 How did you get started in hacking/programming?
keefe: My dad left his old Atari (2600 Junior, I think) in my room and I found basic on there towards the end of grade school. 
This was really frustrating to use, so into middle school I would coerce my dad into getting up an hour early so I could get to the 8086s in my school's computer lab and work in QBasic. After that, he got me a copy of VisualBasic which was much too visual for my tastes but kept me tinkering a while. I also got a copy of Borland C++ Builder at a relatively early age but made precious little good use of it. Around that time, WWW was coming out so I started following web technologies sand playing with JavaScript. My HS chem professor had us do an informational interview with someone in our field, which I did and was offered a job where I started doing HTML/JS/CC work from photoshop templates. I also did networking and picked up on Java there. That's really all she wrote, in the last 12 years I don't think I've gone more than 2 weeks without writing some Java. I still prefer dynamic languages and I can't help but want to dump functions into variables, but it's comfortable and does what I want... plus I can do fun things in JS or AS3 on the front end.