Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

I'm a geek. This is something I'm rather proud of at times. I'm a bike geek, a weather geek, a physics geek and, most of all, an astronomy geek. One of the geekier things I do is look for extraterrestrial life or at least help the Seti Institute do it. I've been a part of the Seti@Home project off and on since its inception. When I taught in Kansas, I had most of the computers at the college I worked at crunching away through the night when there were no studnets around. When I moved to Georgia, the policies were a lot more restrictive so I sort of let it go. I'm a geek but I like to be an employed geek so that was that.

Things have changed here over the last few years and I was finally givven some administrator rights to the computers in my physics lab and to my desktop machine. On a whim I decided to see if I could download the Seti@Home client and run things here. Lo and behold, I was able to! So for the last six months or so I've been crunching merrily away and this last weekend passed the 1,000,000 credit mark. Very cool to do my little bit. The great thing is that it doesn't take too much work on my part and the computers get to crunch all the numbers they want, which I know makes them very happy. The best part is that their not boring integers they're getting to crunch but high precision real numbers handled with floating point operations. Very tasty.

Of course, what I'd love to do is build a processing farm with several of the rumored to be coming eight processor Intel Macs but I doubt that'll happen anytime real soon.

Anyways, that having been said, I'd just like to also point out how great it is to be a Florida Gator. Another National Championship for the Orange and Blue boys. Pretty awesome accomplishments and I get to tease all my students who are UGA fans. We beat them in everything related to a big sport this year so that's been cool. Who knows, maybe the baseball team will get inspired and wim the College World Series.

Thanks for Reading.

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