Brian Richardson, nerd about town, started siliconchef.com as a blog back in back in 2001. He occasionally uses this site to talk about travel, computers, photography, video, marriage, sci-fi, and his little GeekFarm. After two decades living in Georgia, Brian moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2019 and is NerdSteading on his new farm in Oregon.
Born at a very early age, Brian lived the standard “outcast nerd in a small Southern town” life until the age of 16 when he was accepted to the North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics. This is where Brian started dabbling in video production with the help of the school’s media lab.
Deciding against a career in television for many sane reasons (low salaries, lack of job security, bad teeth), Brian went to Clemson University to get an Electrical Engineering degree. During six years of math, programming, elective classes and power electronics labs that might kill you if you’re not paying attention, Brian got involved with student radio (WSBF-FM). This did nothing good for his free time, and lead to him co-founding the campus cable television network (then: CCN, now: TigerVision) around 1995.
Brian left college in June 1996 to work in Atlanta, GA (okay, not actually in Atlanta, but you can see the smog sometimes) and marry a wonderful woman named Suzan that he met in college. He did manage to finish his MSEE in 1997, and slowly tried to blend into the normal life of a computer programmer.
That didn’t last long. In 1998, Brian was introduced to Dragon Con. After starting work with the Technical Operations (TechOps) staff, he co-founded DragonConTV in 2002. This consumed most of his basement, several months of every year, and somehow put him in charge of videography at Dragon Con from 2005-2018. Brian still volunteers for Dragon Con as a panel moderator and host of the parade’s broadcast coverage on Atlanta’s CW.
DragonConTV introduced Brian to the dark underbelly of podcasting, and he co-hosted the Parsec award winning WhatTheCast from 2007-2014. For a number of strange reasons, Brian has been featured on Wired, CNN, BBC Tech News, Slashdot, Slice Of Scifi, Device Forge, Digital Atlanta and Intel’s Software Developer Zone. He also plays drums with the jazz combo Play It With Moxie, and hacks away at martial arts after earning his black belt in 2011.