I’m looking for every opportunity to find humor in this. An anonymous Jason suggested we watch this video before anything is official.

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.

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.

Most husband and wife stuff is private, but I disappointed my wife in a very public way and the only way to really apologize is to make it public.

One night last year, I think it was a Saturday, a tweet went out on Cali Lewis’ account about global warming being a hoax. It became a big controversy that ended with Leo Laporte saying he no longer wanted to work with her. People are split on the issue of anthropomorphic climate change so thousands of people rallied around her and thousands slammed her.

There is a major problem, though. She didn’t write that tweet and she didn’t hit the update button. I did.

Since we started GeekBrief.TV, I’ve studied media successes to learn techniques for growing an audience and keeping them interested. Publicly writing something controversial is usually a very good thing to do. You don’t loose as many people as seems logical because people want to stick around to see what you’ll do or say next.

When Cali found out what I did, it obviously it made her angry.  To her, politics is private and divisive. She doesn’t enjoy it in the least.

I apologized, but also argued my case about the benefits of the controversy. We had recently had dinner with John C. Dvorak and he explained how he has used controversy in his long career as a tech writer to keep people paying attention. I thought Cali bought-in to the idea of creating controversy, but I was wrong.

She was deeply hurt by what I did. She is the kindest person in the world and she didn’t want to embarrass me. She’s lived with letting everyone believe it came from her because of our relationship. The only way I can make it right is to publicly apologize.  A private apology is utterly insufficient because what I did pushed her into a public, political battle she didn’t want to fight. She lost friends and business opportunities because of what I did. I hope this blog post will mend some of those relationships.

I also want to apologize to friends of GeekBrief.TV and followers of Cali’s tweets. The controversy experiment just wasn’t worth it, especially without her participation. I’m sorry.

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.

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.

Of course we registered each of these domains at GoDaddy.com using promo codes GB1, GB2 or GB3 to register each of these domain names at a discount, but now the list is up to 87 names.

ATADAY.COM
BAILEYBABBIN.COM
BAILEYBABIN.COM
BIGTRIP.TV
BIGTRIPTV.COM
CALILEWIS.COM
CALILEWIS.TV
CALILIVE.TV
CALLILEWIS.COM
CARNIVORE.TV
CLEARCHURCH.COM
CLEARCHURCH.ORG
CRAPPYCHRISTIAN.TV
CURIOUSCALI.COM
DATELOVEFOOD.COM
DEARCALI.COM
DRUNCHIES.COM
EVERYTHINGYOUNEEDTOKNOWABOUT.COM
EXPATIA.COM
FAMCAST.TV
FEEDMYINTERN.COM
FONTSHIRTS.COM
GBTV.BIZ
GBTVLIVE.COM
GBTVPC.COM
GBTVSEARCH.COM
GBTVTALK.COM
GEEKBRIEF.BIZ
GEEKBRIEF.COM
GEEKBRIEF.INFO
GEEKBRIEF.NET
GEEKBRIEF.TV
GEEKBRIEFRADIO.COM
GEEKBRIEFTV.COM
GEEKINTELLIGENCE.COM
GEEKPEEP.COM
GEEKYBAR.COM
GIAHQ.COM
GOGOSHOW.NET
GREEKBEEF.COM
HELPIO.COM
HELPMEBUYTHIS.COM
ICALI.TV
ICALITV.COM
IFEVERYBODYGAVE.COM
INEVITABLEMEDIA.COM
IYULE.TV
IYULELOG.COM
IYULELOG.NET
IYULELOG.ORG
JOINGIA.COM
LURIA.TV
LURIAPETRUCCI.COM
MAKEOVERME.MOBI
MAKEOVERME.TV
MARKANDCALI.COM
MYADVANTAGE.TV
NEAL.FM
NEALANDCALI.COM
NEALANDLURIA.COM
NEALCAMPBELL.COM
NEALCAMPBELL.TV
PAIDBYPIXELS.COM
PAJAMA.TV
PANTSCANDY.COM
PEPPERQUE.BIZ
PEPPERQUE.COM
PEPPERQUE.INFO
PEPPERQUE.NET
PEPPERQUE.ORG
PEPPERQUE.TV
PEPPERQUE.US
SHINYHAPPY.TV
SOMERANDOMWEBSITETHATYOUVENEVERHEARDOF.COM
SPLANATION.COM
STARSHOLLOWPODCAST.COM
THEBRIEF.TV
TULLIOPETRUCCI.COM
TVSIDELINE.COM
TVSIDELINE.INFO
TVSIDELINE.MOBI
TVSIDELINE.NET
TVSIDELINE.ORG
TVSIDELINE.TV
WOZISMYFRIEND.COM
ZEEDEEBEE.COM
ZEEDEEBEE.TV

Cali was shooting a video for The Big Trip about Arnie, a motorman who volunteers with the free trolley system in Uptown Dallas. Arnie asked her to put her camera down, and then he had her come up and drive. I got to drive it too, but the footage of Cali is more fun.

It was scary because there were passengers on board, but it was surprisingly easy since there is no steering involved. One handle clicked from point to point to speed up, and one handle moved slowly to slow down.

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.

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.