What motivates me to keep crunching?
* Four close relatives have been afflicted by cancer, including my mother who died in terrible agony at age 45.
* Several good friends have died of cancer, and I expect several more will as time goes on
* Not only cancer, but a variety of diseases are battled via BOINC. It gives all of us a chance to contribute in a small way. No Nobel Prize for us, but a badge or two is something to be proud of.
* I have always been a fan of solar energy... hopefully more solar means less coal burned, so there will be less lung cancer, pollution etc as well.
* It costs almost nothing to run BOINC, except a few pennies in electricity and data. Some experts say leaving your computer on 24 hours a day is actually a good thing, as it doesnt go through heating, expansion and cooling down contractions, which stress electronic circuit boards.
* Ive recruited one friend via a Facebook post. Personally I can't understand why so many people post a photo of someone suffering cancer on FB with the request "share this photo if you care" but dont go to the trouble of running WCG, which is infinitely more practical.
* All my crunching has been done on a laptop, sometimes in rather exotic situations ( see here http://www.madaru.net/day55Freire.html ) I'm looking forward to the day I can set up a dedicated desktop with dozens of cores running on solar energy

That is pretty cool. I'm a bit of armchair travel junkie (don't get a chance to travel as much as I'd like) and tried promoting WCG on a travel blog to get travellers to put WCG on their laptops, but I don't think I succeeded.


Funny, I was thinking a similar thing recently. Found out my wife's family has some land that's been unused for a long time. Dreaming of putting in a solar farm and a nearby WCG farm...but I need $$$ to do that. Wish me luck winning the lottery.

I did SETI@home, rosetta@home and other projects years ago.

I just decided, this week, to get started doing these things again. This seemed like a great project. My husband is a cancer survivor.

Seems like a more valuable project than searching for signs of aliens too far away to interact with.

I have known families with children that have passed away because of a brain tumor. I myself am a survivor of a brain tumor. Let's work to cure the problems of today. This is something that we can help accomplish.

I have been focussing on getting milestones on as many BOINC projects as possible, but now I'm settling down on the project that I believe is the most worthy of my computers.

Since there's no GPU app here, I have started to focus the GPUs on GPUGRID which I believe is the next best thing.

I first started off with Folding at home but after a while got disenchanted by The effort of motivating the team in the face of the flaky software. Then I found XS and joined there before finally giving up after I killed too many Graphics cards in one year. I had chatted to Movieman about having my son rushed to hospital when he was two and how I had been rendered speechless (literally) with worry as he was taken to theater. as he recovered I met other parents for whom the future was far from certain and some for whom it was just a matter of time. Movieman suggested WCG and he talked me into giving it a go. I miss that guy and yes it was cancer that got him just as it got my Pa. I used to build Machines to overclock.... Now I build them almost exclusively to crunch in the hope that for future generations Cancer and the like is a thing of the past