I'm 31 and work for the Public Transport Authority (The railways) in Western Australia. I look after the Communications cable Infrastructure for the railways. This means all the copper cable and fibres optic down the side of the train track used for communications (not the signal cables) and all the structured cabling and phone cabling inside the buildings. I'm the only person that works for the PTA that does this so I tend to need the help of a lot of contractors to keep things going. It is a very busy job but never boring.
I enjoy travelling and taking landscape photos but I don't seem to have enough time to do either of these any more as between work and maintaining my house in the hills, training with the State Emergency Service and getting the room ready for the impending baby seems to take most of my time.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Why do I run seti at home?
I don't think the question is 'Is there life out there'. I'm sure there is judging from the vastness of space, I think the question is 'Will we ever find proof of life out there' and how cool would it be to be the one that helped find 'life out there'.
Views on the project.
I know some people think searching for 'ET' is a waste of time but this was one of the first projects that used distributed computing and proved it was a viable way of harnessing enormous computing power to do research and now there is many distributed computing projects running from studying weather cycles to looking for cures to cancer and for that reason alone I think it deserves it’s place as an important contribution to science.
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.
