I'm a co-op student at the University of Waterloo in Canada at the moment. Co-op refers to co-operative education, meaning I go to school for 4 months, work for 4 months, etc. So it'll be a 5-year degree but I'll get lots of work experience. I'm currently doing my first work term in Oxford, UK, at a company called DecisionSoft.

My interests focus largely on computers; my degree will be in computer science and my job is mainly programming and some sysadmin. I love Linux and use it pretty much exclusively these days; no Windows at all. I also think Mac OS X is purdy schweet. Nice graphics, UNIX stability, talks ssh, can't ask for much more :) I'm also interested in Anime, (Cowboy Bebop, BubbleGum Crisis, Excel Saga mainly) music (I play piano and enjoy lots of classical music, although Bach and Chopin are probably my favorites) and cycling.

I run SETI on my beast and on a few other computers too. My beast is a dual 1.33GHz Athlon rig with 512MB DDR RAM, two 40GB drives in RAID, a GeForce3 Ti500 and a bunch of other goodies. It runs Slackware Linux at the moment but I'm considering moving it to Gentoo. I also run it on a PII 400MHz box and a PIII 1GHz laptop, although not all the time. It's always running on my beast :)

I definitely do think extraterrestrial life exists. Possibly even in our own solar system! (Although it's unlikely that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists in our solar system). I think humans could discover extraterrestrial life quite soon, especially if we send manned missions to Mars in the near future. As for discovering extraterrestrial intelligent life, that could happen tomorrow or it could happen in 1000 years or it could happen never. That's what's so exciting. I think the discovery of extraterrestrial life would have benefits that far outweigh any dangers. I think it would unite the human race like nothing else could, and the knowledge that we're not alone would be profoundly important. I suppose another race could be "out to get us," like in Hollywood movies, but I generally think those notions are naive and immature.

I think we should transmit a beacon for others to find. We should include information about ourselves, all of our various cultures and our history. We should try to have a panel of representatives from around the world, separate from the governments of the world, but elected, to put together this information in as impartial a manner as is possible.

I run SETI@home because the potential discovery could be the most exciting thing in the history of our race. Why wouldn't I want a chance to be part of that discovery?