From aspiring freeskier to computer programmer.

When I was in middle school (circa 2001), I got really into skiing. I wanted to be a pro freestyle skier. Not the stuff you see in the olympics with the moguls but the stuff you see in the XGames with halfpipes and rails. I would go skiing as much as I could and spend my days looking for pictures and trick tips on the Internet.

The Internet was a different place back then. Chat rooms, webrings, and fansites were the norm. Message boards were also big and I stumbled upon the biggest and best newschool skiing message board on the net. It was (and still is) Newschoolers.com. It was everything I wanted. It was a place to post videos, pictures, trick tips, reviews and anything else you can think of. It was a very early social network and the fact that it is still thriving today shows how awesome it is.

So back in 2002, I joined Newschoolers. I posted frequently, becoming one of the top 10 posters. Back then, things were different. People didn’t worry about cross site scripting attacks or SQL injection. It was a very anything goes kind of place. I remember being able to pop up javascript alert boxes in the posts and create “secret” forums just by changing the URL. I learned about different image and video formats and even got to be pretty good at video editing. I remember reading posts in the “Site Discussion” section about how Newschoolers was made and thinking how cool it would be to make a site like that some day.

Around this time, Fred and I created FARP. We put together a short simple video of some of our skiing and posted it to Newschoolers. The skiing was rough (hilariously bad), but I think people could tell that we really enjoyed doing it. Our videos became super popular (because they were so bad) on the site and we even enjoyed a bit of real world fame. I had more than one time where someone recognized the FARP sticker on my skis and started up a conversation. There was another time where we beat out several professional video productions on a “Best Ski Movie Of The Year” poll. Sure, it was a joke, but it was pretty awesome.

In high school, I started taking programming classes and made my own websites. I was spending more and more time on the computer writing code, editing videos, and talking about skiing with strangers from around the world. I was skiing more than ever too, since I could finally get to the ski hill without the help of my parents.

After high school, I went to college where I had to make a decision. Do I go into film production where I’ve had some success, or do I go into computer science, something I don’t really know a ton about. I decided on computer science, but I still got to take a bunch of film classes. That first year, I still skied quite a bit. I went with my roommate Fred and a friend I had met on Newschoolers that ended up at the same college. I like to tell a story about how that spring, I sold my textbooks so that I could afford to go on a ski trip. I did actually do that, but they were the textbooks from the previous semester.

In the years after that, I skied a lot less. School became harder, money became tighter, and I went on NS less and less. Eventually, I graduated from college and got a job working at TechSmith as a software engineer. Life was good, but I still wasn’t skiing as much as I wanted and I had all but stopped going on Newschoolers. Every once in awhile, I’d sign in and see if the layout had changed but I hardly ever contributed any more. I thought I was just growing up.

So then one day last week, I get a message on Facebook from an old NS acquaintance about my original FARP video. Apparently, someone had gone back in time and bumped the thread to the top of the Ski Gabber. That thread is like 8 years old. It’s pretty amazing to look back at my life and see how much NS affected it. My music collection, the way I dress(Does anyone remember NSClothing?), and in an indirect way, the career I chose were all affected by NS.  I have grown up a lot in the past 8 years and Newschoolers definitely played a big part in making me the person I am today. Thanks NS.