I work at the University of Ballarat as a Lecturer in the School of Education. I am 38 years old. I love working with computers and people so Teaching people how to use computers is the perfect occupation for me.
I am very lucky to live in Australia it's a lovely country. Australians are by and large a friendly people. I hope you enjoy living in your part of the world as much as I enjoy it here. If you want to take a look at my web page it's at: http://www.ballarat.edu.au/~rrussell/index.html
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Yes I am sure that there is life elsewhere in the Universe. But I don't think we are likely to find it, though I hope that we do. I think there could be some tangible benefits in discovering extraterrestrial life. It may make us reconsider our position in the Universe and therefore start treating ourselves and our planet with more respect. As for transmitting a beacon well I think we have been doing that for the past 50 years or so, also there was one short one message sent from Arecibo back in the 70's I think. I suppose the act of actively transmitting a beacon as opposed to the random noise that we currently transmit is quite a different thing. In some ways I feel why not, it's hard to know if we should keep a low profile our not. I doubt that ET would pose any physical threat to us though there may be other dangers.
I run SETI@home because I am extremely interested in finding an answer to the "ultimate" question are we alone. I also love being a part of the worlds most powerful distributed computing experiment. I run SETI@home on 8 computers at the moment.
Today I processed my 500th work unit. I have also upgraded to the Command Line Interface client http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/unix.html and have just discovered SETI Spy http://pages.tca.net/roelof/setispy/ which I thoroughly recommend.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.