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Kirk Pearson

Kirk on top of Gray'
s Peak, a 14,000 foot peak in Colorado I became interested in distributed computing projects in 1997. Over a lunch of Philly cheese-steak sandwiches, a friend (hi Greg!) asked me if I was participating in the distributed.net encryption cracking contest. "What is it?" I asked. After lunch I checked out the distributed.net website and quickly developed a new hobby/obsession. It's funny how an innocent question can change a person's life forever :-).

As my interest grew, so did my Netscape bookmarks for distributed computing projects. At the time there was only one page listing projects, George Woltman's mersenne.org site, which tended to list mathematics-oriented projects and wasn't updated often enough to suit my addiction--I wanted to discover a new project every day :-). After my bookmarks started to get unmanageable, I decided that a private web page would be an easier way for me to maintain links to every project I could find, and to my all-important personal stats page links for those projects. Then I started thinking that other people might be interested in the project links.

In June, 2000 I created this site, the first comprehensive, regularly-updated website dedicated to tracking the progress of all Internet-based distributed computing projects that invite public participation. The site contains news about distributed computing projects and provides information about public projects, projects which are in development, and links to other websites and web-based discussion groups about distributed computing projects. It's intended to be a one-stop shop for people who want to learn about distributed computing and how to get involved with it.

As the field of distributed computing grows, my ability to keep up with news and status of current and future projects diminishes. I need your help to keep the information on this site current. If you see any information that is out of date, or if you know about some news or a project that I don't have listed, please don't hesitate to send me email!

In my non-distributed computing project life I design customer support websites and web-based customer support applications at Sun Microsystems, Inc., a Unix computer maker that provides many of the computers used in the Internet and as web servers on the Internet. I have been at Sun since 1997 and have been working professionally since 1991. I live near Denver, Colorado with my wife, three sons, and a dog who thinks I spend too much time at the computer and too little time throwing his frisbee.

Again, please send me email with any questions, comments, criticisms, or thoughts you have. This site can only continue to be successful with your help! I respond to all email I receive...eventually :-). Thanks for your interest!

Kirk
kpearson@aspenleaf.com



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