I first got the podcast-viewing bug about two and a half years ago.  I was at the NVISION show that NVIDIA put on in San Jose.  This was something of a cross between a trade show, a technology fair, and a LAN gaming party, with the main theme being, as one might expect, all the various ways in which NVIDIA graphics cards can be used.

At that show, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht were doing a live show of their Diggnation podcast.  I had never seen Diggnation before but I knew about Digg.com so I figured it was worth a look. It turned out to be a great deal of fun and when I got home that night, the very first thing I did was download several back episodes and watch them.

In one of those first few episodes I watched, someone mentioned another podcast called “Geekbrief” that sounded interesting, so I went to check that out.  It turned out to be a not-quite-daily podcast where the host, Cali Lewis, would present news about the latest techno gadgets and other geek-friendly topics.  Each episode was fairly short, say 4 minutes to a maximum of 10 minutes, and there was almost always something of interest in each episode.  It soon became one of my favorite podcasts.

Cali’s podcast is where I first heard about Twitter, just before it started to explode onto everybody’s radar screen.  On an average day, she sends out several tweets about what’s coming up on future shows.  I was a noob with a new account when I first sent her a tweet asking about something she’d said in one of her own.  I was trying to get into the spirit of things, but I really didn’t expect an answer.  After all, she had thousands of people following her.  So I was quite surprised when she actually sent back a reply! 

Recently, Cali and her show became part of the Revision 3 family.  Revision 3 is perhaps the closest thing out there to being a podcast “network” with a variety of popular shows such as Diggnation, Tekzilla, AppJudgment and many more.   The good news is that Cali’s show has made the transition pretty seamlessly.  It has a new name “Geekbeat.tv” and of course a new title sequence and credits, but otherwise it’s the same show that we’ve come to love.

Recently, Cali was in the SF Bay Area for a visit to Apple and took time from her busy schedule to have a meetup at the Old Pro Bar & Grill in Palo Alto.  Having missed a few previous chances to meet Cali, I was quite pleased at how the meetup lined up with a trip down to the south bay that I was doing anyway.

At the meetup I also got to meet Cali’s producer, John Pozadzides, and play around a little bit with the Canon 1D Mk 4 that he’d brought with him.  It was a bit noisy at the place we met, because it overlapped Monday Night Football, but it was a pleasure to meet Cali and John and the other local fans who showed up.