Please welcome our new contributor

I wouldn't be the geek that I am without my dad. One day, when I was a teenager, he showed me some of the code for the medical-records databases he had written in the 70s. He kept up the project — mission, really — clear through to his retirement: to design an electronic medical records system for OBGYNs that would be the most comprehensive and useful for doctors and staff. He worked in different platforms, and with different vendors, and over time he got to see his industry finally embrace a technology he had long known was inevitable, and had been evangelizing for years. 

Upon retiring in 2004, and being freed from developing on the Windows platform, Dad decided to go Mac. I was all kinds of honored. PowerBook G4 in hand, he quickly got excited by web design, and the then-nascent medium of podcasting. Before long, he redirected his programming expertise to another new idea: music-paced running. He developed a website at jogtunes.com, with a SQL/PHP database of playlists composed by beats-per-minute, selling the tunes in iTunes and Amazon and Rhapsody; then a podcast (iTunes link), based on the same idea, but using independent, "podsafe" music. Now he DJs the workouts of thousands of folks a week, all around the globe. Come on, that's freakin' cool!

Dad had Datapoint terminals in his office. He took me and my brothers to a computer convention, where we witnessed an Apple II playing color images in sequence, almost like a movie! Dad got me a Sinclair ZX81, on which I honed my own [sad] programming skills, but more importantly developed geek cred. and the moment in 1984 when he said "Let's go check out one of those new Macs for a test drive!" — he kicked off my career.

Henceforth, I think I'll use his podcasting handle, Dr. Bob. Bob has been putting iTunes, GarageBand, and Mac web development through much harder paces than I am ever going to, and I know that his posts, besides being spontaneous digital nakhes generators, will be priceless additions to this collection of tech tidbits in our little corner of the interwebs.