My other hobby that I still practice is building and programming computers. I've built a lot of them, including the one I'm using now. It has a generic 6 bay case, 2 80 gig hard drives, a DVD ROM drive and a DVD burner. The mainboard is a Gigabyte Gold board with 7 expansion slots, 8 gigs of RAM and a 2 ghz AMD dual-core processor. For USB components, there are 16 USB ports, 8 are 1.1 and the other 8 are 2.0. There are 4 of each on the back and 4 of each on the front. And let's not forget the media center. This allows me front panel control of mics, speakers, volume/recording levels as well as another joystick connector. Power up time from turn-on to online is 48 seconds. I'm using Windows 98SE with IE6, SP1.
Another hobby, which I had to give up due to medical problems, was building cars (not models). I'm still driving my last one. A 94 Buick Century. The engine LOOKS stock but that's only to draw in the suckers. It's a sleeper and it's all tricked out inside, it's a 3.1 V6 bored over to a 3.3, has a high capacity fuel pump, oversize injectors (6 of them, each equal to a 2 barrel carb), performance cam, high lift lifters, steel alloy heads and pistons and an electrically driven turbo charger buried between the top of the block and the intake monifold. On a dynometer test it peaked 380 hp. My last race was three months ago when I blew away a 71 Super Bee with a 426. The guy thought he had an easy win and failed to take me seriously until I blew his doors off! I gave the Super Bee to a friend of mine. His son drives it to school now. I bet that guy will never judge a book by it's cover again.