Profile: Todd Hebert

Personal background
Hello everyone!

My name is Todd Hebert. I live in North West Wisconsin and as of today (1-25-2011) I'm 42 years old. When I was growing up I was always into electronics and communications. I received my amateur radio operators license when I was in 6th. grade--KA9RIH. I was the youngest operator in the state of Wisconsin to be licensed and was interviewed in the local newspaper, The Leader-Telegram. I continued this as my hobby for a long time and achieved higher grade licenses so that I could use different frequencies that were only allocated for groups at or above a certain level. I'm not so active in this hobby any longer as I have other responsibilities to attend to.

I have used my different forms of communications in that area. EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) were you use huge arrays of antenna's so that your signal was powerful enough to bounce off the moon's surface. This was WAY COOL! And is still today. I have used AMSAT's that are floating around our planet to facilitate communication in much the same way as TV is broadcast.

I have always had a passion for the digital relm, and I got my first exposure to it via Packet Radio (AX.25) and TCP/IP shortly after it was a standard. Vint Cerf was the smartest guy on the planet as far as I was concerned, and Robert Metcalf was also a pioneer (The creator of Ethernet). It was only natural that I would find myself involved in a computer career someday, working for Bill Gates.

In 1995 I was working at Microsoft as a mentor, trainer, and level 5 network support engineer for Windows 95. I had reached the top of the heap, even though my computer teacher in High School told me I would never make it in the computer world. I was filling in for someone at MS and had the pleasure of taking my teacher's phone call. On my fully populated screen about the caller that I had received from the customer service rep I realized that it was him. I greeted him and indicated that I knew him, I gave him my name, my credentials and he promptly hung up the phone. Sweet justice!!

I have had some personal struggles over the years that are in check today and I am a grateful friend of Bill W. (Some of you will understand-others won't)

I'm still working in the computer field as a business owner, PC Synergy LLC, I install and manage computer networks, build custom white box servers,workstations and desktops. I am a hardware and OS guy but I am not a programmer, I could if I really wanted to but it is not my passion. It takes a special person to do that, and I am not he/she.

Today I am comfortable right where I'm at, I have a baby on the way-July 22nd 2007 is the due date and I couldn't be happier to finally become a daddy!
Update-Ethan Michael Hebert was born July 27, 2007-To see his pictures you can visit my site. http://www.pc-synergy.com/baby.html
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Good day and thanks for your interest in my profile.
I was turned onto SETI way back in 2000 by a friend and it became a bit of a grudge match to see who could perform more work units. He had an unfair advantage, he used about 20 computers at work and started before I had. We both agreed to start out fresh so as to even the playing field to just one machine. At that time he had his killer machine, a Quad Xeon, but is was one of the old variety, similar to the PIII, but still it was fast as all heck because the processors had each 4M of cache. I could never catch him with my Dual PIII. I tried everything, overclocking the processor and the FSB as much as components would allow. I reached a thermal limit of the PIII 1 ghz. processors at 1.83ghz. There wasn\\'t water cooling back then like it is today. I custom made my heatsinks to have a huge surface area and monster fans that spun so fast it sounded like they were going to take right off. And with the case fans it sounded like a wind tunnel down in the basement. It was so loud that I had to make a sound dampend enclosure that used furnas filters, I had to change them once a week because they collected so much dust, and had to use flexible ducting tube to evacuate the heat out to the outside by way of the dryer vent. It was cool as heck! And finally I caught him. At that point he considered himself beat and dropped out of SETI. Sadly this year Monty Sorum-my friend died of small cell lung cancer at the age of 40. Monster68 as he was known here will be missed.

Today I am using a few different machines. All of them can be found in the top 100 machines on this project. The most recent addition is a Quad GPU Rig running the Intel i7-2600k at a very comfortable 45c @ 4.45Ghz. This rig in its early form can be found in my profile picture. I have since made everything nice and tidy inside.

I have quite the stable of machines running this project - last I check there were 17 machines - mostly dual socket Xeon systems. There is the exception to the rule with the Quad Octo-Core system being the most out there. It can only handle one GPU to be installed in it due to space limitations but still holds its own in the Top 20 fastest machines. The GTX-480 might get swapped out for a GTX-570 or a GTX-295 if the spirit moves.

Keep up the search! There has got to be something out there!! Happy hunting!
Faith allows the possibility of success-Todd Hebert
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