So, I was in KUOW's studios this morning to record a bit for the BBC (it'll air next week sometime, I'll let you know when that'll be on). The producer on the BBC told me that they have something like 160 million listeners around the world. Whew.

Anyway, over in KUOW my producer was Douglas Paterson (although I didn't know that until after the conversation below happened). After the session we started talking about things and he mentioned "my brother worked at Microsoft for 15 years."

"Oh, and what did he do?"

"He worked on the Visual Basic team before retiring."

That caught my ear cause I got my start working for BasicPro magazine that later turned into Visual Basic Programmer's Journal which later turned into Visual Studio Magazine.

But then he said:

"Oh, and my brother wrote MS-DOS."

"Your brother is Tim?" I asked. (I knew Tim Paterson worked for the VB team).

"Yeah."

What a trip.

Don't understand the significance yet?

Well, remember how Bill Gates got started in the operating system business? He bought DOS from Seattle Computer Works for about $65,000 and the rest is history. Tim has a bunch of links to history about MS-DOS, if you wanna know.

Oh, and Doug is interesting too. He got a PHd in anthropology, traveled the world, taught in various colleges before getting his job at NPR, which he says he absolutely loves cause he gets to meet interesting people every day.

You never know when you're gonna meet someone interesting, that's for sure, and just shows why you should stop and take time to get to know the people who don't seem to be all that interesting at first glance.

One thing I've learned is that the most interesting stuff (and the most interesting stories) are being done by people you don't know, or who you think are unimportant.

It's why when someone from India that I didn't know called me up and asked to have me on his podcast I said "sure."

Why? Cause I know I'll learn something. That guy is Kiruba Shankar and I'll be on his podcast this afternoon.