I worked as a contractor for Pencom to Bell Atlantic-MD in Silver Spring for about a year before extending my 70 mile/day commute to a 110 mile/day one by taking a job at a small software development company, Personal Library Software. This insanity ended in 1996 and I now have a scenic 7 mile/day commute which avoids both the Baltimore and the DC beltways! I often bike to work during nice weather.
Therefore I have been very interested in participating in distributed computing efforts related to protein folding, and now climate modeling. For a single page that describes (and illustrates!) protein folding very well, see this page from Stanford University's Folding@Home project. Folding@Home has been a huge success. Please visit their site and consider installing their screen saver on your computer!!!
Sadly, Folding@Home does not offer a Solaris client program, so I have contributed some computation to another protein folding research effort, the Distributed Folding Project . It is one of the activities of the Blueprint Initiative, a research program of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada.
My next contributions may be to a new effort, Climate Prediction.Net
Therefore I have started eliminating electrical waste at home and work. Using electricity is good. Wasting it is not. Baltimore's electricity is primarily made from coal and nuclear sources. Both of those are expensive, in the long term. Coal is dirty now, nuclear is dirty long into the future.
After replacing most of the lightbulbs in my house with compact fluorescents, I decided to actually generate some electricity. I am now using a solar panel to create electricity! It wasn't hard! Check out my home solar electric system!!!
I'm a lifetime member of Real Goods, a company which sells products to help us have an ecologically-sustainable future. Go there. Learn new ideas. Reduce, reuse, recycle. (Lifetime membership cost me $50, got me the $30 book I wanted to buy anyway (the Solar Living Sourcebook), and I save 5% on everything I order from them.)
A large amount of information is available at the Renenewable Resource Data Center. For example, there is a calculator of how much electricity you can generate with solar cell panels at PVWATTS
Best movies I've seen Movie list!
Pictures from our 1997 trip to Europe: Photos!
During my long-distance commuting life, I was saved from mental breakdown by the intelligent and diverse programming on WAMU 88.5FM and WJHU 88.1FM, which carry programs by NPR. I had three hours a day in the car to listen and now I'm a firm supporter of the Public Broadcasting Corporation. The magic of the marketplace DOES NOT produce excellent broadcast journalism -- it produces Hard Copy and other trash (Question: What's Michael Jackson doing these days? Answer: I still don't care.).
