1) Message boards : Number crunching : Don't know where it should go? Stick it here! (Message 1999188) Posted 22 Jun 2019 by mr.mac52 Post: I don't know where else to put this note, feel free to move it. Folks, I’ve been a member since 2003 and have greatly enjoyed participating in the hunt for extraterrestrial signs of life. I went from a very lowly production rate to earning a two-digit ranking over the years I’ve contributed. My highest rank has been 79. That said, the costs to participate at the level I am adds about $115 to my monthly electric bill. I also find that I’m not willing to spend the capital to radically upgrade my three crunchers to the current technology and somewhat lower my electrical footprint. I am also 13 years into my diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and am losing my ability to trouble shoot and maintain my systems to the levels I desire. All my life, I’ve been able to learn something new every day. Now I seem to be losing something I’ve known for years, every day. I’ve been very lucky over the years to have joined SETI@home. I attended a SETI@home Christmas party a couple of years ago and met many of the SETI@home staff and luminaries such as Frank Drake, Dan Werthimer, and Jill Tarter. Of all the folks that have helped me over all these years, I wish to recognize Richard Haselgrove. Richard is among the ‘gods’ of SETI@home with his knowledge and patience in helping me and so many others with our attempts to contribute. I’ve never met any of my fellow participants of SETI@home although it would have been nice to have done so. Live Long and Prosper, John McClelland

2) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (116) Server Problems? (Message 1989542) Posted 10 Apr 2019 by mr.mac52 Post: Lots of disabled hosts just now and not downloading anything in Colorado.

3) Message boards : News : Long Outage Today (Message 1989425) Posted 10 Apr 2019 by mr.mac52 Post: +3

4) Message boards : Number crunching : how many pc do you have for boinc projects (Message 1980798) Posted 17 Feb 2019 by mr.mac52 Post: 3, 2x GPUs/system, mostly 670s

5) Message boards : Number crunching : Don't know where it should go? Stick it here! (Message 1942698) Posted 5 Jul 2018 by mr.mac52 Post: I can't think of valves without dragging out my old, very old ca. 1910 Electrical Engineer's Pocket-Book by Horatio A Foster. It has a section on Telegraphy with a 9 page sub section on 'Wireless Telegraphy'. It goes into discussions as to how signals are propagated from spark-gaps and, using a device referred to as an 'coherer', detect the presence of oscillations. The last page of this sub section discusses 'Hot-Filament Detectors'. "Another type of detector owes its existence to the peculiar properties of an incandescent body when placed in a rarefied gas. Under such conditions the incandescent body emits negatively charged corpuscles, or electrons, which are free to move about in the rarefied gas, thus rendering it a more or less good conductor. If, for example, an incandescent lamp filament be mounted in its exhausted bulb in close proximity to a plate of metal connected to a third terminal, and a battery be connected between this terminal and one of the terminals of the filament, a current will flow from the battery through the gas." Any time I'm feeling old, I pull this out and realize how young I really am. John P.S. In 1978 I took a test as part of an interview to work at Texas Instruments in Dallas. One of the questions was to solve the voltages around a valve. I started to blow off that question until I realized the valve was reversed biased, non conducting. The question could be answered by putting your thumb over the valve as a static network. The interviewer's had never had anyone answer that question and were shocked by my correctly answering it. -j

6) Message boards : News : Slow network connection to Green Bank (Message 1919606) Posted 18 Feb 2018 by mr.mac52 Post: Quite some years ago I suggested that a customer mirror all his data, rent a SR-71 Blackbird, load all the mirrored volumes into it and fly his data across the country. This was in response to his anger that it would take years at that time to move all his data across the country via the internet of the time. His sales rep totally lost his cool in the meeting although the customer finally realized the limitations of networks and physics. John

7) Message boards : Number crunching : validation testing (Message 1918553) Posted 12 Feb 2018 by mr.mac52 Post: Ah Richard, you've kicked my brain drip pan with your 'birdie' comment. In WWII when radar was being first used, the operators did not know if the radar was actually working when they had no targets. The solution was to use a crystal radio, no power needed, and listen for the RF pulse to go out. The outgoing RF pulse in the crystal radio sounded like a bird chirp. When I worked on a radar in the late '70s at TI, there was a signal called 'chirp' and one called 'chirp gate' that triggered the outbound pulse of RF. Another such story is that of telephony where the wires names, at least in the USA, were referred to as 'tip', 'ring', and 'sleeve'. 'Tip' and 'ring' were the talking pair and 'sleeve' was a control ground. On the old so called cord boards, the incoming circuit was a number of jacks with cords attached and a field of sockets connecting to a end user. The operator would touch the 'tip' of the jack to the socket which was the 'sleeve' connection and if the end user was not using his phone, there would be no so called busy tone. The so called busy tone was, again in the USA, a 60Hz tone produced by the unbalanced line, 'tip' and 'ring', when one side was grounded. In the mid '70s, even the newest computerised telephone switches I worked on used 'tip', 'ring', and 'sleeve' or 'sleeve ground' And then there was Tektronix schematics that would have somebody riding a bicycle down a circuit here and there. Thanks for triggering such fond memoires Richard, John

8) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (110) Server Problems? (Message 1916445) Posted 2 Feb 2018 by mr.mac52 Post: 75 as I'm currently 65

9) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (110) Server Problems? (Message 1916310) Posted 1 Feb 2018 by mr.mac52 Post: My definition of Old is my age plus 10 years...

10) Message boards : News : Slow network connection to Green Bank (Message 1915843) Posted 29 Jan 2018 by mr.mac52 Post: Eric, Thanks for the post of what is going on, makes the situation easier to deal with. John

11) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (109) Server Problems? (Message 1911597) Posted 7 Jan 2018 by mr.mac52 Post: Richard and Keith, I was too lazy to go edit the Hosts file on my own and your two notes did it all for me. By the time I went back into BoincTasks, it had cleared all the files in retry mode that had been sitting there. Thanks! John

12) Message boards : News : Projects are (no longer) down (Message 1910707) Posted 5 Jan 2018 by mr.mac52 Post: Thanks for the status posting, it helps us to know why we have an outage like this one. John

13) Message boards : News : Splitters off, again :( (Message 1905039) Posted 6 Dec 2017 by mr.mac52 Post: Eric, Thanks for the update and heads up on getting data flowing again. John

14) Message boards : News : No work. Database issues. (Message 1903686) Posted 29 Nov 2017 by mr.mac52 Post: Thanks for the heads up on what the problem is. Good luck on fixing it and I hope you are not up all night doing so. John

15) Message boards : News : Arecibo Status (Message 1901912) Posted 19 Nov 2017 by mr.mac52 Post: The Arecibo Observatory will remain open, NSF says From ScienceNews: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/arecibo-radio-telescope-nsf?tgt=more

16) Message boards : Cafe SETI : 2017 Total Eclipse Plans (Message 1885673) Posted 23 Aug 2017 by mr.mac52 Post: I drove from Woodland Park, CO up to Nebraska using back roads both ways. About 30 miles north of Scottsbluff was the centerline of totality along a dirt road between State Highways 29 and 71. Lots of folks parked along the dirt road but there was no problem finding a spot to pull off to observe. The pale light preceding totality was really unusual and the drop in temps enough to pull on my vest. Totality was really abrupt at my location. I kept looking to the west and really never saw it coming, very flat country western Nebraska. The time of totality was about 2.5 minutes and the so called diamond ring effect coming out of totality was really striking. The trip home was about 3 hours longer than the trip out, well over 2 hours to cover 12 miles was the worst part. Never having experienced a total eclipse in my first 65 years of life, this was definitely one of my top 10 life experiences. John

17) Message boards : News : New SETI@home web article in "The Atlantic" (Message 1869030) Posted 24 May 2017 by mr.mac52 Post: Great article, makes me want to sign up all over again!

18) Message boards : News : Free Speech and SETI@home (Message 1869023) Posted 24 May 2017 by mr.mac52 Post: ;^)

19) Message boards : News : Nebula: Completing the SETI@home pipeline (Message 1829128) Posted 8 Nov 2016 by mr.mac52 Post: I will admit that I did not read all the materials pointed to in the various places. That said, I find myself troubled by the statement: "Its goal is to let us finish the current SETI@home experiment". This sounds like the end of SETI@home. I'm a bit tired and low on my glucose levels and I hope I'm not jumping to conclusions so please tell me that I'm off in the weeds. John

20) Message boards : Number crunching : Open Beta test: SoG for NVidia, Lunatics v0.45 - Beta6 (RC again) (Message 1823830) Posted 12 Oct 2016 by mr.mac52 Post: I was able to download the 64 bit version with a simple over ride of Chrome's warning. On my system it is running well with no errors.

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