| Personal background |
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I live in the U.S.A. northeast (NY) and hope to move to the west, northwest, or southwest sometime very soon. I enjoy doing nearly anything outdoors and love to travel, try new food/drink and to meet new people. I would love to live in another culture/country for a while: maybe Argentina, Chile, or Brazil.
I studied a variety of disciplines in univeristy and was drawn to both geology and geography. This introduced me to formal classical cartography and GIS. My team and I, working through a local potable water purveyor, spent 16 years working with local and regional planning communities to analyze, define, create, implement, and assess local planning efforts. We assessed both the cumulative effects of numerous small scale projects, and of large scale development and conservation projects. I worked extensively on large scale finite element hydraulic modeling both confined (in-pipe) and unconfined aquifer flow models.
While our focus was on drinking water planning, protection, production and delivery, our charge was broad enough to afford me the opportunity to become involved in many interdispciplinary efforts. These included; legislative support, public relations, operations and business support, and even enforcement and counter terrorism - though the roles we were expected to fill often quickly changed. This gave me both broad and deep experience in cartography, GIS tech, GIS Management and inter-agency coordination (My personal favorite).
After the '95 Wildfires on Long Island I became interested in Emergency Management and Disaster Preparednesss/Mitigation. I first became a "red carded" wildland firefighter (lapsed) and later expanded this with formal course work in fire weather prediction. Since then I've spent considerable time working with the disaster preparedness/emergency planning and response community. With two other friends and coworkers I've setup and run fire weather stations with both hardwired and satellite uplink. With these stations and others years we performed daily fire weather readings and danger reports for the central and eastern Long Island region. My time in emergency planning and response support brought me to ICS/NIMS (Incident Command Systems), the planning and logistics tool used to manage both the strategic and tactical response to these emergencies. I've hugely enjoyed working with the EMS/DP community: They are a truly great bunch of pretty selfless folks.
I've experience with a broad range of computer applications and a few operating systems (DEC-VAX/VMS, PrimeOS, AIX, DGUX, Novell. NT/2000), and in earlier years , was both a SysOp and Admin for most of these. Recent work though, has been largely interpersonal and managerial/directorial in inter-agency coordination of technical efforts and implementation strategies in support of regional and local planning, emergency services, and disaster preparedness.
Most recently, I've taken some time off that has been used to think, travel, attend conferences, and to generally figure out what comes next. I have greatly enjoyed this experience so far, having finally had the chance to really travel. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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It's neat to be part of something much bigger than you; I find it very comforting to feel small sometimes. I think that's part of why many folks like nature so much: It has that effect. With SETI@home I think we all have a great chance to do/be just that -- be a small part of a huge, longterm, and great effort.
I really hope we find life out there - but even if we don't - I know we will uncover something important in the process. Whether that will be about something here, close to home - perhaps about human nature - or something extra terrestrial, or something more rooted in numbers and formulae, I have no idea. But no matter the outcome, this effort gives us a chance to help some really brilliant and determined people focus on doing great and imaginative things. We'll help crunch the numbers: You folks keep coming up with the bright ideas - let your dreams be your guide.
I'll never get to go out to the stars, like I've wanted to since being a kid and reading (compulsively) any SciFi I could get my hands on, but maybe together we can help someone else find their reason to go there - or at least to never ever stop listening, learning, and looking out and up. |
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