My name is Bob.

This is my first-ever post on technologyevangelist.com but far from my last.  I’m Bob Cringely, a fairly well known guy around the Internet, or maybe it is just that I have been around a long time.  I write a weekly column on the Public Broadcasting Service web site that has been running for almost 10 years and nearly one million words.  I’ll continue to write there but now I am writing here, too.  Let me tell you how it came about.

Back in 2002 I decided to make an online TV show called NerdTV – essentially Charlie Rose for geeks.  It took three years for bandwidth and server costs to come down and PC performance to go up finally making the show financially viable, if just barely.  I made 13 shows that first season, some good, some bad, but all technically shaky because I was the host, editor, and sometimes the cameraman, too.  NerdTV was a critical success with more than two million downloads but a financial failure with more than $100,000 drained from my kids’ college fund.  I was in trouble, broke, and driven nearly mad from all the 100 hour weeks.

Enter Technology Evangelist, which started a bit later and had been experimenting with putting high quality video on the Web.  We joined forces and the second season of NerdTV was produced with the assistance of the folks here at TE.  The shows are better, I get to sleep occasionally, and my wife no longer hates me.  That entire season is complete, by the way, though no shows have yet aired for reasons that make sense only in the land of PBS.  Trust me, they’ll air soon on a web site near you, and maybe a few other places, too.  Stay tuned for more information on the new NerdTV schedule in the next few days.

Technology Evangelist saved NerdTV and possibly my career, so now I’m here to help them (and myself) a bit, too.  I’ll be posting all the time, not the huge essays I write for PBS, but shorter rants they won’t even let me post over there.

Just to warn you, I don’t particularly care about STUFF, which seems to be at the heart of many TE posts.  The latest gizmo holds little interest for me.  I’m much more interested in the people who built that gizmo and the people who use it.  And of course I see conspiracies everywhere.

Don’t you?