John Persichilli
Member since:
23 January 2012
Country:
United States
BOINC ID:
581222
Background
I am a 66 year young retired educator living in Flagstaff Arizona. I moved to Arizona in 1977 after finishing my undergraduate degree at Central Michigan University. I was born and grew up in the great lake state of Michigan. I moved to Arizona to attend Arizona State University to pursue my first masters degree in educational administration. I began my teaching career after finishing the MA in Ed from ASU. I have taught high school Earth and Space sciences, Astronomy and Geology to 9-12 grade students.
I then decided on another route to teaching college astronomy. I finished my community college credentials and began teaching college level astronomy shortly there after. I wanted to continue my education and attended an online university James Cook University in Australia. I finished my second MS in astrophysics and continued on working toward my PhD. Due to a drop off of tuition funding I had relied on through my employer at the time I missed entering into my chosen dissertation research program and postponed my enrollment in the program. I am still hoping to finish my PhD if I can find a university in the US that would accept my work from Australia, a daunting task indeed. So far no luck and the program in Australia is no longer in existence.
I have advanced degrees in astronomy and planetary sciences.
I own several amateur telescopes.
I have done some initial asteroid research at Lowell Observatory as well as some of my astronomy graduate work done at Lowell.
I enjoy computing. I recently revived a couple of notebook computers to run Linux operating systems. I've installed KStars planetarium programs as well as AAVSO variable star research and other imaging programs that allow for UBVRI work. Two of these notebooks are running the Linux OS only. One of the newer notebooks that was operating Windows 10 Home edition just fine. However, I wanted to explore installing Linux in a dual boot option with this HP notebook. It worked very well and both are happy to be with each other!
Opinion
I do think this is a damn good and wonderful program that I am so pleased to be able to participate in. So, thank all of you guys and gals that are making this project so fantastic!
I do hope to hear more about those of us who get to join with the professional papers and their research results. I am sad that as of this date I haven't had that opportunity but by my continued participation with Einstein@Home project perhaps that will occur in the future.
I do have a wish. My wish is that the project would keep us up to date with the BOINC project and specifically updates and/or issues with the screensaver celestial sphere. I continue to have some trouble maintaining the celestial sphere. Too many times I get the BOINC manager screen saver stating that the projects screen saver is "loading" which it never does. I've recently updated my Windows 10 Home edition pack which appears to have crashed the celestial sphere screen saver? I'm not sure. I've tried by changing my screen resolution to no avail. So, what screen resolution needs to be in place in order the celestial sphere to operate successfully? Is that even as issue? I am not sure.
Now, I like others with computers running Linux OS have never had success if having the Einstein@Home celestial sphere screen saver work on any of our distro's of Linux. So, why no action on correcting this?
I hope in the near future the projects for all, Linux and their distributions, BOINC and Einstein@Home will work together to correct these deficiencies so that we all can be happily running with these projects.
