Cali’s Dad is Tullio Petrucci. I’m convinced he’s watching over everything we do. He lived his life as an artist who focused on the audience. The name of his company was Interactive Entertainment. He cared about a two way, three way or four way interchange between the audience and the producer.
He would have totally gotten what we’re doing with GeekBrief.TV and he would have inspired us to do a better job. Actually, I think he does.
We lost him before we started the show. It sucks and we hate not having him as a visibly active part of what we do. Tullio Petrucci, father of Luria Petrucci (aka, Cali Lewis) was/is an amazing man. He accepted me and my love for his daughter. I couldn’t have done that so gracefully because she is way too exceptional.
It’s around the anniversary of when we lost him. We wish he was actively, physically here advising us and helping us succeed. It’s hard not to believe, though, that he’s here in spirit helping more than he possibly could in the flesh.
I just got off a streaming test with Mike Versteeg the developer of CastBlaster and VidBlaster. He’s very close to having a viable alternative to Tricaster at a price any individual, church, school or community group can afford.
VidBlaster can stream to the Internet now using Windows Media streaming, but we’ve asked him to make it work with Ustream.TV. He made it happen in about two weeks.
Steven Saylor is in town and we’re going to do a live stream with him tonight at 8PM (ish). We’ll probably limit it to one camera so we can have a higher quality video in the archive.
Mike isn’t quite ready to let me try the Ustream-friendly version of VidBlaster, but he said he’ll have a version I can test after this weekend.
I love this stuff!
Alcoholics describe their experience with alcohol in a way that very nearly mirrors my experience with political news. I have to try very hard to avoid partisan political discussion because even a small amount of exposure can send me spiraling into depression and ultimately a sense of despair. Some people can handle it. I cannot.
Growing up, I watched This Week with David Brinkley with my grandfather on Sunday mornings. I loved Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts and George Will. That was where my addiction started and by the time I was in college, I was a political news junkie. I listened to Rush Limbaugh for three hours a day and National Public Radio the rest of the time. On Sunday mornings I recorded the political shows so I could watch This Week, Meet the Press and The McLaughlin Group back to back.
At some point there was a shift away from politics being a positive form of entertainment. It because a source of frustration for me, especially as I began to think of myself as more of a Libertarian.
When Rush Limbaugh returned to his show after re-hab, he talked about how it’s much easier to be a happy person when you distance yourself from politics. That was it. I walked away and now, as much as possible, I try my best to stay away from it. I’d rather be happy than right.
I’ve exchanged politics for technology because technology offers real solutions rather than false promises and power grabs. On Brief 377 we covered a Silicon Valley company called LS9. They’ve genetically modified bacteria to feed on wood chips or straw and excrete crude oil. Within just a few years their technology very well may eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. The political arguments haven’t changed much in years and years. Technology can transform our lives virtually overnight.
I won’t always be able to avoid political discussions, but I’m trying as hard as I can. Live is much more fun without it.
I’ve been getting some great advice from Jason “Cannonball” Jenkins about lighting. Jason is a professional lighting designer who is currently on tour with the Osmonds on their 50th anniversary tour. After he introduced me to a few hardware and software solutions that would enable us to control our lighting from a single control point, I read a short blog post on AutomatedHome.com about the company iControl receiving funding from the iFund.
I started wondering how cool and how hard it would be to create an iPhone App that would control DMX lighting via WiFi. The lights themselves could be wired to the network, and the iPhone would operate as a wireless controller complete with sliders for dimming individual lights.
I’m still early in my research, but I found a post about using an iPhone or iPod Touch as a visual controller. I found a company that makes an ethernet connectable DMX controller that has a Palm App written for it. I also found this DMX WiFi receiver that would probably be overkill in my setup. I also found a D.I.Y. for using DMX in a home automation setup.
If an iPhone or iPod Touch can be used in home automation, it could also be used to remotely control studio lighting. I’m not sure how hard it will be to pull all the parts together, but it seems like it could be amazing.
This post is meant for googlers. Smurf sex is just when sex happens with so much blue light that the participants look blue. No mystery really.
I started to @tastyworm on Twitter about this, but 140 characters just wasn’t enough. He asked, “is she *really* OS agnostic? She certainly comes across with a major apple bias.”
Here’s the problem: Geek Brief is a two person production with a massive audience. We write the show together, but often Cali’s time is encompassed in responding to email. She gets about a thousand a day.
Cali agrees with me that OSX is better than Windows, but she likes Windows, and if she had all the time in the world, she would spend it studying Linux. If you watch all the shows, that sentiment is pretty clearly reflected.
Me, on the other hand…I’m as Apple committed as is possible. I hate Windows and, to my detriment, I look down on people who aren’t willing or able to switch. I’m the bad guy, if there has to be one. When there is an over the top Apple bias on GeekBrief, it’s always when I have written that part of the show. I have no interest in being fair and balanced. I want everyone to switch to Mac.
Cali, on the other hand, somehow sees value in Windows. She even kind of likes Vista. When you see that sentiment in the show it’s all her. When there’s Linux stuff, it’s all her because, to me, Linux is hard work.
GeekBrief.TV is a two person production and the Apple bias mostly comes from me. Cali absolutely prefers Mac, but she also really cares about the alternatives. I try to convince her to make Geek Brief a Mac podcast, but I’m not holding my breath.
Spending money in new media is a tricky thing. Everything we do costs much, much less than antique media, but it isn’t exactly cheap. Lighting for the Big Trip cost just under $6000. That’s a lot, but it’s a choice that will make sense for the next several years.
Usually when we buy something for production, I expect a pretty quick return on our investment. That doesn’t feel quite as true for the streaming stuff we’re experimenting with. Live streaming is where podcasting was three years ago, months before we started GeekBrief.TV. Money wasn’t exactly flowing into podcasting then and it isn’t quite flowing into live streaming now.
So, I’m thinking about buying a Tricaster so we could go live for a portion of each day with two or three cameras. I’m not sure the investment would be returned for at least a year, but I really think being an early mover is extremely important. Leo gets it. Chris Pirillo gets it. I HOPE we get it.
It’s a big expense, but I’m thinking the long-term return is massive.
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.
Saturday, I was writing a check for rent and paying other bills. I opened a spreadsheet in Numbers to keep a running total of about 5 debits and credits. Numbers is great, but for a quick little list, I wish there was a lightweight, desktop widget with about 10 rows and 2 columns. The left column would be for labels and the right for numbers. The bottom right cell would provide the sum and it would look something like this:
I’m not a big fan of Dashboard because it lives on a different layer. I’d like it to have QuickSpread on the desktop so I’m thinking Adobe Air?
