ABOUT MICHAEL JAY HARRIS
Hello and here's a little bit about me. Many of you may know me as hairy®, the creator
of www.395.com and GoMammoth.com. I am
a
ski bum from Mammoth Lakes, and Bishop, in California. Originally form Orange County in
California, Seal Beach to be exact, I ran away from home four days after I turned 17 on January
31st, 1977, in order to live in the High Sierra and ski every day.
I was a skier, and a mountaineer, who had read an article in the L.A. Times, (remember newspapers?) about how, after two years of major drought (it is a feast of famine weather-wise in California) there was suddenly tons of snow and no workers to staff the local businesses. I drove to Mammoth with no chains for my tires in my tricked out 1966 Mustang with mag wheel and wide rear tires, (ahhh, remember the seventies?), and I went in to a restaurant called Nicolosi's where I ordered a spaghetti dinner with my favorite food at the time, garlic bread.
Well, my waiter was a guy named Bob Colton, and I later learned he was a great skier who was known as “Barnacle Bob”. Anyway, I asked him about how hard it was going to be to get a job and he said “No problem.” He went and got the owner, George Nicolosi, and he hired me on the spot and comped my dinner. George sent me in to the kitchen to wash dishes with his son, George Nicolosi, Jr.
As it turned out, the dishwashing machine was broken and so we had to wash everything in the sink. It was New Year's Eve and the place was packed. Thus began my career as a ski bum in Mammoth, which is incidentally the best ski area in the United States.
Over the next 30 years I worked at any job I could get. I was a dishwasher, a cook, a maid, a snow-shoveler, a carpenter, and eventually a writer, photographer, and a web pioneer. When I got my first computer in 1995 when Windows 95 was introduced (I got a Pentium 133 with 32 MB of RAM) I hit the ground running and I never looked back. I skied, I wrote stories, I took pictures, and I built web pages.
Eventually, in January of 1997, web video was introduced to the masses with companies like Vivo and VDO Live. I jumped in headfirst with a video ski report called “Mammoth Today”. I was a rebel, I spoke the truth about snow conditions and I was not a part of the ski area or Chamber of Commerce. I was surprised by the popularity and so when RealAudio introduced RealVideo, I got my well-polished ski report listed on their site as featured RealVideo Content and the rest is history, as they say. I wound up streaming live video with a dedicated web server in what was the precursor to today's video streaming explosion.
I did this for ten years until 2007 which is where my “Ordeal” began. Please read my book “The Ordeal” and delve deep into the oppressive criminal justice system which inflicts mass incarceration on those who are less fortunate, and some who are violent people who need to be punished. Regardless, the story I have to tell is interesting to say the least and I welcome you and your comments.
I was a skier, and a mountaineer, who had read an article in the L.A. Times, (remember newspapers?) about how, after two years of major drought (it is a feast of famine weather-wise in California) there was suddenly tons of snow and no workers to staff the local businesses. I drove to Mammoth with no chains for my tires in my tricked out 1966 Mustang with mag wheel and wide rear tires, (ahhh, remember the seventies?), and I went in to a restaurant called Nicolosi's where I ordered a spaghetti dinner with my favorite food at the time, garlic bread.
Well, my waiter was a guy named Bob Colton, and I later learned he was a great skier who was known as “Barnacle Bob”. Anyway, I asked him about how hard it was going to be to get a job and he said “No problem.” He went and got the owner, George Nicolosi, and he hired me on the spot and comped my dinner. George sent me in to the kitchen to wash dishes with his son, George Nicolosi, Jr.
As it turned out, the dishwashing machine was broken and so we had to wash everything in the sink. It was New Year's Eve and the place was packed. Thus began my career as a ski bum in Mammoth, which is incidentally the best ski area in the United States.
Over the next 30 years I worked at any job I could get. I was a dishwasher, a cook, a maid, a snow-shoveler, a carpenter, and eventually a writer, photographer, and a web pioneer. When I got my first computer in 1995 when Windows 95 was introduced (I got a Pentium 133 with 32 MB of RAM) I hit the ground running and I never looked back. I skied, I wrote stories, I took pictures, and I built web pages.
Eventually, in January of 1997, web video was introduced to the masses with companies like Vivo and VDO Live. I jumped in headfirst with a video ski report called “Mammoth Today”. I was a rebel, I spoke the truth about snow conditions and I was not a part of the ski area or Chamber of Commerce. I was surprised by the popularity and so when RealAudio introduced RealVideo, I got my well-polished ski report listed on their site as featured RealVideo Content and the rest is history, as they say. I wound up streaming live video with a dedicated web server in what was the precursor to today's video streaming explosion.
I did this for ten years until 2007 which is where my “Ordeal” began. Please read my book “The Ordeal” and delve deep into the oppressive criminal justice system which inflicts mass incarceration on those who are less fortunate, and some who are violent people who need to be punished. Regardless, the story I have to tell is interesting to say the least and I welcome you and your comments.