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Note: This account is no longer active.
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Activity Summary
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Reviews Written: 16
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Member Visits: 603
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Total Visits: 17,263
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davegingerich's Most Popular Reviews
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#982 in Personal Finance: More bad Datek experiences
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davegingerich's Author Popularity
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#596 in Personal Finance
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About davegingerich
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This week's photo shows a large solar prominence and comes from The Best of SOHO
NOTE
A special thank you to all those members who have added me to their WOT. I'll do my very best to maintain your valued trust. Thanks.
Personal Interests
I'm interested in lots of things and my interests have not been the same all my life.
At present some of my current interests are:
Space science especially everything about cosmology, astrophysics and space exploration. Derivatives from this are quantum mechanics, relativity and particle physics. (I was a double math & physics major a regrettably long time ago in college.)
Computers & technology Fortunate, since I work with computers and technical stuff (see My Corporate Life), And of course, I'm enamored with "that internet fad" (gack, putting it that way makes me sound about as knowledgeable as Al Gore).
Travel Places I like to go are the Oregon coast, Vail, and Germany. Places I would like to go to are England, Scotland and Ireland. I would also like to return to Alaska and NW Canada (where I once canoed 750 miles of the Yukon river and camped out for two months).
Activities Things I like to do include snow skiing (I live in Colorado and state law requires that I include this), bicycling, watching art films, hiking, writing and listening to music which leads to ...
Music I've gone through many phases of musical interests. In high school it was fusion rock/jazz and bluegrass. I'll even admit that for a brief time during the early 80s I was into "classic rock". Forgive me. Should have been listening to early punk. Now I listen to jazz, ambient, avant garde, techno, electronica, trip-hop, trance, etc. I will be providing more reviews of CDs in this area. Here are some of my reviews of Paul Van Dyk, Hooverphonic (completely rewritten & expanded 08/00), Global Communication, and Global Underground 002 (revised with new material 08/00)and 003.
My Corporate Life
Few people can make a decent living in space exploration so I get as close as I can by writing flight software for NASA space missions to Saturn (actually, the descent imager on the Huygens probe which will enter the atmosphere of Titan), Mars, comet Wild 2, our Sun and to wherever else they'll pay me, erhm, I mean my code, to go. Check out the list of my favorite web sites at the top of the page and below for additonal links to what I have worked on recently. (I'm not trying to impress anyone but rather be an evangelist for space exploration.)
My current project is the Genesis mission which will launch in early 2001 on a two year mission to collect samples of the solar wind and return them to earth. For instance, that giant solar storm we had recently was a Coronal Mass Ejection. Once Genesis reaches orbit it will be collecting samples of that type of material blown off by the sun and returning them to earth for laborartory study.
Previously I worked on the imaging software for the camera aboard the Stardust mission, now just 3 ½ years away from its encounter with comet Wild 2. This sample return mission will bring back tiny samples of the comet's coma. See the web page for interesting facts about Aerogel, a silicon-based solid 1,000 times less dense than glass and 99.8% air. You can also find there how we're using Aerogel to capture those hypervelocity comet pieces that will racing by the spacecraft at 6 km/sec.
I also worked on the code for the telecommunications and power subsystems on the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). An extraordinary spacecraft that is still on orbit performing its science mission. You may have seen MGS in the news recently with the announcement of possible evidence for free-flowing water on the surface of Mars in the comparatively recent past.
Although I didn't work on the MGS imager, here are a collection of some of the best hi-res images of Mars taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC). The Mars sites at JPL tend to get very busy at times so if you're in the US you might try one of the mirror sites located here and here. The complete list of mirror sites, including international servers, is located here.
Links
For a (student based) reference about space exploration, I highly recommend the SEDS site. Go to this JPL site for a calendar of space activities. Some of NASA's best space images are here at the NASA photojournal site. A stupendous online reference about everything in our own solar system is at the Nine Planets site.
The Ugly Truth About Me You Won't Read Anywhere Else
I live in Colorado, can't stand the Broncos, grew up in Oregon, love the coast and wonder why you care.
I have a MS in engineering from Colorado State and a BA in mathematics/physics from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, (small, private liberal arts school -- highly recommended - anybody review it yet?).
Once in a past life I held internships at Argonne and Oakridge National Laboratories.
Life can be messy and so can I. I'm divorced, sometimes terse, abrupt & grumpy, spent five years in therapy, love single malt scotch and I'm losing my hair.
Some favorite quotes
"Can't you see I try. Swimming the same deep water as you is hard. The shallow drowned lose less than we."
"Film is art, theater is life, television is furniture."
Additional Information
What? C'mon! That's everything about me. There's nothing left to tell.....
Sheeeesh, email me if you think you have to know something else.
the FBI has logged
visits to this site since 15 August 2000
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