Andrew noticed my name in the credits for The Incredibles. Woohoo! I’m famous!

Note: I actually have two listings in the credits.

Steve Ivy over at redmonk.net sent me a few questions by email, and nicely presented my my answers as a Sitelight: his own way of highlighting blogs which he thinks are cool. I kind of liked the questions, and am not sure I’ve gone over some of this stuff before, so go surf on over to his blog, and find more about what I should have put on my own blog.

Well, thanks to Ruth Meers at podcast.net, yours truly was interviewed briefly by Matthew Fordahl, an AP Tech reporter. The article is a fairly typical one giving a reasonable but not very exciting view of the history and scope of existing podcasting effort. But from my vantage point, it includes one major advantage: it has quotes from me!

Some podcasters still see podcasting as just a fun hobby. Mark VandeWettering, a Pixar Animation Studios technical director, podcasts from his El Sobrante, Calif., home on a range of subjects, including fatherhood, baseball and telescope building.

“It would be great if I made a fortune doing it, but I don’t see how that could possibly happen,” he said. “I’m not really trying for it, either. I’m hoping to meet some interesting people and establish some good communications with people on weird topics.”

It’s only a pity that he failed to list the url for my blog. Oh well. I made a few mistakes in my interview. He asked me when I had done my first podcast, and I said I didn’t know exactly, but I thought I had started in October. In reality, the first podcast that I have on my system is dated September 10th, so I was at it pretty damned early, riding the wave up, but eventually being left behind as the wave breaks considerably higher than I anticipated. That’s okay. My goal was never to be first, or best, or lord knows, famous. I just wanted to do something cool.

Surprisingly, I think I’ve done that.

I really would like to thank Ruth Meers for sending him my way, and more importantly, for asking me a very simple question at Bloggercon:

So, what’s your podcast all about?

I really didn’t have a prepared answer for this seemingly obvious and basic question, and in trying to formulate one (both on the spot, and more carefully in the weeks that followed) I realized that brainwagon is really about answering the question “what is Mark VandeWettering about?” You won’t get a complete answer, because obviously there are things that I am not going to share with the millions of people on earth, but you can learn a great deal about just how much of a nut I am by reading these posts, listening to my podcasts, and trying to understand what kind of bizarre nutcase wrote them.

I hope you all enjoy it. Thanks Ruth, and thank you Matthew.

While testing MSN Search using my name, I found Topics in Animation: The Pinscreen in the Era of the Digital Image which includes a reference to my public domain raytracer. Who knew?