Subject: Re: Programming

I have a love/hate relationship with computers. I spend significant amounts of free time sitting on my ass staring at a monitor. Usually I feel this is "wasted" time. I find playing music infinitely more rewarding. In fact, I can't stand the idea of using a computer to create music. Computers are tools to move numbers around really fast. That's all they are good for. Well, that and being a convenient wedge to easily separate the lower and middle classes.

Nevertheless, I can't seem to shake this vice. Hunched over a keyboard is no way to go through life, but society doesn't seem to see it that way. So if the man is going to pay me to basically maintain a mild addiction to the perpetual cheap thrill of solving an endless series of small problems, that's fine by me. I could use the money to buy more music equipment.

SETI@home: I've been working for the UC Berkeley SETI group since 1997 as a programmer and systems administrator. Nowadays I'm more the latter than the former, as SETI@home ended up (quite unexpectedly) being the biggest distributed computing task to date, thus requiring lots of server maintenance. I do feel very lucky that I get to work on a creative, interesting project and not for a commercial venture that only exists to make money or produce ultra-violent games that dull the minds and morality of our youth.

Matt's Gibberish Engine: Yet another way to kill time at your dull and stultifying day job. Despite its limited vocabulary it can spew well over a quadrillion different sentences. Some of them may actually mean something. By the way, this was my very first perl CGI script written many many years ago, so don't regard this as an example of my best work. In fact, it kinda sucks eggs.

..and that's about it for now, kids. I'll add more links to other projects and programs in good time.