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This week I did a short appearance on CNBC. It's the sort of thing that goes with the job. You write about technology, when TV shows want to cover technology, sometimes they call you to play the expert. But this week I happened upon a VHS tape from a dozen years ago that contains my first TV appearance, from the summer of 1993.

First here's the setup: That summer I was an intern for the Chamber of Commerce in the tiny Central Oregon town of Bend. It's primarily a tourist destination where in the winter you ski, and in the summer you play a lot of golf or go whitewater rafting. My internship involved writing a public relations plan for the Chamber. This in itself was unusual because while I was a journalism student at the University of Oregon, where the curriculum includes, among other things a section devoted to PR. I scored the internship despite not having taken a single PR class.

Anyhow, on the second day of the internship I volunteered to help write and research the copy of a brochure for "The Heritage Walk." The Chamber had teamed up with the Des-Chutes County Historical Museum (the county is officially called Deschutes, pronounced deh-SHOOTS, but the museum for some reason insists on the hyphenated name) to create a walking tour of some of the historically notable buildings around town, including a few houses that were built in the early days, like the Sather House, the Allen Rademacher House, the Lara House and commercial and civic buildings like Pine Tavern and among more than 40 others.

My personal favorite was the O'Kane building, and sadly I can find no suitable link to good information about it. It was in my time, the home of Cafe Paradiso, a European style coffee house with couches and chess boards, and also of Stuft Pizza, a respectable Pizza joint and pub. Apparently the location of the old coffee house bears the obnoxious-sounding name "Soba Noodles" while the old Stuft Pizza location is now Bend City Grill having changed its name from O'Kane's Grill after a dispute over the use of the O'Kane name with the clearly obnoxious McMenamin's chain which apparently operates some arriviste establishment bearing the name.

Anyhow, I got involved with the effort to not only help draft the copy, and to help do some of the research on some of the sites, but also to promote the Heritage Walk itself by getting the local media interested, which was pretty easy given that it was August and there were no other major local stories going on.

So there I was, all of 22 years old, and the local morning gab fest "Central Oregon Today" -- it was a short local segement that showed during a break-away from NBC"s Today Show -- needed a few people to talk about the Heritage Walk "kick off" event which was taking place over the weekend. So here I am, on TV for the first time, with all the cheesy local TV production values and the host's loud clothing preserved for posterity in Quicktime format.

Posted 12/03/2005 03:11:00 PM

A little something from the archives