Does your science team
need data acquisition and analysis?
There are few activities as satisfying as performing quality control on sintered tungsten for a CERN forward-endcap calorimeter maquette. (Satisfying, you ask? I find my payoff in the realization that that maquette, assembled at the University of Toronto for the Large Hadron Collider, is a minuscule contribution to one of the most sophisticated suites of experiments in the history of science.) That's where I was in the summer of 1996. Yet, astonishingly, I can now name something more satisfying still: working through the night on the largest optical telescope on Canadian soil, organizing and monitoring acquisition of moderate-dispersion spectra for the north-polar-cap portion of NASA's NStars programme. (The payoff? Eventual NASA exobiology.) That's where I am now. Can I help your team - say, in astrophysics, whether at the telescope controller by night or at the downstream IRAF workstation by day?
Does your science team
need computing?
I'm something of a veteran in low-end Linux systems administration, having run my own desk as an essentially Linux-pure space since 1996 (albeit with Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional within Linux, in a virtual machine, since late 2001). I used to be rather a tough C guy (having in 1995 ported a 10,000-line VAX C application, running on 32-bit machines, to ANSI C, for the 64-bit Alpha chip). I'm presently something of an SGML worker. The proof of the latter proposition is my participation in the preparation of a 700-page Estonian-language book, hand-coded at my desk under the DocBook DTD, then converted simultaneously to *.ps, *.rtf, and *.htm with a bash script driving Jade under DSSSL. Occasionally, I write some tiny script in Perl, either for my own workstation or for a senior Toronto stellar spectroscopist. I'll seize any excuse to dust off my LISP, Prolog, or Mathematica/MatLab skills, or to learn something new. (Java, anyone? How about XML - which, in fact, I am already quietly studying, along with the less glamorous SQL?)
Does your science team
need human networking?
You may need services which I cannot provide alone, but which I can arrange for you. Like many technical workers, I am proud to participate in multiple intellectual communities. (For instance, I can reach some hundreds of colleagues in the Editors' Association of Canada, from coast to coast, with a few keystrokes.)
- Do you need an editor not specializing in my own fields of astronomy and physics, but with a geology background?
- Do you need a Microsoft-and-Linux person lacking my SGML, TeX, vi, emacs Unix-publishing finesse, but with a track record of twenty or more RedHat installs, and of many tens of thousands of lines of ColdFusion coding?
- Do you need a couple of optical engineers - both of them with serious vacuum chambers, and yet of quite dissimilar backgrounds - so that you can do some comparative shopping as you plan the maintenance of your optics?
- Do you need a team of astrophysicists who not only speak my home language, Estonian, but also can translate your English texts into Russian, your Russian texts into English - in both cases at the very attractive rates available in the Baltic republics?
Give me a call, and we'll see what results my collegial network can deliver.