A Temporary Thing
Being married to Luria was all I ever wanted in life. It was the thing I prayed for in bed when I was nine-years-old. I wanted to be married to a beautiful, smart, sweet girl. I’m not sure what I believe about God anymore, but Luria turned out to be an answered prayer. I loved her, love her and will always love her.
I worked on things to fit what she said where her dreams. Modeling didn’t work because that business is just weird. She groked it and that business doesn’t like girl who grok it. We then started writing a book. Harry Potter was taking off and we started writing a book set in New Orleans with a flood threat that skidded to a halt with Katrina. My next thing was podcasting inspired by Dawn and Drew. The Crappy Christian Show quickly evolved from Luria and me getting drunk and talking into a mic into a ministry type thing to share the idea that God may love gay people just as they are, without any expectation they change. I didn’t want to be in ministry and Luria certainly didn’t.
Steve Jobs announced the first iPod that played video and I worked to make that iPod play GeekBrief.TV. That worked well. We started making money. Mevio was a great partner. Luria wanted more, and people in her life convinced her she was the character I wrote every day. Her belief that she was Cali Lewis grew into an argument that led her to leave our marriage.
I still want to be writing tech news as Cali Lewis and producing GeekBrief.TV. I don’t get that as an option, and I’ve come close to launching alternative visions. I almost released a gadget show yesterday.
Here’s the deal though … I don’t want to work on a next thing that is anything but temporary. My heart can’t currently believe in long term. I want to work, but I’m not ready to say, “This is the thing that replaces Cali Lewis and GeekBrief.TV for me.” Even my dreams for Bacon.TV in partnership with Wright Brand Bacon isn’t that powerful!
The Mayans predicted the world ends at the end of 2012. Obviously, that’s silly just like when that preacher dude did it twice in 2011. But you know what? So what! What will happen if I live this year like it’s not only my last year, but yours? That’s what I’m going to do.
Tomorrow I launch a temporary thing I can believe in and I think it will inspire you to do something better than you planned to do in 2012. It isn’t serious because I’m not ready to be serious. It’s just about fun.
I’ve lost my life goal of being married to a beautiful, smart, and kind girl. I’m not making that kind of goal again. To make it through. I want to live as though it’s not only my last year but yours too.
Read MoreIf Only We Had Gotten A Donut!
I’m looking for every opportunity to find humor in this. An anonymous Jason suggested we watch this video before anything is official. 
How We’re Doing GeekBrief.TV from Two Locations
I’ve said all I’m going to say about the personal part of what’s happening, but I thought it would be kind of cool to share how we’ve been producing the show from two locations.
Writing the show hasn’t changed much except that Luria writes much more than she did when she was here. It’s been interesting to see the different types of stories she chooses than me. I tend to write about gadgets. She tends to write about tech news and Web services like Google Docs. The Brief we will release today is about stuff we both wanted to cover. I wrote some of today’s show yesterday, some this morning and she wrote some to. Because of Google Docs, it’s always been easy to collaborate on a script.
After the script is done, Luria shoots it herself. She has our lights and the camera and the teleprompter. She shoots in front of a green screen in one take with one fixed shot and then she transfers one HUGE file to me, via FTP. The uncompressed footage is typically 4-8GB per episode. Sometimes it takes five hours, and really, that’s the biggest downside of the setup.
I have all the editing gear. As I download the file, I do preproduction graphics that will be used in the episode. When I have the file, I drag it into Final Cut Pro. It usually takes less than an hour to edit. Occasionally, when there are unusual graphics or video features in a particular episode, it takes longer.
I compress the show into three formats using Sorenson Squeeze. It does an excellent job, but it’s slow (and expensive). Then I upload the four formats to Mevio and post to the GeekBrief.TV Web site.
Except for news that needs to be more timely the workflow has worked well. It’s always fun to trouble shoot our way through new challenges.
Read MoreTake Real Vacations!
When you start a business you love, you may be tempted to put 100% of your time and energy during waking hours into making it a success. Cali and I have done that with GeekBrief.TV. Even when we took time off from the show, we used the time to work on parts of the business you don’t see. We took that quote, “Find something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” to heart.
The problem is, people aren’t designed to only work. We need rest, and we need play.
Yesterday morning I was listening to the audio version of My Life in France by Julia Child and I got a life lesson. She wrote,
In 1963 I was shooting four episodes of The French Chef a week while also writing a weekly food column for the Boston Globe. In the Fall, we were scheduled to take a break from TV work and had planned to visit Simca and John at their rambling farm house in Provence, but as November hove into view, we began to regret it. The quicksand of my cookery work, Paul’s painting and photography projects and all the mini bits of upkeep and improvement that 103 Irving Street required were sucking at our feet.
‘I just don’t know if we have the time for a trip to France right now,’ I sighed.
Paul nodded, but then we looked at each other and repeated a favorite phrase from our diplomatic days,
‘Remember! No one’s more important than people.’
In other words, friendship is the most important thing–not career or housework or one’s fatigue–and it needs to be tended and nurtured. So we packed up our bags and off we went, and thank heaven we did!
Throughout the last five years we’ve produced Geek Brief, we had similar opportunities and intentions to travel, but we always made the other choice. We prudently decided we should use that time to work on the business. Sure it would be great to go to Italy. I want so bad to go to Scotland. Hey, we should go to Japan and see all the crazy gadgets and have real Ramen! Instead, we opted for the more prudent choice. We stayed home and worked on our business.
Rest and play are the other side of the work coin. You can’t just breath in. You also have to breath out. Lot’s of people look at our story and think it is inspirational, but I hope people will learn from what we got right AND from our mistakes.
Take real breaks. Leave the Mac at home or at least in the hotel room. Enjoy life with friends and enjoy the beauty in the world. Otherwise you’ll just wear yourself out and burn yourself up.
Read MoreEquipment Advice
We get asked all the time for advice about equipment. New media production, even using professional equipment, is far, far less expensive than broadcast production. Even still … better, more expensive equipment can set a new media producer apart from someone using equipment purchased from a local, consumer electronics store.
We started GeekBrief.TV with an inexpensive consumer camera and a relatively expensive professional microphone. It was clear a couple shows in that the inexpensive consumer camera wasn’t getting the job done, so we upgraded. It was a massive financial challenge for us and we sacrificed a lot to pay for it without going into debt, but we bought a high-end camera. I think it gave us an advantage.
The next episode of GBTV will be shot on our sixth camera. We moved immediately from consumer to “prosumer” and in the prosumer space, we moved from SD to HD. Our new camera is our first professional camera and it was freaking expensive. The costs are covered by the value of all the equipment and past cameras we’re selling, but still, it feels like a big investment.
We love giving equipment advice to anyone interested in working in new media, but the one thing we never advise is to go cheap. We recommend making sacrifices to purchase the best equipment a sacrifice will enable.
The hardest questions we get are related to price. We often get asked to recommend an HD camera below $300 or a wireless microphone system below $200 and our answer is we can’t! There are HD cameras below $300 and wireless microphone systems below $200, but we can’t recommend them because they just aren’t good enough for professional looking and sounding production.
The first year of GeekBrief.TV, we spent approximately $30,000 on equipment. We had to sacrifice a lot to pay for it, but we were passionate about our goals. We still sacrifice to buy better and better equipment because this is our life.
The best advice we can give about equipment is to not go cheap. Go cheap on your clothing. Go cheap in your food and drinks. Go cheap on everything in your life, but invest everything you can, without going into debt, on your equipment.
Read MoreBrief 400 and Bluegrass
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.
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