| Personal background |
|---|
| I have lived in the Chicago area my entire life (all 31 years of it!), and currently reside in a south suburb. I work for a company called OpenTV where I am quality assurance for our web browser, Device Mosaic. AS a result of this position, I have had a great deal of exposure to a vast amount of Internet technology that started with simple HTML, but then went on to CSS, JavaScript, the DOM, DHTML, Flash, Real media and wave sound, Java, and several other things that make browsers and the Internet the things they are today. I have had the opportunity to learn and use many platforms as a result of what we port our browser to: Win32, Linux/Unix, Sun's Solaris OS, VxWorks, and others. I even get to do a bit of engineering as we are required to make slight modifications to source code and build extensively on Win32 with MS VC and on Linux and VxWorks with specific compilers for those OS's. I love playing video games on both the PC and consoles. My current fave is Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. I have also been revisiting the past with Civilization II, Unreal, Wolfenstein 3D, and my MAME emulator. I have a 2000 Dodge Ram Quad-Cab 4X4 that I have been upgrading with several performance modifications to try and get to the point where it can be called a "muscle car of the new millenium", or something cheesy like that!!! I love doing road trips, and now they are even more fun with a nice, big truck to enjoy them in. Of course, I like looking for aliens also!!! |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
|---|
| I personally find it hard to believe that alien life does NOT exist. I think that there are many types of life that exist outside our current (and inside our current) system. Whether or not they want to be discovered is unknown. I think we will eventually find transmissions from other forms of life, but I think we may have already received transmissions, but are unable to detect them with our current technology. They may be in other forms that supersede radio broadcast. However, I do still feel that it is important to continue to monitor for transmissions in this form. Maybe a better way to receive them would be to establish a moon base that incorporates several receivers that are all tuned to monitor different regions of the frequency spectrum, thus covering the largest area of reception possible. By having this set up on the moon, we could eliminate atmospheric interference, though I wonder how much we will still get, being in close proximity to the earth. I think that discovery is one thing, interaction and contact is quite another altogether. That will be the interesting part. Other than the obvious benefits of sharing what our civilizations have learned, I truly wonder if we are at a point where we can collectively "handle" the existence of another intelligent life form. We have FAR to go to understand those on our own planet and learn tolerance for people not like us. I would not be surprised that there are civilizations out there that know of OUR existence, but are waiting for us to get to a point where we can effectively realize the potential of interaction with an alien life form without it becoming a political or religious struggle. No, we have far to go before that can even become a dream, much less a realization of mankind. Maybe the discovery of life elsewhere would cause us to take a long look inward and reconcile the things that we allow to divide us as humans. |
| Your feedback on this profile |
|---|
| Recommend this profile for User of the Day: |
I like this profile |
| Alert administrators to an offensive profile: |
I do not like this profile |
|
|
