Buzz asks:
Does that make me a sicko or what?
Yep, I think it does. And I think I am similarly afflicted. :-) Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted a computer -- partly just so I could explore it and tinker with it. When I got to high-school, we had a dial-up connection to a PDP-11, that was mostly for administrative use. Our math teacher had gotten several accounts and he gave them out to me and my friends. We wrote a bunch of little simulations in BASIC: I first wrote a program that could produce a graph and then wrote programs that could simulate orbital motion or a bouncing ball. We also played some games that were on the computer (a Star Trek game and a game called Adventure, which was a text-based journey through a mysterious cavern). But mostly we explored the computer itself: we read all the documentation we could find, explored all of the system binaries, and, eventually, wrote a program (with some critical technical assistance from my brother) that simulated the login procedure and used it to try to get people to login through it (and thereby capture their passwords). We got caught and got in minor trouble for it. But I always wanted to be on the other side: to have access to the spinning tapes and blinking lights of a real multiuser system. Linux lets me do that.
My brother doesn't really get it. Or maybe that's not fair: he gets it, but he doesn't have the same need. He got a friend to help him set up an openbsd gateway for his home network, but has no interest in really doing any administration. He installed MacOS X, but won't install fink, for example, so he can't run any of the X-windows apps I tell him about. It's just not how he wants to spend his time -- he just wants to use his computer to do stuff! Now that's what I call a sicko. :-)
Then, of course, there's my brothers-in-law who are hardware freaks. They are both windows bigots who say to each other that if you're not arguing about hardware at the level of individual chipsets, then you're just a weenie. Of course, I can't see that they ever actually do anything with their computers, except play games. They both work in computer support positions, but they themselves don't really use their computers other than at a pretty superficial level. So I think they're sickos too.