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| Personal background |
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Wow, It has been a while since I updated this profile. Still plugging away on my packets. ---
The Old Profile:
I am a long time computer jock. I learned 3 years of programming in basic and fortran before I graduated from high school in the very early 1970's. Yup, I'm a pretty old fart, but also a pretty lucky Minnesota farm boy to get that opportunity that long ago. Spent 3 years in the army programming on the biggest computer of the time the CDC7600. That's Control Data, for those still wondering. I got to sit on the loveseat of the Cray-1 before I left the service. Those were heady times with 512K of small core memory. Then a company gave me a computer to work on with 16KB for the OS, programs, data, registers, etc. What a let down. Then I swung over to a small computer company called Tandem Computers. Life was good. About 20 years later, Compaq Computer Corp purchased us. Still having a good time with computers: always was a customer facing pre-sales consultant. At the absolute top level in the field system engineering ranks now.
As for hobbies not too many. Help out with my son's street and roller hockey teams when he plays in the town leagues. Even us older types as coaches get to play the 16-18 year old teams on Friday nights. Another hobby is taking too many digital pictures according to my family. Or maybe going back to the farm I grew up on to help my brother with the fall harvest. And I'm not sure this is a hobby, but the Mrs. and me are always at the shore. Life is short, Have to cram in all the shore time possible! "the shore' is my only location hint. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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As for Extraterrestrial life existing, I can only think about the pictures that the Hubble Space telescope provides showing dust clouds that are a million times bigger than our solar system. I think the odds are good that in all that dust and other stars there is a planet with the right mix to make an atmosphere to support some kind of life form.
Should we send a beacon is an interesting question since it takes 10,000 years for light to reach some of those solar systems. It SETI@home found a signal, it would that 10,000 years for our signal to reach back. By then the odds are great that I will be pushing daisys.
And for why I run SETI@home I always think of when I'm on the farm and looking up at the millions of stars one can see. I always wondered what was out there. Maybe SETI@home can solve another mystery. In addition I think the community building that SETI is doing by banding folks into a common good is a refreshing thought. Even though I am in the top 1% of folks I am always in awe that there are still 30 some people with the same number of units as me and that I am always in ~30,000th place. That's a lot of people doing something interesting. At least interesting to me when I think back to my younger years staring up at the stars.
It's a shame that I live near a large city with so much light polution that all the little stars cannot be seen with the naked eye. |
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