Soledad O'Brien stands stock still in the middle of a very post-modern television set while a makeup artist touches up her cheeks and a soundman clips some gear to the back of her shirt.

She's got a producer reading off a schedule on one side, a boom mike whizzing perilously close to her head on the other and a cameraman perched on a wheelchair buzzing her as the floor guys try out some long shots.

Three weeks into hosting ``The Site'' - MSNBC's new daily show on technology - this 29-year-old is having the time of her life.

``Every single thing I've been wanting to do, I get to do,'' she says. ``I interview people every day. I get to be a reporter. I don't have to pretend to be dumb or really, really smart - I just ask the questions a reasonable person who's computer-literate would ask.''

Despite her youthful demeanor and occasional tendency to giggle on air, O'Brien is open, professional and utterly unaffected by her sudden national fame.

``Someone sent me e-mail saying `Get ready to become extremely popular on the Net' and I thought `Wow, how strange,'' the freshly minted anchor says.

More than a few kilobytes of discussion about her and the show have poured through various Internet discussion areas.

There are those entranced by her open smile and exotic looks, those who speculate about her name (best wild theory: named by hippie parents after black revolutionary George Jackson's book ``Soledad Brother'') and the inevitable naysayers who deride her as a mere ``face'' who couldn't tell a byte from a bit.

Guess again.

O'Brien went to Harvard, where she studied English and American literature. In the summers, she did pre-med courses at the State University of New York at Stonybrook.

``I was one of those fun kids,'' she says wryly.

She comes by her brains honestly. Her father is a mechanical engineering professor, her mother teaches Spanish in Harlem. Of her five brothers and sisters, two are in medical school, the rest are all lawyers.

Oh, and the name?

Born to a black Cuban mother and a white Australian father, she was christened Maria de la Soledad O'Brien - named in the Spanish tradition for Our Lady of Solitude.

``To be black and have a weird name as a child in the open-minded community of Long Island - I was pretty much sunk,'' she says.

O'Brien strayed from the family path of academics to pursue her love of writing, but not too far. After four years at Harvard, she left before graduation to take a job as assistant to the medical reporter at WBZ-TV, a Boston station. After a year, she was promoted to writer, then associate producer and then producer.

After three years there, she got a call from NBC headquarters wondering if she'd like to work for them as a science producer. It was a job she loved, but after two years in New York, she decided she wanted to be on camera.

``You have a lot more control when you're the person saying the words and you can say them as you want them,'' she says.

She jumped to KRON-TV in San Francisco, where she learned the on-screen side of the business - the hard way.

``If you've never been on camera, you're usually horrible the first few months you're on,'' she says. ``I had a really good producing background, but on screen I was a nightmare.''

Her first experience doing a live report certainly didn't help. She was covering a Giants playoff win from a bar in San Francisco when someone in the crowd came up behind her and grabbed her derriere - while she was live on camera.

``I'd only been a reporter for two weeks and I just stopped talking,'' she says with a laugh. ``At least I didn't fall over.''

Two years later, she transferred to the station's Oakland bureau, a move she'd long wanted.

``I always felt that in local news, minorities are not really covered very well. I don't think it's malicious, I just think it's ignorance and a lack of time,'' she says.

O'Brien and her husband moved to Oakland so she would be a part of the community she was covering, and she was quickly promoted to bureau chief. Then fate came knocking.

``NBC called me and said, `We've got this thing. We can't tell you anything about it. But are you interested?' ''

Trusting her mentors at the network, she said yes. That was in April. She hasn't looked back since - not that she's had time.

``I get in at 6 a.m. and do research on my stories. We're usually done taping the show just before 7 p.m. and then I stay to watch it. Afterwards, I have to prep for the next day, so I often don't get home until around 9:30.''

Then there's answering her e-mail, up toward 50 a day and rising. A peek at her in-box reveals a long queue of messages, most in English, a few in her second language of Spanish.

But her favorite came from the 17-year-old who wanted to know if she'd go out with him.

He said "I think you're 21. Do you think I'm too young for you to date?" She replied, "Honey, I'm 29 but you have made my day."