Another Friday night of catching up with things that I keep thinking about but never sit down to do. I've noticed that its obvious when my wife is working. Most of those nights I'll get on and post something. Tonight is no different. But I do have a couple posts to get caught up on.
The thing that had me all giddy this week was I found the podcast This Week in Tech. Check it out and skip the next paragraph if you aren't interested in any back story.
I'll start from the beginning. Back in college, the cable company carried TechTV on basic cable. TechTV had a show called The Screen Savers that was on 4 or 5 days and was an hour and a half long. They would talk about computers and technology for the whole time. They would also take any computer related phone call; tech support, hardware recommendations, etc. The show could go from extremely technical to very basic in a matter of seconds. That was the appeal of the show. Everyone could watch it; it wasn't technical for the entire hour, but it wasn't elementary either. Unfortunately, I graduated and moved back to Minnesota where the local cable company, Comcast, did not carry TechTV on basic cable. During this time Comcast bought TechTV. The idea that Comcast had was to merge G4 (television network for gamers) and TechTV into one channel, G4TechTV (Real original, huh?). The result of the merge was a consolidating of the shows and personalities. Unfortunately, the two main hosts were let go and replaced. They were replaced by new people or someone who did small segments on the old Screensavers. I found various sources and was able to see a couple of the new Screensavers. It seemed that the direction of the show became more gamer oriented. No more technical computer info. On various message boards you could see that many Screensavers fans disliked the new show. Needless to say G4TechTV has dropped "Tech" from their name after sometime. The show was renamed Attack of the Show. A couple sites have said that the show is good given that you don't expect any in depth computer coverage. I may check it out just to see. Fast forward to present time.
I knew one of the old hosts of Screensavers has a show on Canadian TechTV (see previous paragraph regarding US TechTV), so I went to his site. I saw that he has started doing podcasts of a couple radio shows. But what caught my eye was "my newest podcast, this WEEK in Tech, with Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and other former TechTV hosts". These were the people I like so much on the Screensavers. Kevin Rose was a host of the Screensavers during the G4TechTV reign, but he wasn't able to get technical due to the new focus of the show. I browsed through This Week In Tech and found that there were 8 shows available to download. [There are 9 now due to a special midweek show] The group of Leo, Patrick, and Kevin have been doing weekly shows for awhile. I downloaded the first two shows and listened to them to see if the show was good. The next day at work I listened to the remaining shows. The shows are exactly what the Screensavers was when it was at its best.
Michelle was not as excited as me. She's just happy that she doesn't have to sit through them. During college I would sit and watch the Screensavers at 6 pm and watch it again when they re-aired it later that night.
