David is a communications consultant, doing employer branding and internal communications for companies across the UK. He spends alot of time on Flickr and the web generally, as well as reading and writing short fiction.
Valerie is a former features editor for a newspaper in Colorado who reads, gardens, paints and writes in her downtime.
The two crossed paths on the popular photo sharing website in 2005, when David posted a "blurry cameraphone shot of a Lego dinosaur eating my little sister". Valerie happened on it, and the rest is history. They were married on June 2 this year, and Valerie has now moved to the UK to be with her Flickr soulmate. (Read the whole narrative of their virtual courtship, from cute dinosaur pic, to modem handshake, to happily ever after in this chronicle from David).
So how did these two arrive at the terminal -- and ultimately, the altar?
David's first brush with technology was hanging around his Dad's office over a couple of Saturdays, and "pestering him til he booted up the 'Draw' program on the ancient Xerox mainframe terminals they had there.
"My first brush with the Internet came at high school when I signed up for a Hotmail email address, then wondered why I got no emails (it was a little early for most people to have an email address, about 1993). Soon after the first web cafés opened and I spent more time than was probably healthy wading through screenfuls of text on Usenet and avoiding horrendous blinking HTML on the web."
Valerie's first machine was an Apple IIe. Her third grade was granted a gaggle of them for educational purposes. "All the little kiddies would have scheduled time in the library to play reading and math games," recalls Valerie. Make way for the inner geek. "I didn't like the final 'reward' screen on the program that I was using and I changed it. My mom got a very frantic call from the school saying that I broke their computer and that she now owed them about $5,000. We had a rather heated summit with the school principal, and I explained to them what I had done, and put it back the way it was before. They made me take a lot of IQ tests after that and I had to take classes with the other weird kids from there on out."
But the "magic" really began, says Valerie, when she first connected to the Internet, via an FTP server or Usenet through her high school. "I was still taking 'weird kid' classes, but there weren't any other weird kids to pair me up with," she explains. "I studied pretty much everything in high school as independent study, and we had access to Colorado State University's network. I remember listening to JFK's speeches for history courses and being blown away that it was all available through this magic box called a computer. :-)"
So what first drew them to Flickr?
"If I remember correctly, I saw a post on Boing Boing about Flickr's first anniversary, and clicked through to have a look," says David. "Not having a camera (except for the crappy one on my mobile phone), I hesitated, but signed up anyway, then paid for a pro account a couple of weeks later, thinking it would be a good motivator to get myself a camera. I was pulled in properly by two things though - Valerie's comments on my pictures, and the awesome community of photographers in London and around the world that I met up with in person."
For Valerie, it was the recommendation of a friend (the way many of us stumble onto one online portal or another). "He was in charge of the historic photography collection at the Denver Public Library and had seen some of my photographs. He suggested that I go have a look at Flickr, just because he thought I'd like it. I did look, and I did like it, but I was really broke and couldn't afford a pro account. Dave was gifted with two free accounts to give away for being an 'early adopter' and he gave me my pro account about two weeks after I signed up under the free account."
Unlike many offline hookups, their connection was driven by grey matter out of the gate. "Neither of us was looking for a romantic connection," says David.
Venessa Paech Venessa Paech - Editor & Founder. Venessa holds a BFA from NYU. She has done the arts to death, and has been in love with the web since she "discovered" it at a CyberCafe in NYC in '93. She wants to be a podcaster when she grows up.
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Venessa Paech - Editor & Founder. Venessa holds a BFA from NYU. She has done the arts to death, and has been in love with the web since she "discovered" it at a CyberCafe in NYC in '93. She wants to be a podcaster when she grows up.
GI Pin Up: Ella Morton
GI Rising Star: Tom Wood