Jeremy Laporte & Family

 By nature I’m a very curious person and I love learning new things. Therefore I enjoy doing a lot of different activities.

My Family

 They are the most dear to my heart and nothing comes before them.

Business

This is my field of study and I truly love it. I’m always trying to learn more about it. The subjects that appeal to me are marketing because I love creating, how to use technology to improve a company, entrepreneurship and Venture Capital businesses.

 The Great Outdoor

I alway loved being outside, going camping, but since I moved to Idaho, I put it to a new level. Unlike France the weather in Idaho is very good. Snowy and very cold during the winter and warm and sunny during summer. Idaho topography includes plains, mountains, lava fields, and a lot of wilderness which are all excellent playgrounds for any outdoor enthusiast. This is actually the main reason why I love Idaho. I just acquired a GPS unit so you can keep track of my trips in this blog and also at the following website: http://www.everytrail.com/profile.php?user_id=31670.

I also practice geocaching, which is a sort of treasure hunt using GPS coordinates to find those hidden “treasures”. Please note that geocaches are never buried in the ground but hidden from the general public. You can follow me on this pass time here.

Linked to my hiking / backpacking experience, I’m also a gear tester for www.backpackgeartest.org (BGT). It’s a great website where I can write professional reviews of gear I own and also receive equipment, test it for four month, write three reports and then get to keep the gear. That is providing me some experience into writing professionally, being very critic and also forcing me to get out to test the equipment. You can see my tests reports at the following link: http://www.backpackgeartest.org/tester_reviews/jlaporte.

I used to do some rock climbing. People said that I’m good at it, even though I’m just a beginner and I climbed up to some multi pitchs with a 5.9 difficulty rating and part of a 5.11. I also tried some ice climbing but never went much further because I can’t afford all the equipment. I have a love / hate relationship with rock climbing. I always struggle finding a good partner and even if I enjoy doing it, I’m extremely scared of falling. I did take a few falls but nothing bad. though every time I’m on the rock fears take me over an I can’t think clearly and freeze in my progression. Since I got married, the fears became even worse, certainly because I keep thinking of everything at stake if I had a bad fall. Because of that I put the hobby on standby. Though I don’t usually give up, I just hope that one day I will be able to master this fear and increase my level of climbing.

My last outdoor hobby is with scouting. I belong to the Grand Teton District, Eagle Rock Council and I’m an assistant scoutmaster for troup 341. I’m currently in charge of the 11 to 12 year old kids and I truly enjoy sharing my knowledge with them and seeing them enjoying mother nature and discovering the world.

Aviation

Since a very young age my parents introduced me to aviation and it was love at first sight. I touch about everything that is related to aviation. I flew tourist airplanes, gliders, ultralight, went into the cockpit of many airliners, build and flew remote controlled airplanes, and practiced intensively flight simulation (see below). I also got some pilot scholarships from the french government after taking some tests on aeronautical knowledge and finishing in the top of France. Currently the cost of this hobby being too high for my income, I had to cut back but I still practice flight simulation and tried to go flying in a real plane at least once a year.

Simulation

Video games for me are more an opportunity to learn new things than just playing. I never played a lot of games but the few I used are all simulation and have for objective to be extremely realistic. At one point of my life I tried to master them so much that I became a video game addict spending truly all of my free time improving my skills on those various simulators. I mostly played with airplane simulators like Flight Simulator and also America’s Army. For each of them always striving for excellence. Since I move to the U.S. my only computer is not powerful enough to run any of them and I also started to get bored because I reached a level where I was not learning much . I turned myself toward an old simulator: Falcon 4 AF that allows me to fly the F16 fighter jet and I learn a lot of new things regarding flying and how to operate this jet. I belong to a virtual squadron that can be found here: http://www.72ndvfw.org/ but fly only 2 hours once a week or even less than that.