I truly gives me great pleasure to welcome Ben to the site, because he’s been by best friend for going on seventeen years now. I met Ben back in the fall of 1991 in college at WPI. Since then we’ve shared a couple of apartments and worked together at three different companies – Xylogics, Livingston, and GTE Internetworking. We also co-founded a little writing cabal called Eyrie Productions way back in 1991 that’s still going today. We haven’t figured out which one of us is Jay and which is Silent Bob just yet.
Like so many others, myself included, Ben was a victim of the tech bubble collapse back in 2001. And like many, he took the opportunity to strike out in a new direction – in his case, as a writer. In his own words:
In his career – well, not so much a career as a series of interesting but usually ill-advised vocational choices, if we’re being honest – Benjamin D. Hutchins has been a tech support grunt, an Internet operations tech, a small-town print reporter, a public relations writer, and a semiprofessional muser upon the random. Now he’s working on several books (none of which, just to buck tradition, is the Great American Novel), eyeing the relentless march of personal gadget technology with bemusement and often suspicion, and wondering what’s with these kids today, with their clothes and their hair and that stuff they think is music.
His first book, Off the Top of My Head: Personal Reflections of a Small-Town Newsman, can be had here or here.
I’ve always enjoyed his writing style, and for a while I’ve had the idea of having Ben contribute to the site, kind of how Lewis Black does in his Back in Black segment on The Daily Show. And it finally gelled in a conversation with him this weekend.
His ‘column’, Technosophy, will basically cover whatever he feels like writing about (with some tech/geek connection), whenever he feels like doing so. He also has a thing for somewhat geeky toys, and reviewing same. He’s already queued up two posts, and I think they present an interesting, and amusing, contrast in subject matter.
And if you like his writing style, check out his book, and I don’t say that just because I appear in a few of the anecdotes. 
Welcome, Ben!
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