I'm a highschool dropout that spent my spare time tinkering with unix and general tech.

I started as a customer service consultant at a telco, and now I work as a network engineer at a marjor telecom equipment vendor. I never lied about anything, just applied for positions that seemed interesting, and did convincing interviews and solid good work.

It did and does require a considerable amount of self study and eksperimentation, but I really do enjoy tech, so it's not a problem for me.

The tech industry is generaly forgiving with regards to lacking formal education. Basically, whatever gets the job done.

With no higher education what so ever (stopped at high school) the internet has been my salvation. I now work as as an engineer at one of the worlds biggest telecom network equipment vendors.

I belive that future generations will be more focused on finding, evaluating, and applying information rather than outright remembering it. Computers do remembering alot better than humans do, but we still have the upper hand in dynamic evaluation and application of information and data, so it only makes sense that a shift will occure to focus on educating a mind to be highly capable of absorbing and utilizing available information.

I use:

http://www.classicsonline.com/
http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/
http://www.linnrecords.com/
http://store.harmoniamundi.com/ (no download)
iTunes
Spotify

I ended up doing as most in this thread did. Networking.

I bought a BubbaII from http://www.excito.com/ its a small fan less linux box with 2x usb, 2x ethernet, and 2x extSata.

NB: NICs are gigEthernet, but they perform substantially slower than one expects. This according to the manufacturer, is by design to keen the temperature at a resonable level to accommodate the fan less design.

I work as a sysadmin in a pretty large mobile network operator. This is a business packed with obscure and higly proprietary systems (tho most protocols are free and open), yet I use OSS every single day. All of our machines, from the most mission critical call handling clusetrs to the most insignificant terminal pc, are in some way depending on OSS tools. Even an ancient Sinix/Reliand UNIX cluster from like... 1996 runs openssh and some other gnu apps.

I could not for my life imagine a world without OSS tools readily available for almost any platform I use. So, a big thank you to everyone who is making it possible!