I'm not sure what the challenges involved are since I'm just a .NET guy who uses a debian home server, but I would switch to FreeBSD instantly if I could get utf-8 support in my irssi.
I'm a 6' male with a beard, used to have long hair too.
I always got selected for "randomized" searches when flying (in the UK). At UK airports everyone goes through a metal detector. It would always beep when I went through even if I took off my shoes and belt.
I've used gitit a fair bit for some personal things and I'm very impressed. Unlike doku-wiki it was still lightning fast when running off of an old EeePC 700 (630Mhz Celeron).
Before Vista came out I managed to cut down an XP image to ~200MB in ISO form and less than 300MB on a "fresh" install on real hardware ("fresh" because it was Service Pack 3+ slipstreamed into the install ISO).
That was basically the bare minimum needed to run the OS on my laptop with wifi and sound.
Put something similar on my EeePC 701 when I got it, having a 6/7 second boot time on Windows was quite nice;