I work for making D the best programming language in the world. I've always been doing things like that since my first job. I've always liked the challenge, especially when people tell me I can't do that.

I selected a college specifically to prepare for the kind of things I wanted to do as a career, and selected classes in the service of that. I once told my dad that I was never bored for a moment in college.

Vacations dull pretty quickly.

Lying around doing nothing is my notion of hell.

That's cool, thanks for sharing. I vibed with your point about being stimulated and [not checking out]. I'm relatively new to programming (5 years, self-taught) but I find the endless amount of information to learn quite appetizing and inspiring. I think I'll stick around with this stuff for a while.

Maybe I'll take a look at D now :)

Do you have any resources you'd suggest to someone (who, btw, doesn't have a systems programming background -- but is curious to learn!)

That's a hard question to answer, because how I learned was on equipment that is so dated it is no longer available in any reasonable form.

The only thing I can really suggest is get one of those tomes on Linux systems programming.