My understanding and feelings about low-level systems are perfectly encapsulated by the fact that I implied you were a "hardware" person. Even if you don't make it or even use assembly, at least you only have a couple of layers of abstraction between you and 0-5 volts. I'm more comfortable with about 12 levels of systems below me that I just expect to work.

I develop web applications with mod_perl / Oracle on Linux right now for CitySearch.com . Specifically, I'm in charge of the real estate site (http://realestate.citysearch.com/).