Richard K Miller

One of my favorite columnists of all time is Robert Cringely of PBS. (Wikipedia’s article on Cringely is very interesting — it turns out that Robert Cringely is just a pen name that he — Mark Stephens — used at Infoworld. When he left, Infoworld sued him for the name and continues to use it today as the pen name for one of its other writers. But the real Bob Cringely works at PBS now.)

Anyway, Bob Cringely and PBS just recently launched Nerd TV — a TV show for techies. I’m not sure whether it will air on regular TV, but I do know that it’s available over the Internet in every format a techie could want: MP4 video or MP3, AAC, or Ogg Vorbis audio, by regular download or Bittorrent. Each show has a “Nerdy bit” and a more mainstream “Juicy bit” or you can download the whole thing.

I just finished watching the first episode of Nerd TV and I liked it. (No comments on that please.) The first guest was Andy Herzfeld, one of the first Mac computer programmers. I couldn’t quite tell where the Nerdy and Juicy bits started and ended, but the whole thing was pretty interesting.

For instance, Andy mentioned a time when Steve Jobs was interviewed for a book and said “Bill Gates has no taste.” When the book came out, Steve Jobs felt like he needed to call Bill Gates to apologize. He got Bill on the phone and said “I want to apologize for saying you have no taste. It’s true you have no taste, but I shouldn’t have said it in public.”

I’m looking forward to upcoming Nerd TV guests including the cofounder of Sun, the founder of O’Reilly books (my favorite publisher), the cofounder of Apple, the CEO of Google, and the creator of Linux. I’ll keep you posted on anything good I find.

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