What does Vraxx do in his spare time?

This question comes up occasionally and while some people think I just sit around absorbing information like some weird undersea sponge the truth is I am usually reading, gaming, or otherwise goofing off.

While my work schedule keeps me on a pretty tight leash, I try to break out and enjoy things like photography and hikes. Unfortunately it's nearing our rainy season here in Hawaii so most of my fun is had indoors.

In a silly attempt to reach some sort of geek nirvana and to make maximum use of my VMWare 5 install, I have been installing various Linux/BSD distributions. These include:
Fedora Core 4
OpenBSD
Ubuntu
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4WS
Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition

So far I've actually really enjoyed working with Ubuntu. It's a more desktop friendly distribution than I had expected and lets me ease my way back into Debian. RHEL 4WS is all too familiar for me and really I loaded it for convenience. Fedora had its quirks, especially when a Kernel update caused a panic querying the IDE controller. OpenBSD was a bit of a kludge to install since I was too lazy (and didn't have any cdrs) to burn stuff and wound up installing over FTP. Windows 2003 didn't really like being in a VM :| This was not a surprise given the limited amount of RAM I could allocate for it on my laptop.

Besides that I'm looking forward to hopefully being able to afford a new lens for my camera and doing more action shots as the weather improves a few months from now. Well that about rounds out what I've been up to. Carry on.