The way you sounded connecting to my modem. The way you teased me as you slowly loading each single picture. I get teary eyed when I think of what we’ve been through together. You showed me what Pamela’s boobs looked like, you taught me to make bombs from household products and you even managed to land me some of the freakiest sexcapades I could ever imagine. Oh, you might have gotten me in trouble with the wifey a few times or kept me away from work, but if it wasn’t for you, I’d probably be homeless.

I was 14 when I convinced my mom to “buy” internet. After months of begging and cleaning just about every piece of that house, I finally won the battle and was allowed to use the computer 2 hours a day which became more like 6. Like most curious boys, I went straight for the porn. We were like kids in a candystore that only sells sexual chocolate. Most of the models which I daydreamed about had naked pictures online and that was reason enough for my best friend ( let’s call him Beavis) and I to spend hours scouring what seemed to be the motherload of booty. But soon enough, we realized that we did not yet own all the keys to the poonie kingdom. Just when we thought we had seen every picture there was of Pam , the infamous sex tape came out on paying sites and we just had to get it.

Although we exceeded the horniness requirements by a landslide, I didn’t exactly come from a home where I had the freedom of using my mom’s credit card to buy porn. So I did what any horny teenager would do. I started looking for a way to beat the system.

Soon enough, I stumbled upon a site called “xxxpasswords.com”. It was like I had found the exact point where all hell broke loose and I quickly realized that hackers are the coolest people you’ll never meet. As I dug deeper into the land of free shit, i came across just about anything I’d want, from music to movies and eventually programs. That is the precise time where my life changed.

I always considered myself to be a pretty creative person but I only had the opportunity to display it by drawing and finding new original ways of pissing off my family and friends thus far. I started off by downloading photoshop and then some basic sound and video programs. Before you knew it, I was spending most of my free time learning and experimenting on my own. No youtube tutorials. No todaysbeats.com. I sucked! But I was determined to learn more. Besides, I was still the only one of my friends who could cut your face off a picture, place it in a gay porn film with an original score I created by sampling your mother’s voice. Classsiiiicccccc.

At the time, mp3’s were a brand new thing and I was so happy when I found a way to record them to tape. Soon enough I got a crappy radio shack microphone and me and my jewcrew started recording over loops. We were terrible but had a blast and I knew I had found myself a new hobby. My mom would hear us and barge in, embarassing me right in the middle of my verse. Oh, the same. Don’t get me wrong, she was supportive. In fact, she became so supportive that she insisted I show her how to download all her old records which somehow disappeared.

That was exactly 10 years ago and I now work as a music producer for commercials, films and TV and I know that piracy is a phenomenon that influenced my career path.
As for Cegep, you can still kiss it. ( Big Up to Thomas Fisher who called me the backstreet boy and told me that nobody gets anywhere by someone telling them they did a good job when they didn’t) Audio recording school too. The only institution I’ll give props to is University where I met tons of very interesting people in the Communications program. Aside from that, everything I learnt to be able to produce on computers is thanks to those wonderful people who spend hours cracking programs so that I could learn how to use them for free. They allowed me to find my direction in life and teach myself skills which would’ve been too costly for me to undertake at such a young age .

I am sure that many people have a similar story to mine. Everytime I wake up and walk over to the computer to go to work ,I think about how lucky I am to have a job like that. That is the sole reason that I work so many hours . It’s all-time job for me and it’s been made possible by hackers from around the world.

Let me know if you ever need some beats!

Tags: C4, commercials, homeless, internet, mp3, Piracy