A Hobby breakdown:

Here's more information on my various hobbies.

Usenet

I read a lot, and sometimes I post stuff, but not very often. Right now the most visible thing I've done recently is arranging the creation of comp.unix.advocacy. Favorite newsgroups, in no particular order:

I used to like a lot of others, but right now I'm really just going through the motions for a lot of them. But then, everyone says that.

Being Enthused about Programs

Yes, it's really a hobby of mine. I like to zoom around the Internet finding and exploring nifty new toys. Current favorites include:

exmh
An X based MH frontend written in TK and TCL. Exmh is well designed and easily customizable, and has all the usual advantages of GUI-based programs when manipulating large amounts of mail.
tkman
An X based manual page browser written in TK/TCL, with many slick and nice features. To quote from the tkman help:

A manual page browser, TkMan offers two major advantages over xman: hypertext links to other man pages (click on a word in the text which corresponds to a man page, and you jump there), and better navigation within long man pages with searches (both incremental and regular expression) and jumps to section headers.

9term
A program that is an X11 based emulation of an 8-1/2 window. 9term features fully-editable text; all text can be edited and reused. Using it gives an interesting perspective on shells with command line editing.

Mailing Lists

Geeze, I'm on too many to count, including a bunch I can't tell you about and a bunch you'd be bored with. I run three that you might be interested in, on rc, es, and sam respectively.

I'm always interested in better ways to deal with email. I prefilter my mail with procmail, a very nice mail filtering tool, and read it with MH and the X based frontend exmh, which is very nice and much better than mh-e in GNU Emacs or xmh.

MUDS

I don't play as many or as often as I used to. I'm a wizard on AmberMUSH, and I play on the just-revived TooMUSH 4 and occasionally on Deep Seas. I used to be active on FurryMUCK, but I became much less active there after it moved from my machine to its current home. I play under the name Chris on all these places. If I play under other names, I'm not going to tell you about them.

You can also read an unauthorized biography of my MUD life and times here.

Netrek

I play a fair bit of netrek, perhaps too much. Most recently I was on the INL team Team Testudo, which is mostly a University of Maryland team; these days, the only organized thing I do is be part of the Netrek Draft League. You probably won't recognize me on any netrek servers. Here's a brief history of me and netrek, complete with excess links.

Miscellaneous

I read science fiction, fantasy, and technical reports; I listen to a wide variety of music; I play roleplaying games; I sleep on weekends.