In 1999 my friend's band wanted to sell their music online and so I looked at the new Microsoft DRM that had just been released (don't kill me!) and set up a te

In 1999 my friend's band wanted to sell their music online and so I looked at the new Microsoft DRM that had just been released (don't kill me!) and set up a test web page. I ended up getting an interview (and a job) with a company that Peter Gabriel had just started as I was practically the only person in the country that had even looked at the SDK. PG gave us an opening to every record label ("Hi, Peter Gabriel would like to come visit and show you something...") where we'd show them we could sell their music legally online. Five minutes after PG leaves each building a team from Apple would show up and show off what they were building too. Their meetings were much shorter as we always did all the heavy lifting first. (Note, we always had to use our own equipment because the MS stuff worked way better on Windows, but all the record labels were like 99% Mac). On another one.. it wasn't a side project, but I "hacked" a competition on a popular TV show's web site and they ended up hiring me as the co-presenter o_O