1) How old are you and what do you do to pay the bills?

I am 29 and at the moment I do software engineering for a telecom consulting company (mainly we build custom solutions involving Asterisk and other Voice-over-IP solutions).
That varies a lot by the problem :) Parts of Tracker are messier than others, and depending on the problem it can get quite hairy. The kernel messaging problem was somewhat intimidating since I hadn't ever really tinkered with the kernel code much, but with much thanks to the ever patient Ingo, I managed to work my way through.
Offhand, not for the moment, I've been tinkering with a modified scheduler lately, but that's not really what I'd call complete or successful at this point.
Assuming I understood your question correctly, a somewhat friendlier userland debugger would be nice, but for me that's about it, I tend to operate a bit more minimalistic in terms of development and debugging and prefer just a syntax editor + console to an IDE.
I did read a very neat book recently by David Brin titled "Earth". It was very well written and particularly interesting since it seems to touch on a lot of the environment-related events in recent years, though somewhat unintentionally since it is in fact more in the realm of science fiction (at least to my awareness we don't have a small black hole at the center of the Earth at this point ;).