philips DVP5960 All Region PAL /NTSC that will play everything. We happen to have a Philips DVP5960, also available on Amazon.com. It’s about $37 less, but the title doesn’t say anything about being multi-region. Would a two players with the same model number have different functionality? Don’t know.