I feel this barely qualifies but I still think back on it as a formative moment. My dad had parental controls installed on the family computer, and they were pr

I feel this barely qualifies but I still think back on it as a formative moment. My dad had parental controls installed on the family computer, and they were pretty strict (I remember at the time that, for example, IGN was blocked). One day either my sister or I discovered that he'd written his passwords down on a sticky note. I'm not sure exactly how I figured out to do this, but I was able to log into my dad's account, open up the terminal, then kill the daemon program that controlled the firewall to disable it. My fading memory tells me that I was simply inspecting the list of running programs on top, saw one named 'integod' (Intego being the name of the company that produced the firewall program), and targeted it. Worked like a charm and you can probably imagine what I used my newfound freedom for (I was in middle school). Pretty basic command-line stuff, but I do credit the early exposure for my ability to pick up more advanced concepts more quickly when I entered the workforce. -------------------- One of my more proud work hacks was on a business trip where I couldn't deploy a source code change but could change the compiled binaries and libraries, so I changed some instruction to a NOP to get around a showstopper bug.