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Would you believe something good actually came out of the private message situation. After double checking everything at the backup site, I realized that I've been sitting on one last interview for some time now. This one was sent back to me 01/06/2009. Nothing personal nomad, Pocatello was getting some HDCotM interviews up at that time and I didn't want to compete with that, and then I kind of forgot.... 
About you.
Where do you call home?
Southeastern PA about 50 miles NE of Philly. Near a small town called Pottstown if you're looking me up to deliver my lottery check. Closer to Reading if your not.
What is your family situation?
Married to a wonderful woman that keeps me sane and attempts to keep me sober (no she doesn't read the forum). Two sons grown and on there own (thank God).
What do you do for a living?
I'm a wrench (as in electro-mechanical tech). I've worked on a bit of everything. C-130 radar systems, altimeters and IFF's (USMC), mainframes (back in the 80's such as the IBM 3033, 3084, 3090 etc. for those that remember those dinosaurs) and their associated I/O (tape drives, disk drives and printers), commercial gas detectors (toxic and combustible gasses), industrial controls and panels and currently I'm working on high speed mail processing equipment.
Does your forum name hold any significant meaning?
Kind of.. I ride a Nomad. On a summer cruise through the Poconos many summers ago, I got involved in a little race with one of our group and spanked him pretty good. At a lunch stop later on down the road, I overheard one of the group tell the guy "gee, that Nomad sure ate your lunch". So when I was choosing a nick for here it just seemed like a good choice.
Did you ever post in the "Let's see your mug... " thread? Why or why not?
Yeah I did (http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1032505174&postcount=253). It seemed like a pretty fun thread and it's always nice to place faces to names in a team environment such as this so I figured what the hey.
What other hobbies or interests keep you busy?
I like fishing, but haven't gone much recently due to being busy with other things. Any excuse to get out to the range and pop some caps is also up there on my priority list. I guess primarily right now though it's riding. My wife and I are involved with the Red Knights Motorcycle Club so we do group rides regularly, a lot of veteran related rides from Memorial Day right through the end of September and hold an annual poker run which takes a bit of time for planning and execution. Then of course there's the never ending wrenching on any of 2 cars, 2 motorcycles and a pickup.
Right handed or left handed?
Right handed. Always have been, always will. Now I might have been accused of being left winged a time or two but never left handed. Not that there's anything wrong with that.. ;O
About your involvement in DC.
Who or what got you stated in DC projects? About when was it?
It was my wife actually that got me started. Last winter she was helping her online gaming communities F@H team during a race. I noticed her PC was on constantly for several weeks, which was unusual for her, so I asked about it and found out about F@H. I had no idea what DC was about. I had thought it was a reference to some sort of network/enterprise environment so I never bothered looking into it any further. Once I knew what the general idea was I dropped by here and started reading. The rest as they say.. is history. This was back last spring right before the Chimp Challenge. I started the week prior to the race I think it was. It was a bit of a hectic time trying to get up to speed and figure out what to run to get the most output to help the team. There's a lot of good information here that's pretty easily found (although since the refresh Xilikon did it's even easier) so I moved from the standard client to SMP pretty quickly.
Why do you particpate?
Once I knew what DC'n was about, it was a no brainer. I believe that as I walk through this life, taking from this rock, I have an obligation to the rest of the species to contribute something meaningful that has the potential to benefit either the species, the rock or both. I think the potential humanitarian contribution that the projects I've chosen may provide will best fulfill that obligation.
If DC'ing could find a cure for just one disease tomorrow, which one would it be and why?
This is a tough one. I guess if I had to choose only one it'd be Alzheimers. The statistics are staggering. According to the Alzheimer's Association there are as many as 5.2 million people (just in the US) that live with it. They estimate that a potential 10 million baby boomers will develop it. It has surpassed Diabetes to become the sixth leading cause of death in the US. Plus I lost my father to Alzheimer's many years ago. I had the misfortune of seeing this beast up close and personal and watching the slow agonizing and frustrating spiral that Dad went through as he sunk into the darkness.
What projects have you contributed to? Any others you find interesting?
F@H on the Stanford side. In WCG I'm running Help Conquer Cancer, Fight Aids @ Home, Human Proteome Folding, Discovering Dengue Drugs Together (I'm interested in this one as West Nile Virus is one of the mosquito borne illnesses they're investigating and West Nile is getting more prevalent in my area). I'm also intermittently running Nutricious Rice for the World. WCG has recently introduced an interesting project called the Clean Energy Project that is doing research on next generation solar cells. I've run a few of these WU and will probably run more in the near future. Then of course there's the 50 or 60 some odd projects in the DC Vault about 5 or 6 of which (besides WCG) I crunch for.
What teams have you contributed to?
Blasphemy! What the hell kind of question is that. Seriously I never considered contributing to another team. This (the [H]) has always been my home. Granted most of my almost 5 years here has been pretty much lurking but..
Why did you choose the Horde?
It was pretty much a natural choice really. [H]ardOCP is where I normally go for hardware info so it seemed like a good fit for the place to DC.
If your current project ends, which one will you move on to?
Don't be screwing with me... what do you know... Seriously, I hope I never have to make that choice. Between F@H and WCG with its' variety of projects I'm pretty confident one or both will outlive me. If not, I'll search around (I've heard Google is your friend) and find some other humanitarian science type project to contribute to. With the advances in technology and hardware over the past five to seven years I think we'll see an increase in DC projects not a decrease.
Current level of production and how's it spread around?
Currently at 7.9k/32-35k Boinc/WCG PPD split up between WCG and various other DC projects from the Vault. I'm getting ready to throw my 8800GTS back online though so I expect 3-5k PPD with that for F@H .
Where do you see the [H]ard DC sub-forum in the near future? Long term?
It's been pretty active and I hope that continues in the future. Long term? No clue. I'll get back to you on that one.
Any ideas on improving the [H]ard DC sub-forum, or suggestions or improvements for our Team?
As far as improving the forum, I'd have only one suggestion. When I started, the guides were pretty outdated. They gave me a good idea of what I needed to search around for but it took some time. Xilikon did an excellent job writing some new guides and compiling others. It makes it VERY easy for a new person to come in and get up and running. My one suggestion would be to try and keep them fresh. Maybe revisit them every six months to a year and update as necessary. Plus if they don't get so far outdated they'll be easier to maintain.
As far as the team is concerned, yeah I've got a suggestion but I'm not sure how well it'll be taken. I think it's time to take another look at having WCG as an "officially" supported second team/project. I'm aware of the history as I did some research on it before deciding on this idea and answer. I think having the recognition as being a "normal" project is important. It just irks me every time I go to the Hardfolding main page and see it listed under the heading of Unofficial. Hell UD is dead and it's still listed there with F@H under Statistics. It makes it look to a new user like it's not supported here and that's just not true. Yeah, I've heard the argument that people are free to run what they like. Doesn't necessarily make a new user very comfortable I don't think. But that just my opinion. I do believe this team is more than capable of supporting 2 projects and should do so "officially". It would make it feel like more of a "team" instead of the F@H team and oh yeah.. whatever you want to run.
About your farm
What did you begin with?
I started out during the CC with a P3 laptop, a P4 @ 3.0, an Athlon XP 2600+ @ 2.2 all running the standard clients and an E4300 @ 3.2 running SMP. I retired the laptop right after the CC as it just wasn't cutting it and used the time during the race to do some investigation. Right after the race I setup both the P4 and Athlon XP to run headless and diskless with notfreds. Of course they were both runnin' nekkid. Around the time the GPU2 client came out, I picked up a Quad and retired the P4. I moved the E4300 into the P4's spot with 2 GPU's and put the Quad in service as my main system with a GPU and notfreds SMP client. That was the start of the sickness...
What are you running today?
Currently running 3 Quads on WCG and a combination of other DC Vault projects that the DC Commandos are rolling with. I have a 9600GSO running GPUGrid and an 8800GTS that's going back on F@H soon.
What plans do you have in moving forward? Where do you see your DC'ing activities in the next year or two?
At the end of August I made the switch over to WCG. I had actually signed up for it back in May but well, you know it was a busy, hectic summer with the GPU2 startup and all. I had meant to give WCG a try but hadn't gotten to it. So I made the jump with a few resources at first, running a mixed bag of GPU2 and WCG. After doing more research on their projects and seeing how user friendly their setup was, I made the jump to all WCG by October. When I got rolling on WCG I noticed an increase in production and activity the beginning of September so I set a goal to try and help push the team further and see if we could break into the top 70 places by years end. We just crossed that line and hopefully can maintain the gains going forward.
In the short term, I've got an idle GPU that needs to get back in production. January is a hideously busy month for me at work so after that's passed, I need to get the GPU client back up and running. Overall though, in the next year or two I'd like to continue helping the WCG team push to new milestones. You know, get more active in that community and see how far we can go with it. Over the not so short term, I'd like to explore some of the projects in the DC Vault and see what's up there. I haven't really looked into it yet and as I'm mainly interested in "humanitarian" science applications I don't know what else is out there. Right now though I'm cool. I'm a meat 'n potato sorta dude. It works for me... I tend not to mess with what works for me.
Do these boxen have day jobs or are they dedicated folders?
Two of the three Quads are dedicated crunchers. The third is my daily driver but since I'm not that much of a gamer (although Santa did bring me WIC) it might as well be considered a dedicated cruncher as well.
How are these boxen configured? OS, client, etc?
Dedicated cruncher#1 is a Q6600 @ 3.3 w/ 2gig. I recently setup openSUSE 11.0 x64 on this box to make the leap into the *nix environment. I'm running Boinc 6.2.15 x64.
Dedicated cruncher#2 is a Q6600 @ 3.3 w/ 4gig. It's currently running XP with the BOINC 6.2.18 client. Based on how well cruncher#1 is running with openSUSE and how much I like that distro, after the January rush at work this box will be going 64 bit openSUSE as well.
My daily driver is a Q6600 @ 3.4 w/ 4gig. It's running XP with the Boinc 6.2.18 client. After some play time on the other 2 crunchers to get more comfortable with SUSE, I'm thinking about going to a dual boot setup with this box.
Have you been successful borging? If so, what kind of borging worked for you? (For example, friends, family, and/or work?)
None whatsoever. I'm reviewing the training DVD to see where I've gone wrong though.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Nope. That's about it.
Did I forget to ask you anything?
You? Doubtful Alan as you're pretty thorough.
About you.
Where do you call home?
Southeastern PA about 50 miles NE of Philly. Near a small town called Pottstown if you're looking me up to deliver my lottery check. Closer to Reading if your not.
What is your family situation?
Married to a wonderful woman that keeps me sane and attempts to keep me sober (no she doesn't read the forum). Two sons grown and on there own (thank God).
What do you do for a living?
I'm a wrench (as in electro-mechanical tech). I've worked on a bit of everything. C-130 radar systems, altimeters and IFF's (USMC), mainframes (back in the 80's such as the IBM 3033, 3084, 3090 etc. for those that remember those dinosaurs) and their associated I/O (tape drives, disk drives and printers), commercial gas detectors (toxic and combustible gasses), industrial controls and panels and currently I'm working on high speed mail processing equipment.
Does your forum name hold any significant meaning?
Kind of.. I ride a Nomad. On a summer cruise through the Poconos many summers ago, I got involved in a little race with one of our group and spanked him pretty good. At a lunch stop later on down the road, I overheard one of the group tell the guy "gee, that Nomad sure ate your lunch". So when I was choosing a nick for here it just seemed like a good choice.
Did you ever post in the "Let's see your mug... " thread? Why or why not?
Yeah I did (http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1032505174&postcount=253). It seemed like a pretty fun thread and it's always nice to place faces to names in a team environment such as this so I figured what the hey.
What other hobbies or interests keep you busy?
I like fishing, but haven't gone much recently due to being busy with other things. Any excuse to get out to the range and pop some caps is also up there on my priority list. I guess primarily right now though it's riding. My wife and I are involved with the Red Knights Motorcycle Club so we do group rides regularly, a lot of veteran related rides from Memorial Day right through the end of September and hold an annual poker run which takes a bit of time for planning and execution. Then of course there's the never ending wrenching on any of 2 cars, 2 motorcycles and a pickup.
Right handed or left handed?
Right handed. Always have been, always will. Now I might have been accused of being left winged a time or two but never left handed. Not that there's anything wrong with that.. ;O
About your involvement in DC.
Who or what got you stated in DC projects? About when was it?
It was my wife actually that got me started. Last winter she was helping her online gaming communities F@H team during a race. I noticed her PC was on constantly for several weeks, which was unusual for her, so I asked about it and found out about F@H. I had no idea what DC was about. I had thought it was a reference to some sort of network/enterprise environment so I never bothered looking into it any further. Once I knew what the general idea was I dropped by here and started reading. The rest as they say.. is history. This was back last spring right before the Chimp Challenge. I started the week prior to the race I think it was. It was a bit of a hectic time trying to get up to speed and figure out what to run to get the most output to help the team. There's a lot of good information here that's pretty easily found (although since the refresh Xilikon did it's even easier) so I moved from the standard client to SMP pretty quickly.
Why do you particpate?
Once I knew what DC'n was about, it was a no brainer. I believe that as I walk through this life, taking from this rock, I have an obligation to the rest of the species to contribute something meaningful that has the potential to benefit either the species, the rock or both. I think the potential humanitarian contribution that the projects I've chosen may provide will best fulfill that obligation.
If DC'ing could find a cure for just one disease tomorrow, which one would it be and why?
This is a tough one. I guess if I had to choose only one it'd be Alzheimers. The statistics are staggering. According to the Alzheimer's Association there are as many as 5.2 million people (just in the US) that live with it. They estimate that a potential 10 million baby boomers will develop it. It has surpassed Diabetes to become the sixth leading cause of death in the US. Plus I lost my father to Alzheimer's many years ago. I had the misfortune of seeing this beast up close and personal and watching the slow agonizing and frustrating spiral that Dad went through as he sunk into the darkness.
What projects have you contributed to? Any others you find interesting?
F@H on the Stanford side. In WCG I'm running Help Conquer Cancer, Fight Aids @ Home, Human Proteome Folding, Discovering Dengue Drugs Together (I'm interested in this one as West Nile Virus is one of the mosquito borne illnesses they're investigating and West Nile is getting more prevalent in my area). I'm also intermittently running Nutricious Rice for the World. WCG has recently introduced an interesting project called the Clean Energy Project that is doing research on next generation solar cells. I've run a few of these WU and will probably run more in the near future. Then of course there's the 50 or 60 some odd projects in the DC Vault about 5 or 6 of which (besides WCG) I crunch for.
What teams have you contributed to?
Blasphemy! What the hell kind of question is that. Seriously I never considered contributing to another team. This (the [H]) has always been my home. Granted most of my almost 5 years here has been pretty much lurking but..
Why did you choose the Horde?
It was pretty much a natural choice really. [H]ardOCP is where I normally go for hardware info so it seemed like a good fit for the place to DC.
If your current project ends, which one will you move on to?
Don't be screwing with me... what do you know... Seriously, I hope I never have to make that choice. Between F@H and WCG with its' variety of projects I'm pretty confident one or both will outlive me. If not, I'll search around (I've heard Google is your friend) and find some other humanitarian science type project to contribute to. With the advances in technology and hardware over the past five to seven years I think we'll see an increase in DC projects not a decrease.
Current level of production and how's it spread around?
Currently at 7.9k/32-35k Boinc/WCG PPD split up between WCG and various other DC projects from the Vault. I'm getting ready to throw my 8800GTS back online though so I expect 3-5k PPD with that for F@H .
Where do you see the [H]ard DC sub-forum in the near future? Long term?
It's been pretty active and I hope that continues in the future. Long term? No clue. I'll get back to you on that one.
Any ideas on improving the [H]ard DC sub-forum, or suggestions or improvements for our Team?
As far as improving the forum, I'd have only one suggestion. When I started, the guides were pretty outdated. They gave me a good idea of what I needed to search around for but it took some time. Xilikon did an excellent job writing some new guides and compiling others. It makes it VERY easy for a new person to come in and get up and running. My one suggestion would be to try and keep them fresh. Maybe revisit them every six months to a year and update as necessary. Plus if they don't get so far outdated they'll be easier to maintain.
As far as the team is concerned, yeah I've got a suggestion but I'm not sure how well it'll be taken. I think it's time to take another look at having WCG as an "officially" supported second team/project. I'm aware of the history as I did some research on it before deciding on this idea and answer. I think having the recognition as being a "normal" project is important. It just irks me every time I go to the Hardfolding main page and see it listed under the heading of Unofficial. Hell UD is dead and it's still listed there with F@H under Statistics. It makes it look to a new user like it's not supported here and that's just not true. Yeah, I've heard the argument that people are free to run what they like. Doesn't necessarily make a new user very comfortable I don't think. But that just my opinion. I do believe this team is more than capable of supporting 2 projects and should do so "officially". It would make it feel like more of a "team" instead of the F@H team and oh yeah.. whatever you want to run.
About your farm
What did you begin with?
I started out during the CC with a P3 laptop, a P4 @ 3.0, an Athlon XP 2600+ @ 2.2 all running the standard clients and an E4300 @ 3.2 running SMP. I retired the laptop right after the CC as it just wasn't cutting it and used the time during the race to do some investigation. Right after the race I setup both the P4 and Athlon XP to run headless and diskless with notfreds. Of course they were both runnin' nekkid. Around the time the GPU2 client came out, I picked up a Quad and retired the P4. I moved the E4300 into the P4's spot with 2 GPU's and put the Quad in service as my main system with a GPU and notfreds SMP client. That was the start of the sickness...
What are you running today?
Currently running 3 Quads on WCG and a combination of other DC Vault projects that the DC Commandos are rolling with. I have a 9600GSO running GPUGrid and an 8800GTS that's going back on F@H soon.
What plans do you have in moving forward? Where do you see your DC'ing activities in the next year or two?
At the end of August I made the switch over to WCG. I had actually signed up for it back in May but well, you know it was a busy, hectic summer with the GPU2 startup and all. I had meant to give WCG a try but hadn't gotten to it. So I made the jump with a few resources at first, running a mixed bag of GPU2 and WCG. After doing more research on their projects and seeing how user friendly their setup was, I made the jump to all WCG by October. When I got rolling on WCG I noticed an increase in production and activity the beginning of September so I set a goal to try and help push the team further and see if we could break into the top 70 places by years end. We just crossed that line and hopefully can maintain the gains going forward.
In the short term, I've got an idle GPU that needs to get back in production. January is a hideously busy month for me at work so after that's passed, I need to get the GPU client back up and running. Overall though, in the next year or two I'd like to continue helping the WCG team push to new milestones. You know, get more active in that community and see how far we can go with it. Over the not so short term, I'd like to explore some of the projects in the DC Vault and see what's up there. I haven't really looked into it yet and as I'm mainly interested in "humanitarian" science applications I don't know what else is out there. Right now though I'm cool. I'm a meat 'n potato sorta dude. It works for me... I tend not to mess with what works for me.
Do these boxen have day jobs or are they dedicated folders?
Two of the three Quads are dedicated crunchers. The third is my daily driver but since I'm not that much of a gamer (although Santa did bring me WIC) it might as well be considered a dedicated cruncher as well.
How are these boxen configured? OS, client, etc?
Dedicated cruncher#1 is a Q6600 @ 3.3 w/ 2gig. I recently setup openSUSE 11.0 x64 on this box to make the leap into the *nix environment. I'm running Boinc 6.2.15 x64.
Dedicated cruncher#2 is a Q6600 @ 3.3 w/ 4gig. It's currently running XP with the BOINC 6.2.18 client. Based on how well cruncher#1 is running with openSUSE and how much I like that distro, after the January rush at work this box will be going 64 bit openSUSE as well.
My daily driver is a Q6600 @ 3.4 w/ 4gig. It's running XP with the Boinc 6.2.18 client. After some play time on the other 2 crunchers to get more comfortable with SUSE, I'm thinking about going to a dual boot setup with this box.
Have you been successful borging? If so, what kind of borging worked for you? (For example, friends, family, and/or work?)
None whatsoever. I'm reviewing the training DVD to see where I've gone wrong though.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Nope. That's about it.
Did I forget to ask you anything?
You? Doubtful Alan as you're pretty thorough.
