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| Personal background |
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I am a guy in his early-50s who was born and raised in Northern California. After a living several years on the east coast and spending a few years in the Seattle area, I've finally moved back "home" again. I've been a nerd/geek/technophile all of my life, always interested in the sciences. I started using computers in the early 1980s, first Basic programming on a TRS-80 in high school. After high school I spent a few years in the Navy as an electronics technician. It was there that I met a friend who had an Apple ][ and it got me more interested in computers. I subsequently bought my first computers, a Commodore 64, and a Sinclair ZX81. A few years later I made a career change and became a CAD drafter. It was then that I bought my first "PC," a screaming, top-of-the-line, MS-DOS based, 486/33MHz tower. It was with this PC (in the early 90s) and my first 9600bps and 14.4K modems, that I started venturing outside my house and talking to others who had computers. Before the Internet as we know it, I was using Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) to communicate with others. As they say, the rest is history. I've owned several PCs since then, all upgrades from my original 486. I currently own a few PCs with various incarnations of Windows on them, a couple with Linux, and an Apple Mac Mini.
I've been interested in science fiction and the possibility of the existence of extra-terrestrial civilizations since childhood. Since seeing some of the first-run Star Trek shows in the late 60s, I've been a Trekkie. I've enjoyed all the different Star Trek spinoffs, the Stargate series, and Battlestar Galactica as well. Sci-fi is also my favorite movie genre, and the movie Contact (based on the book by the late Carl Sagan) is at the top of my list of favorites.
In addition to my more "nerdly" interests, I'm also interested in European history, languages, homebrewing, gold prospecting, and more. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I run SETI@home because I believe in the possibility of the existence of extra-terrestrial life and I want to contribute my small part in crunching data that might lead to the discovery of such life. I started running SETI@home classic back in the beginning when it first started up, but life and other things got in the way and I abandoned the project after a short time. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of my old user profile, so I have no way of recovering early work units. Now that I'm back, I hope to continue as long as the project keeps running. [Edit: I finally ran across some old files (sometimes it pays to be a digital pack-rat) that had my SETI@home classic information in it, and was able to link the two accounts... woo hoo!]
I think the project is important and should continue in conjunction with our plans for space exploration. Why go out into space blindly, when we have the possibility of discovering what is out there first? It is really too bad that we can only obtain data from the narrow swath of Space available to the fixed radiotelescope dish at the Arecibo site. It would be nice to have other radiotelescope sites in other parts of the world to cover more of Space. |
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