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GuilFIN was also famous for its 24 hour music stage/marquee at festivals and that summer I went to Glastonbury, a 7 day eclipse
festival, a 3 day local festival and a 1 day green festival organised by them and others. I became interested in Human & Animal
Rights, and with people I met through them started Hunt Saboteuring weekly. I have to this day never done anything as exhilerating and
as cool as spending the day running through fields dressed in black with 50 others, chased by 10s of police, directly disrupting hunts
and saving the lives of animals. I'm not interested in breaking laws or causing criminal damage to achieve goals - Hunt Saboteuring is
about as extreme as you can get without crossing these boundaries.
That winter, with the turn of the millenium I made the decision to become vegan, and have remained so ever since. Despite having met
very few other vegans my age since, for the same ethical reasons that I converted at the time I don't see myself ever resorting back.
By this time I'd met a lot of club owners in London who knowing i was a poor student got free guest list entry to pretty much every
club i went to. In Feb 2000 I helped organise another huge party with people from the uk.music.rave newsgroup to which around 2000
people attended. All the profits from the night were divided between 10 charities, the percentages of which decided by the punters,
using a computer based voting system that I wrote for the night.
That summer i went to glastonbury and various other festivals/free parties again with GuilFIN, before going away to university. The last club event
I went to with them was the cream of London Hardhouse clubs - Torture Garden. I'll leave it to you to find out about this place, but in a nutshell it's
probably the coolest club i will ever go to, and certainly one I would never dream of going to without 20 other people i'd met in
daylight hours and trusted well enough to go with!! (edit: I've since been back several times without the 20 chaperones!)
University (2000 - 2004)
After going out clubbing the night before many of my A Level exams and going to get my results still pissed from the night before I
managed to blag my way onto the foundation year of my first choice university degree. I hadn't planned doing an extra year of study,
but in reality it meant an extra year of fun and drinking. After which I got onto what is in my view the best course in the country
(Internet Engineering at the University of Essex), with no where near the A Level results I should have gotten to qualify.
At the end of the first year I changed to a new course: BEng 'Computer Games and Internet Technology'.
Owing to the fact that I am a self confessed geek I enjoy this kind of work, I've put in countless hours of study in my own
time from quite an early age (i've used computers since i was 4, programmed since 13).
As a result I never got round to meeting any undergraduates who
had even approaching the level of computing knowledge that I did. This isn't meant to be a pretentious "I'm better than everyone else"
statement, but it's simply a result of the motivation to work hard that i've gotten through enjoying what i do. Unfortunately for me
it meant that I ended up taking a course where
the interesting content i studied myself years ago and now found trivally easy. What was
left is the boring and irrelevent stuff, which I didn't want to learn in the past and still didn't!
To begin with this left me quite discontent with the whole being at university thing (I may as well be
earning money not spending it right?), but then I realised it gave me the ideal oppertunaty to exploit the other
reason I went there - social life. University turned into a 4 year holiday camp.
Now, universities are supposidly packed full of culterally diverse and interesting students, at least they
are in Disney movies anyway, however after having experienced what I did prior to coming it's all been a bit
disappointing in that respect. I did for instance met very few vegetarians and even less vegans. From the
nightlife point of view, for the majority of people who never went to anything more exciting than the village
hall and a couple of local pubs before getting here it's amazing, but i couldn't help but find it all a bit pants.
So I ditched the clubbing scene altogether and just concentrated on friendships and chilling out with what I did have.
For my last 2 years I was president of the Amnesty International group (with about 80-100 members), the department rep, science and engineering school convenor and had
serveral other posts around the place. I got a chance to do my own research and study, goto lots of crazy house parties/pub
crawls (many of which i organised), meditation classes, sport and travel to London on a regular basis during the summer to
fire performing meets (a hobby i started in summer 2002).
Because my course didn't get into the prospectus in time and I found out about it because I was
already at the university, there only turned out to be one other guy on the course. Owing to his inability to understand english/use computers he
got kicked out after the first year and I was left as the only student on the course, with one on one tutition and
my own study lab (complete with playstation2 linux kit, widescreen tft, linux box and 24 hour access on campus :).
Very little work was done! In my second year I did virtually no coursework at all, which in hindsight was possibly a bad idea,
because despite managing a 1st in my computer games part and a 2.1 in my final year, I ended up with a 2.2 overall due to my second year performance.
I don't regret it thou, I did have a *lot* of fun and my grade is good enough to qualify me for a masters in a few years time.
Present Day
After spending all summer 2004 looking for a job I finally moved to Coventry to take a Linux/Unix techy job. Coventry isn't
the most desirable place in the work to live, but it's dirt cheap compared to London so I can afford a really nice place to
live in the centre of the city for the same price as a squat in some of the places I was applying for jobs in. I
enjoyed having a house share whilst at university, but despite being small my flat is all mine (appart from the odd
annoying bass music from downstairs) and I love it. Having a
9 till 5.30 job isn't as fun as uni, but I like the company and the direction I'm going in.
(I'll probably return to uni at somepoint before the age of 30 for a masters anyway, I'm not old quite yet! :)
Final Thought
Overall I enjoy and like my life now. Everyone has things they would have liked to have changed and done differently, but I am truely
happy, if not amazed, with the stuff I've achieved before, at and after university. I often forget a lot of the stuff
that went on and it's
nice to look back from time to time.
I have many dreams for the future, some of which I am starting to put into practice now and I seem to be aquiring new hobbies at the
moment on a montly, if not weekly basis. I aspire to change the things that I can for the better and live peacefully with those that I
can't.
There's tonnes of things which now I come to the end of this document that I've forgotten to put in, but then if this was a
comprehensive desciption of my life there would be no use for the rest of the site.
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