I was born far too long ago for me to remember in a part of East London that was once part of Essex. This can be said for much of London, but in my case I was just saved from being an Essex man by a mere year, but gave me the dubious privilege of being a Londoner. Fortunately enough Essex blood flows through me to dislike both jellied eels and Ford Capris and to spare me the Cockney accent.
My earliest years were a period of preparation for my later life, lying on my back with a bottle in my mouth. Whilst sober and when not learning to crawl I would study quantum physics and soon invented a toaster that utilised worm holes to deliver fresh toast straight to the breakfast table without having to reach over to it. Various other highly clandestine projects brought my household under the attention of MI5 and it wasn't long until an armed SAS squad stormed the house whilst my mum was out shopping in order to seize my notes. The au pere was arrested and later released after questioning, but fortunately I managed to pin the blame on my teddy bear in order to avoid capture. Teddy was never seen again, something I have never quite been able to come to terms with, but if it wasn't for his brave sacrifice I would not be here today. Besides he only cost £4.99.
My early school years were quite uneventful but apart from my skill with mathematics and getting thrown out of the Cubs for calling Arkala a communist I managed to stay unnoticed.
My parents always had my best interests at heart, and with this they sent me to a comprehensive school in Romford (one of the roughest towns in the area). I found that my height and medium build was as an advantage at school and soon made it into the school Assault With A Deadly Weapon team as well as the inter house knitting team. I still have fond memories of the inter-school riots and the inter-house cardigan crocheting matches. Soon my skills with a ball of wool and a couple of knitting needles got me a place in the country wide finals and I just managed to beat a small school in Pucklechurch by half a bootie to claim the title of Mr. Knitting (11 to 16 category) of Great Britain and the grand prize of a trip to the Middle East. It was with great pride that I arrived in Kuwait as the judge of an inter-emirate chess match between Kuwait and Iraq. Supporters from both country swarmed to Kuwait City to watch what would be a thrilling spectacle, but as this happened something dreadful happened. A radio ham in Kuwait who's grasp of English could be described as basic at the best of times, radioed to a friend of his in the USA to tell him about the invasion of Iraqi spectators and to complain ho it was now almost impossible to get a beer anywhere as the bars were so packed. Regrettably this was taken the wrong way and before we knew what was happening the UN was attacking Iraq thinking that it had tried to take over Kuwait. The match was on the fourth turn as the first cruise missiles and Tornado jets flew over and I had no choice but to cancel to match. This was a bad idea. Having come so far the Iraqi supporters were less than impressed with my declaration of 'war stopped play' and hostilities soon flared. Being a desert state there is a distinct lack of windows to break, videos to nick and police to beat up in Kuwait and so having the normal way of venting anger unavailable the Iraqi supporters started to behead the Kuwaitis and set fire to their oil wells. The rest is history.
I was 'liberated' whilst enjoying a drink in a nice little bar in Kuwait City by a heavily armed squad of US marines who, after beating me into a small pulp demanded to know if I was a 'Goodie or baddie'. When I said I was English they looked confused and repeated the question. They looked really quite pull out when I said I was a goodie and the next thing I knew I had been bundled on a transport plane, sent to a US air base in Suffolk, debriefed and kicked out into the street when I asked them if the base commander was house trained.
Whilst at school I also discovered my first computer, a BBC model B but having a box of electronics that could play simple music and make blocky graphics pootle about the screen after six hours of programming certainly didn't impress me and I promptly ignored after that. I had spent many hours with a Spectrum 64k prior to that, but I believe the debate whether it was a computer or paperweight still rages.
After leaving school with a set of GCSEs, three board rubbers, half the library and a science technician I discovered a love of playing with highly dangerous industrial machinery. Deciding that my cover had to maintained and to allow me to increase my chances of permanent limb-loss I went to a technical collage to become an Technician in general engineering. This proved to be a bad idea as my final year project was a computer controlled robot.... and the only computer available was a BBC Model B. I grew to loathe this tasteless grey object and still feel a chill when I remember it and the way it almost seemed to watch it. It also had the uncanny ability to be broken in a completely different way each time I came to use it. Finally, through my newly gained skills in electronics, mechanics and a huge lump hammer, I managed to get the damn thing to behave some enough of the time to get an OND and become a technician. My delvings into the new black arts of electronics and robotics led me to invent the LAN coffee machine, but production didn't start as I got rather drunk one evening and lost the factory in a game of 'swallow the rat', but fortunately my opponent failed to realise that the used handkerchiefs that I threw in with the bet weren't the deeds to Canada and was arrested when trying to smuggle it back to Britain in his hand luggage so I am safe for the moment.
By the time I had left collage a strange occurrence had taken place. When I had started my training Britain has some industrial capabilities and now there was none. This gave me a choice, I could either work in a burger bar or go onto university and hope that this strange state had sorted its self out and I could get paid loads of money for saying words like 'thixotropic', 'Austinite' and 'polymorphic'. The choice was obvious, I would go on holiday and think about it later. I don't think that I'm a procrastinator, but I just can't be bothered to think about today. Packing my knitting in a small case with a copy of the Times, just in case the local officials didn't believe I was English, I headed off to Yugoslavia. The holiday wasn't quite as relaxing as I had hoped, Lord Lucan kept hogging the bathroom and Glen's constant practising really got on my nerves, but it was quite interesting to go on holiday to one country and to leave a completely different one.
By default I seemed to end up at uni in Bristol, perhaps living so close to Suffolk and thereby speaking Wursel fluently had something to do with it (at least I could always get served in Bris pubs). The first few weeks were dark times to say the least, but one day I ended up in a computer room somehow and things have never been quite the same for me since. The room was inhabited by a small tribe of small, white, shrieking creatures with huge, red, sore eyes that were referred to as 'the mudders'. Unfortunately I failed to communicate with them just getting a series of agitated gibbers from them when I poked one of them. After a few days at uni I was sent to the computer centre to get a login so that I could be contacted by another tribe of small, white, shrieking creatures called 'the lecturers' via the 'e-mail' system. The 'help desk' at the computer centre, apart from failing to live up to its name, had a number of guides for sale for less than a pound, and I soon found my self the proud owner of a UNIX account and a copy of the imaginatively entitled 'UNIX' guide. Of course, the guide was extremely out of date and almost completely useless, but I did glean how to log in, use telnet and read usegroup news from it. The first time I logged in was a revelation and my flat mates didn't see me for about three days as I sat in the 24 hour computer room reading alt.rec.mud.lp and other such sources of arcane knowledge. My first experience of mudding came with my friend Jon telling me to telnet to a port on a certain computer system and the world of a Diku mud opening before me. I soon mastered the basics and found to my horror that I had become a complete mud addict and knew quite a bit about the Internet that everyone was raving about. Even worse, I started to understand what 'the mudders' were taking about.
When I wasn't mudding I started to investigate the architecture of PCs and found that they were so basically simple I could upgrade, build new bits for them and that people started to ask me for buying advice. Scary. Things came to a sudden halt a few months later when the mud I was on simply vanished, but well, Jon came good again and provided me with the IP address for Nuclearwar mud in Sweden. It was radically different from the Diku that I had got used to, but I soon found my feet again. The end of the year heralded a change in my normal routine, for several months I ended up working on a building site and worse, I was link less
When I got back to uni I found that, not only had half the people on my course got thrown out, but I hadn't lost any of my touch. Taking a break from Nuclearwar I found that there was a mud run on a student server (the very one which you are reading this page on) was running a local mud that belonged to one of 'the mudders' and as a fast link is one of the most under rated things in the world had a word with the man in charge and soon became a regular. This started a great friendship with him and the other mudders and I soon found myself in a world of beer, curry and mudding. It was a hard life but someone had to do it (yeah, right). I then became a wizard on this mud (ResWorld) and not long afterwards an archwizard and lo, my coding did improve. When I was bored one evening I decided that some web pages for ResWorld would be nice and so I learnt HTML and coded the pages within one hour landing me with the job of Web Master. Well, this wasn't to last forever and I soon finished uni and lost my link.
So now to the present day, unemployed and having to use a service provider to get on the net (Being stuck at 28.8 baud is almost unbearable). Well, ce'st la vie.
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