World Community Grid - View Thread - [:)][:)]Thank You David, Graham, Lawrence and Billy Bob[:)][:)]

I am reposting an item that I posted in the "My Online Team" team thread here because the individuals involved have not only contributed a lot to our team, but the the WCG community as well.

I usually am not very thoughtful and don't often enough thank people for things that they have done. I think that is characteristic of those of us employed (or retired as is my case) in the technical field. So, to correct my poor behavior over the past few months, a few Thank You's are in order.

First of all, I want to thank David Autumns who started our (then) little team with himself and his two daughters. He then invited a few friends locally to join him and a few days later put out the first "Join My Online Team" thread on the forum. That invitation drew out a couple other frequent posters including Lawrence Hardin and myself for starters and eventually Graham Hood (yeah, we were all drawn together before we were Community Admin's even). You might say the rest is history, but it isn't. David also had the foresight to start our team web page. If you think that we have all gone nuts with the smiley's that Graham has provided us with, you didn't see the first edition of our team web page. It was an entire screen full of smiley faces! My how that has changed. Now, I think it has to have become nearly a full time job keeping the web site up to date. Again, thank you David for all of the effort you have put into building our team.

Next, I want to thank Graham. First, I want to thank him for adding a word to my vocabulary. Before he joined the team and had his profile put up on the team web site, I did not know what a horologist was or that there even was such a word. Now that I know what a horologist is, I figure that with all that work with clocks and watches, Graham must have found a way to create extra time for himself to devote to "My Online Team" and to the World Community Grid as a whole as well. Graham's efforts in searching out and editing the graphics for signature banners, emoticons, national flags, and milestone celebrations for both the team and the WCG have done a lot to not only dress up the forums, but to keep up the morale of the thousands of members of the WCG who are quietly donating their computer resources to this humanitarian endeavor. Graham has also done a lot towards helping David to build up our team web site to the point that it is second to none with statistics analysis, growth predictions and, soon to be implemented, some knock your eye out graphics! While doing all of this, Graham has found the time to beat up a few reporters to get the word out about the World Community Grid. His BBC article alone resulted in the addition of more than three thousand more crunchers to the community. So, you say, what has Graham done with all the extra time he has left over after all of this, he spends it browsing the forums to find members having trouble running the WCG software or with their PC's in general and tries to help them. He and I have tripped over one another more than one time doing our Community Admin thing.

Speaking of the Community Admin thing, my neighbor to the south, Lawrence Hardin, has been really expert in addressing the problems that WCG members have brought up in the forums. I sometimes suspect that Lawrence has found a way to have access to the programming code that the grid application runs as well as operating system internals from Microsoft. Not only has Lawrence shown us his technical skills in computing, he has become quite the expert in the Human Proteome Folding project as well. I suspect that the ISB will probably be soliciting him for their board sometime in the future. Thanks, Lawrence, you, David Autumns and Graham Hood have all made me proud to hang out the Community Admin shingle on my posts as well.

Finally, I want to thank Billy Bob who went out and obtained the rights to the WCG.CC domain and has provided storage and bandwidth for so many of our graphics needs on "My Online Team". I hope that other teams will get excited and use this resource as well (and I know that is also Billy Bob's hope too). He has not only made this available to our team, but to all teams on the WCG. Providing and maintaining this at his own expense is a very selfless thing to do and I really admire him for doing so.

I hope that all of the rest of my friends at "My Online Team" will not feel slighted by my singling out these four for thanks. I owe all of the rest of you for thanks as well. You all have helped keep up my morale the past few months while I have faced some pretty serious medical problems.

Your friend and team mate,