How did it all start?

Where did my adventure with Bitcoins start? As far as I remember, it went like this:

At the time I was a student of first semester of MSc course in Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering. I was taking a boring lab at the moment, Modelling and Analysis of Informatic Systems. I googled around for some info on the PSN hack, came across the LulzSec Twitter account, and I saw this message:

I thought that it was intriguing that there was some way to send such a small amount of money to someone, and then I started looking around for what those "BitCoins" are. Soon after I was hooked on the concept of creating your own money. The book of value of Bitcoins was only starting, so like many people I was doing my calculations and looking into getting some hardware. Did manage to mine and sell some part of a coin before the value stated going down, but at any rate, I didn't get rich;).

By that time I learned a bit more and knew that if I wanted to earn anything in the long run I had to get into making my own mining pool, rather than mining. The costs of getting a decent mining rig was too much for a student, and the ratios between how much it costs to mine coins and how much they are worth didn't calculate. I decided to incorporate it all into my master thesis, but since the summer break has already started, it was hard to get in contact with anyone form the university and ask them to be my supervisor...