Operation Pixel Baby
Cali and I both grew up poor, but blessed. Cali grew up connected to an amazingly supportive Italian family and I grew up raised by Baptists who introduced me to Jesus and home grown tomatoes.
We’ve been married nine years and we’ve put off having a kid because we have an amazing relationship. We’ve never had an argument…ever and the big fear is that having a kid might be the factor that changes that.
For our Big Trip, we started a site called PaidByPixels.com. It’s similar to the principal of buying a brick in a pathway to support your college. You buy pixels to support our trip and get ads galore on PaidByPixels.com and on our network of Web sites. We call it the Pixel Board.
We don’t need nearly all of the pixels to sell to fund the Big Trip, but we need most of them to sell. Cali said tonight, if we sell all of them, we can have a kid after the trip. I’m pretty sure I can convincer her to get started on the kid mission about half-way through.
People have always said that you can’t wait for everything to be fine finically to have a kid because things my never be okay. Cali grew up in a struggle and she doesn’t want to raise a kid that way. I’m not opposed to admitting that I need your help convincing her. She loves me, and she loves y’all.
When people don’t get this Web 2.0 world we’re living in, I wonder if they want to connect to people at all. To us the connection we feel to our GeekBrief.TV friends is more real than the connection we have to anyone in the flesh-and-blood world. That’s why I’m sharing this mission with you guys and not the natural fam.
Read MoreThe Key Word is Vicarious
When we set our minds on the goal of becoming professional podcasters, we had laser focus that goes beyond any ambition we’ve ever had before. Our year-long road trip goal has a similar feeling. The goal actually seems almost impossible. We’re wanting to raise more money in two months than we’ve ever made in a single year. That’s what’s required if we do the trip debt free.
The thing that’s weird is that it doesn’t seem impossible or even difficult to accomplish. Two months from now, I might be writing that I was wrong, but right now, we’re moving forward with a tremendous amount of faith and expectation.
Some people are inspired by the Geek Brief story. We love it when we encourage someone to pursue a dream. I hope the Big Trip will do that and more. I hope it motivates people to try something they’ve always wanted to try.
So Excited…I Just Can’t Hide It!
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!
Travel
Some people just LOVE to travel. I’m not one of them. We just got home from Nashville and now we’re off to Arizona for three days. We’re meeting with some folks from Intel, and I’m excited about that. I’m also excited about shooting a Brief at the Grand Canyon, finally. I just don’t want to leave home to do it.
We’ll only be back a few days before leaving for our very first trip to New York. Again, that should be something to look forward to, but I just can’t. We’re always so tired, and I think it might be time to take a week off.
Someone, I’m sure has figured out how to balance opportunity with capacity. I want to learn that secret. When opportunites are realy interesting, it’s difficult not to say yes to too many things.
We haven’t grown enough to justify employees. We’re probably being stingy and holding on too tight to what we’re blessed to make, but we have a dream to pay cash for a house. Maybe we’d get there faster if we let go of a little bit so that growth is a little more comfortable.
Read MoreHome from the Road Trip and Fracture
There’s a Southern Gospel song that kept ringing through my head as we wound our way back home. It says,
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
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.
Read MoreThe Road to Gnomedex
We left a week ago. It was the beginning of a month-long road trip.
Sunday, we were driving through Wyoming listing to To the Best of Our Knowledge on NPR. The host was talking to the author of a book about mothers. She had just written a book about how women become smarter when they become mothers. When we have new experiences, our brains create new pathways as a home for the new knowledge. That’s how we learn and grow. Since mothers are bombarded with new experiences they gain knowledge and wisdom very quickly.
I started wondering how that will apply to us and our trip. What will the new experience of being in Yellowstone National Park and seeing wild elk up close add to how we think about the world and nature? Maybe it won’t have much impact or maybe it will lead to radical changes like when we took our first kayak trip down the Buffalo National River in Arkansas.
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