About Phil Long
I am, at time of writing, 30 years of age. I emerged into existencce in Liverpool in 1978. Six months later I moved to Warrington, where I lived for almost exactly 17 years.
I am the youngest of three. I have an older brother, Maff, who now lives in the Isle of Man with his wife Lynne, sons Robin and John and daughter Rosie. I also have an older sister, Jen, who lives with my parents in Wigan - where the family moved to six months after my 17th birthday.
I have lived most of the past 6 years in Rochdale - where I am now. Prior to that most of my post-college life was spent in Warrington, with a brief stint in Manchester and two in Prestwich.
I have worked in two distinct fields full-time. When I initially left college I worked as a Technical Support Engineer for U-Net Ltd. A Warrington-based Internet Service Provider. I worked for U-Net for a year, before leaving the company to pursue an opportunity as a Journalist for Orbit News Service - a local freelance news provider.
I worked at Orbit for two years - producing articles for the Manchester Evening News, the Liverpool Echo and The Daily Post, along with local radio stations and Orbit’s own websites and publications; Warrington Worldwide and Lymm Life. During this period I also ran my own website - Wirearts - and became Chairman of the Warrington Music Collective, which I helped create with local musicians as a result of my work on Wirearts. ‘Real life’ and the Internerd has never seen such a collaboration before or since.
After two years with Orbit I reached the conclusion that Journalism wasn’t for me - and provided me with little inspiration. I returned to U-Net; which was now owned by an atrocious company called Via Net.Works Ltd which quickly degraded all of the aspects of quality service associated with U-Net. I worked in Technical Support again, and was promoted to the Second Line team after four months. I remained at Via for almost exactly 12 months, when I moved to Zen Internet Ltd., in Rochdale. This was in March, 2003.
I began work for Zen as First Line Support, progressed to being the Team Leader of the Second Line Team after around 6 months and have for the past three years been the Manager of Technical Support.
Interests
I’m pretty normal here - I like music (anything from Audioslave to Zero 7), films (typically sci-fi, or anything that is a bit cerebral - naturally I like to switch off with mindless action films once-in-a while too though), reading and most recently photography (hence the number of photos you probably noticed on the front page). I also like a bit of console gaming - but usually party games on the Wii, with friends and wine.
