The complexity that goes into making each person’s life unique is one of the reasons those of us who cling to the concepts of grace and mercy love those ideas so much. It’s easy for me to assume I understand someone’s life and situation and make judgements about it. Even though I try not to, I do it all the time. I see politicians on TV. I listen to what they say, I read about their lives, I watch how they act, and then I round out the picture with assumption. We do the same thing collectively with celebrities. We do the same thing with friends. The more we care about someone, the more willing we are to be to dig deep and get an accurate understanding of who a person is and what their life is about. Even with the people we’re closest to though, we only get a partial picture.

When we share bits and pieces of our lives 140 characters at a time on Twitter, people read what we write, take what they know about us and fill in the blanks.

One day earlier this month something facinating happend on Twitter. Anyone following @calilewis and @nealcampbell might have seen two tweets about Oscar Wilde, one from each of us. The easy assumption was that the two tweets were related. I tweeted, “@2degreesofalie Oscar Wilde.” One hour later Cali tweeted, “One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. - Oscar Wilde”

Oscar Wilde is way off topic for both Cali and me. Anyone paying close attention to both of us would assume the two tweets were related. Since my tweet came first, it would be easy to assume Cali saw me tweet Oscar Wilde and then tweeted an Oscar Wilde quote. But she didn’t. She hadn’t read my tweets that day and I hadn’t read hers. My tweet was an answer to a trivia question. Cali just happend to tweet that Oscar Wilde quote an hour later by coincidence.

Last night I tweeted a reference to a Sarah Silverman tweet. I think Sarah is one of the most brilliant comedians alive, but if you don’t know her sense of humor, you could very easily be offended. I would re-tweet her all the time, but I don’t because I fear people reading wouldn’t get the jokes. Sarah tweeted, “F**k-ups always have friends named Neil.” I tweeted, “I feel the need to RT @SarahKSilverman, but I don’t feel comfortable re-tweeting salty language. ”

Someone made the assumption that my reference to that tweet had something to do with Cali. It didn’t have anything to do with anything other than Sarah making fun of the name “Neil” and me thinking her joke was funny just like I think most of her jokes are funny. I clarified everything with the guy on DM so everything is good, but I wanted to write this post because I’m working on assuming the best about people and sometimes it’s a challenge for me.

Sharing our lives with each other in real life and online is a risky proposition. We risk offending each other, hurting each other and even just misunderstanding each other. It’s even riskier when we share our lives 140 characters at a time. It’s also rewarding and well worth the risk. The reward of sharing our lives is that we encourage each other, inspire each other, and when were really lucky, we make each other smile.

1 Corinthians 13:12 says, “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.” It was written at a time when mirrors weren’t anything like what we have now. I think of  a reflection in water or a stainless steel pan when I read that. The verse is about understanding God, but the idea of seeing things imperfectly, or “in part” like the older translations say, applies to how we understand each other too.

My goal is to assume more good things about people than bad things. I don’t always reach that goal, but it’s still the goal.

It took me a long time to grok Facebook. Cali and I looked at from an entirely different perspective than a regular facebooker. We have so much love and appreciation for thousands of people who watch GeekBrief.TV that we added them as friends on Facebook when they asked us to. I stopped adding people after about a hundred because I found the flood of information about people’s personal lives to be overwhelming. Now I’m back to adding friends of our show, but Facebook is really about not letting go of those real connections we make in our lives.

A few weeks ago, I connected with my favorite cousin from growing up. She and I spent as much time as we could together singing, watching Cinemax and eating Doritos. Around college time, I pulled away from friends and family for a stupid reason. I had a nickname that everyone, including teachers in school called me. I HATED it made me feel small and avoid social situations because I hated being called that name. It’s an Arkansas thing, I guess. I have a great aunt who seems to have no qualms about being called “Mutt” her whole life.

When I left for college, I used my real name and started life fresh. Lots of good came from the fresh start approach, but I regret so deeply that I lost touch with all those people who meant so much to me growing up. I should’ve just told everyone to stop calling me that stupid name!

This morning, I checked in with Facebook and had a friend request from one of my best friends during the high school and early college years. I approved the request and started browsing her friends and saw so many names of people I care about and miss having in my life. Clicking around led me to a memorial page for one of my best guy friends from childhood. He was killed in Afganistan December 30, 2009. He was one of the best kids I knew growing up. His dad is a doctor. They were wealthy. He didn’t have to serve the country by going to war. He had to have done it because he wanted to do it. I never would have known he was gone if it wasn’t for Facebook.

An earlier generation told us about the hardship of walking to school uphill both ways. I think my generation will tell our kids about how we used to loose touch with the people we loved when we moved to a different city. That doesn’t have to happen anymore and it is a beautiful thing.

I’m going to spend some time this weekend connecting with people I miss in memory of my old friend, Jeremy Wise (1975-2009).

I’ve been working through an internal struggle since McCain introduced us to Palin. I don’t like being political in my public life because politics is so personal and I don’t want to risk alienating folks who disagree or don’t enjoy rational, political discourse. With Palin, I’m all-in at least one more time. If she disappoints me by using power to restrict liberty, I will go back to ignoring politics.

Twitter serves as an amazing pressure valve, but it’s much less satisfying that I would like because someone might follow my tweets because of what we do professionally and have no interest in my late night ranting. This morning I woke up with a great idea. I created a different twitter account for “Neal After Dark.” The new Twitter account is where I’ll stand on the porch yelling at the kids to get off my proverbial lawn.

The idea of having place to blow off political steam, where people know what they’re getting if they follow that account seems kind of liberating.

The “After Dark” account is Twitter.com/lateniteneal. Follow at your own risk.

Our littlest dog Zoe woke me up early with a request to go outside. When I got back to the room, I couldn’t fall back asleep. We’re on a road trip from Dallas to Chicago because a couple friends who own a restaurant in Highland Park, IL are having a BBQ emergency and we decided to be spontaneous and support the meat.

Laying in bed, trying to go back to sleep, I was thinking about the next episode of GeekBrief.TV. It’s episode #400. Cali and I think celebrating round numbers is arbitrary. We’d much rather celebrate the episodes that are good–the ones that inspire funny comments and make people smile or laugh. The 400 number isn’t even accurate because we haven’t always given every episode a Brief number, and if you’re pedantically minded, like we are, celebrating 400 is celebrating an inaccuracy and it doesn’t compute.

The restaurant we’re traveling to is called Bluegrass. It was opened in Highland Park at the same time Cali and I opened a self-storage facility for Extra Space Storage next door. Jim Lederer and Chef Dave Teichman fed us well. In fact, when we were saving money like crazy to get out of debt and buy production equipment, Jim and Dave made us honorary Bluegrass employees and gave us an employee discount. The bar manager when Bluegrass opened, Brad Davis, introduced us to all manor of martinis. Brad was so charming and funny (and generous with his pours) that when Cali’s sister Ariane decided to move to Chicago from Atlanta, we looked forward to introducing Brad to Ariane. We fell in love with martinis and Brad fell in love with Ariane. She fell in love with him too.

So far about 30 people have RSVP’d for the Emergency BBQ Meetup, and it just hit me! Brief 400 is going to happen back where Brief 1 happened!

It’s the place where we lived when we first heard Adam Curry on NPR talking about Podcasting. Adam inspired us with his idealism about the indie nature of Podcasting. It’s where we lived when we first heard Dawn say “Get ready, baby! Get ready! It’s The Dawn and Drew Show, ohhh!” It’s the place where we coined the phrase, “Tyranny of the Day Job” because no matter how well we were treated by Extra Space, the day job was getting between us and our driving desire to podcast full time. It’s the place where we spent a whole weekend with Cali’s whole family the Summer before Curtis Safford, our brother-in-law died of cancer. It’s the place where I interrupted Cali’s shower one morning in October 2005 and told her our next goal was to start a podcast that’s good enough and popular enough that we’ll be able to do it full time.

About a week before our last day at the day job, our Curtis passed away. We packed up the truck fast, dropped off our stuff in Dallas and headed to California for the funeral. Curtis was an IT guy at USC and he’s the person who converted us to Mac. He’s also the father of our most awesome 3-year-old nephew, Loki.

Friends of the Brief (FotB, pronounced FothBas) who come will be able to see where we started, where we lived and taste how good we ate when we WEREN’T eating Ramen Noodles. It really feels like we’re going home.

Today I hit 1000 Tweets! I’m not usually one to celebrate round numbers, but I love Twitter and all it’s plurking hang-ups.

Plurk, by the way, is now my official curse word.

Macworld, for us, was an amazing week. We met old friends and made new friends. We’re convinced people who watch GeekBrief.TV are the nicest, coolest people we could know. We also learned a lot.

The shows we make outside the studio are not as good as those we make when we’re here. Cali is great in both situations, but I’m not.

At the end of this month, I’ll be doing a four-day bootcamp at the Travel Channel Academy in Washington D.C. My least favorite part of what we do is running a camera. I like the pre and post production stuff, so I hope to learn some shooting skills that will make camera work more interesting for me and for people who watch what I shoot.

When we speak to an audience about what we do, we refer to a video Ira Glass made for Current TV. In the video, he talks about how all video wants to be crap. Making good video is working hard against video’s tendency toward crappiness. He also talks about how your skill doesn’t live up to your taste when you’re getting started. It takes most of us two or three years to start making video that starts to live up to our original imagination. I’m still not there.

I have it in my mind. I know how I want the show to look and feel when we’re outside the studio, but I’m a long way from making that happen. I’m hoping I’ll be closer after the Travel Channel thing.

BTW, Cali isn’t feeling well. She worked hard and didn’t get much sleep last week, so I’m hoping she’ll take a couple more days to rest. I have PLENTY of Briefs in the can, so that should help.

We’re extremely grateful to xTrain.com, Drobo and PodShow for making our first trip to Macworld happen!

Did you ever think about waffles? It’s a miracle that waffles ever came into existance because they depend upon a unique mold that transforms a pancake into something all together different. Who was the first guy who declaired, “I shall cast iron into a form so that pancakes shall no longer repel syrup, but henceforth and forever, my cakes shall hold the syrup in wells until such time that the cakes be cut by knife?”

Maybe its wasn’t so grand a plan. Wikipedia doesn’t cover the exact origins. My best guess is that it began with some royal chef aiming to create a decorative cake for the pleasure of a king.

At any rate, waffles make me sick. It’s just too much concentrated sweetness.

Blogging makes me feel like Peggy Hill.