Garrick Van Buren interviews me on First Crack Podcast.

We met the other night for coffee, and when he suggested recording a podcast I was willing (obviously!) but unsure how on earth our conversation would be interesting enough. What I didn’t know at the time is what a skilled interviewer Garrick is. I am not a scintillating conversationalist, yet he smoothy managed to keep me talking.

You can hear how being a model introvert comes out in my speech: long pauses, slow speech as it takes a long time to dredge up memories, lots of false starts and starting in the middle of a thought. Heck, I’ll stop talking in the middle of a thought, unaware that I’ve done so. I think Garrick edited out the worst of it (as well as my longish rants about Java :).

He’s got a cool little setup: a basic clip-on microphone, a nice little pre-amp, piping to Garage Band, where he edits the audio before exporting to iTunes.

A correction: the San Franciscan sample roaster that I mentioned does not cost $1000. It’s more like $3500 or $5000, depending on whether you get electric or gas — and again, that was 10 years ago. I don’t even know whether the company that made it is still in business. It was a smart little roaster to work on, though. I think that you can still see it at White Rock, which is at the same location the Roastery was.