Ben Drawbaugh

It’s hard for be to believe it has been two years already. It seems like yesterday that I emailed Kevin Tofel at HD Beat to see if he wanted to co-host my podcast (This Week In HD) with me. Kevin declined, but invited me to join the HD Beat team and co-host a podcast with him. After he explained what a blog was — and WIN took months to process the paperwork — we were off. Although Kevin only ended up recording 10 podcasts with me, he did teach me a lot, and to this day we remain friends.

I had to go back and find my first post, it was a boring piece about DirecTV raising their rates. I’ll never forget my first feature though, it was about how to setup an OTA HD antenna, which even after two years is a top 10 article every week for EHD — thanks to being the number one result on Google when you search for “OTA HD.” But the most popular post I’ve ever written was a week later, it was about how to connect your computer to your HDTV — it’s kinda depressing that I peaked so early. Over the past two years I’ve written 286,319 words spread over 934 posts (including x-posts to classic) but I still enjoy recording the Podcast and writing features the most.

The biggest challenge was being assimilated by Engadget eight months later, but now I wouldn’t have it any other way and CES with the entire Engadget crew is my absolute favorite week of the year.

Sometimes I wonder how long I will continue to blog, as much as I love it, it takes up so much of my time that I can’t explorer any of my other passions — always wanted to learn to program.

Either way, at this point in my life I don’t see an end in sight to blogging and I’d like to thank everyone that I’ve ever worked with at Engadget and every commenter — except the nasty ones — for making Engadget such a rewarding experience. But most of all I’d like to thank Kevin Tofel for telling me what a blog was, and Ryan Block for keeping me on even though my writing skills were are sub-par — at best.

This was my third CES and although I love gadgets — HDTVs in particular — the best part of all three shows for me was the people I met. While I’m not going to list every Engadget Editor who went, or every press relations person I met for the first time, — despite working with them for years — I’d like to list a few. I talk to Steve Kim (pictured above on the left) every week on the podcast and this is the first time we met, and as I expected, we got along great. Jeremy Toeman with the cool new gadget from Bug Labs was also great, despite the fact that he believe everyone wants to watch crappy video on their computer. I marveled at watching Darren Murph perform his blogging magic in person (200 posts in 10 days, wow!). Unfortunately I didn’t get meet everyone I wanted, at one point I was in the same room as Mari Silbey and we didn’t even know it. And of course I got to hang with some old friends that I only get to see once a year like; Ryan, Zatz; Richard (pictured above on the right) and Tyler (pictured below playing me in the AVP challenge) — as well as so many more that I won’t list. It never ceases to amaze me how well I get along with all these people and they’re the ones that make the trip as much fun as it is. Thanks.

Every once in a while there is a Engadget comment that just cracks me up, so from now on I’m going to post them here.

“Ben Drawbaugh is an interesting specimen – a Blu-ray fanboy and a
Microsoft fanboy.

Engadget is owned by Time-Warner so Ben is a Blu-ray fanboy.
However, he owns an XBox 360 and many of the ads on Engadget are
Microsoft-centric, so he is a Microsoft fanboy.

So the best way for him to appease both sides of his fanboy nature is
to promote Blu-ray and to bash the PS3.

Remember, the PS3 is connected to the Internet so once any standard
becomes the norm, you can expect Sony to upgrade the firmware to
support it. Ignore Mr. Drawbaugh’s Microsoft fanboy comments.”

Just for the record, I don’t own a 360 anymore, hate Microsoft and if Time Warner told me what to do, I’d quit.