One Year…
That’s right, today is my one-year anniversary in the Seti@home project. I wouldn’t even have realized if it wasn’t for the popup message from a work machine which I use Setispy to monitor (Thanks Roelof!). Due to this special occasion, and given that the team has had some rocky moments in the last week or two, I’d like to take a couple moments to reflect on the progress of the team in that time.

When I started Seti, I joined Team Lamb Chop (which only had 900 members back then) right after I setup an account. So I’ve been here since unit 1. The main reason that I joined was simply to put my idle CPU time to good use. I had at the time a pair of 464MHz Celerons, which were very good performers. I had heard about Seti from my friend Knight, and remembered seeing information about it on Ars, so I joined up.

It’s really amazing how different things were back then versus the team now.  When I first started, the Seti site only showed the top 100 users for any team. My goal was simply to make it into the top 100 users on our team, so that I could see my name on the list. While that doesn’t sound ‘simple’ now (because it’s not!), it was at the time. In fact, you only needed 120 or so work units! The team structure was a bit different then too. Way, way, way up at the top of the list, with 4000+ work units completed, was Panders. He was a towering fortress of work units, which we all knew we could never surpass. He was so far up, that the next person down only had 1/3 of his totals. But that was okay by us ‘normal’ people, we just wanted to climb up into the coveted top 20. After all, you only had to do about 10 per day to shoot up through the ranks.  We had a small group of people who started to cluster together and race up, challenging each other and spurring each other on to great feats of processing power (ie- we setup more computers). I remember racing neck and neck with a few different people- Leech, Orlbamf, and C. Eric Smith. Yep, CES and I were was side by side. Ahhh..the good old days. There was this other guy on the team too, not as loud and boisterous as some of the others were, but still there, and moving quite nicely through the ranks. Always was ahead of me, but not by a HUGE margin. His name was Guru@Crashing Windows. He has since stopped using Windows (and stopped crashing), so he’s shortened that one a touch.

When I first started, we were back a few spots in the team ranks. As I seem to recall, the Art Bell team was no where to be seen, and we trailed behind Mac Addict, O’Grady’s Powerbook team, and /. The other thing I noticed was that the team didn’t have many notable figures around, nobody you could turn to for advice. That’s not to say that the team wasn’t active, just not anywhere near as good as it is today.

One of the biggest, and most exciting, changes for the team came about a few months after I started. This relative newcomer, named zAmboni, offered to keep track of the team stats, so everyone could track our progress, and plot the overtake rates of our next victim (Mwuhaha..). Things seemed to take a dramatic change overnight. What was a hobby before became an obsession for many. I found myself in my basement, setting up Seti on my wife’s work computer, setting it up on my workstation at work, setting it up on my father’s computer (it was mostly mine anyway, built out of spare parts). The level of competitiveness in the team rose dramatically, but we never lost the team spirit. The first 300 post Seti thread was posted on the Ars board and discussions ensued on how to crunch units faster, how to hide the client, and how we were going to spank those Mac weenies.

I think this is the point where TLC really started to change into something beyond what it was. It was already a world class team, our #4 ranking proved that. But after this, it became THE world class team. Because of the excellent info provided by zAmboni, many members have become whipped into a frenzy, building new systems or upgrading just for the purpose of crunching Seti. I myself have built a few ‘extra’ computers for this reason. And with the inclusion of the Benchmarking pages, the TLC website has been of interest to non-team members as well, which has drawn even more people into the fold. In short, it’s just increased our rate of growth.

It’s been an interesting year, with a few changes that have made us stronger than ever. So what can we expect out of the future? I think we’ll see the team continue to grow in membership, especially now that people are able to see where they fall in the team from the very beginning. The level of competitiveness in the team will almost certainly stay high, since we have to catch those Art Bell bastards again. I think we’ll see higher levels of integration between Ars the Seti team and Ars the website. After all, aren’t we all the same entity? I think we’ll see our own distributed forum for the RC5 users and ourselves (did you know I’m currently in 30^th place on that team too?), which will honestly serve our needs better than the forum here.  I think we’ll pass Art Bell again too. And that it’ll be an even bigger accomplishment this time, more the result of a team effort than by one ‘super user’.  And I think that TLC will continue to the best Seti team on the face of the planet, and one that I’m proud to be part of. Go Lamb Chop!

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