Magnus Bäck, March 1997 
The back of our house in the winter 
Our garden in the spring |
Who I am Born in July 1979 (the 7th, actually the same day Björn Borg won the Wimbledon for the third time), I'm currently 17 years old. I live in Lund, a rather small and old town in the most southern part of Sweden. What I do Like most people of my age in Sweden, I go to school most of the time. I've chosen to study a national program with courses in maths, physics, chemistry, biology, mechanics, electronics and computering at Polhemskolan. This study program is one of the hardest we can choose among and the homework takes a lot of my time, but (most of) it is interesting and it's well worth the extra work. When I'm done with this (June 1998), I'll continue with the studies at Lund Institute of Technology and hopefully graduate as a Master of Science in engineering physics or computer science. My spare time is mostly spent in front of the computer, I can be seen on the Swedish BBS IDG\Online a couple of hours every day. There, I read and compose a lot of postings and freelance as a moderator for the PC files (sort of a miniture file administrator). Other than IDG\Online and Internet surfing, I'm working on some programs in Pascal ([Wersting] D[ir], a great replacement for DIR, Delphi and C++ (until recently dClasses, a school project). I'm also hoping (probably in vain, unfortunately) to finish my own Windows POP3 client. After winning a Tele2 Internet account on IDG\Online, I had two mailboxes. Not many mail programs (not even Eudora Pro as only v2.2 was available at that time) support multiple accounts, so I started making an own client. The goal is not a complete mail application, rather a small mail checker that runs in the background and checks my accounts every 10 minutes or so. What I don't do Unlike most of my friends, I don't drink alcohol. They probably think I'm a bit dull, but I believe that you just fool yourself when you have to drink alcohol to have fun. It's of course not as dangerous as real drugs, but aside from that I can't find a difference between them. Where are we headed when we can't have fun by ourselves and as ourselves? Anyway, it's really expensive :-) Another way of fooling yourself is to be religious. Some people need to be fooled to be able to live on, but I don't. I don't believe that everything can be scientifically explained, but if there's something really strange that we haven't got an answer to, I just ignore it. Stupid? Perhaps. What I've been doing I've only lived in Lund for the last 18 months, my first 16 years were spent in Umeå, about 1,300 km north of Lund. Being settled in Lund, I've found that both the climate (that one I knew before the move) and the people are different. The most common and difficult question I get is Which place do you like most?. The answer is; I don't know. My old childhood friends are still up there, but one must also leave the past and look ahead. When I get older I'll perhaps move back, I miss the dry and cold winters with snow and a nearness to undestroyed nature not found elsewhere. In 1986-87 I lived in Philadelpia, PA, and went to school there, 1st grade at Swarthmore-Rutledge K8 school. I guess I enjoyed that too, but unfortunately I don't have any contact with the kids in my former class. Perhaps we were too young at the time. What I think I'm politically unbound but sympathize mostly with right-wing parties. The trouble I see today is that people don't have any confidence for politicians no more. I think many take democracy for granted and don't understand the difficulties politicians encounter. The problem today is not lack of money; just lack of planning och strategy. The social welfare system is run like a corporation with departments that all have to reach a zero budget balance. That doesn't work, the whole society is one homogenous unit. Saving so and so here will cost you somewhere else. I find it very important to be frank, honest and to say what one really thinks. Without being downright stupid (confronting a hostile gang of neo-nazis alone in an alley in the middle of the night crying Fuck y'all, cuz I'm Jewish! would be considered as downright stupid, no matter what you think about nazism as an ideology), always tell people what you think about what they're doing, but still use common sense, you shouldn't hurt them. Don't abuse freedom of speech by being quiet! Regards, 
Magnus Bäck |