Please Help Me Fight Cancer

Today’s post is unfortunately a sad one. We lost a very close family member this weekend to a long battle with a number of ailments including Cancer. It was one of those situations where our loved one was taken decades before her time, but at least it was not something that just occurred suddenly.

It’s been a very sad weekend, but at the same time one that reminds me how precious life is. I also came to the personal realization that grief is for the living, not the dead. We have to continue on through this world forever missing a part of ourselves that can never be refilled.

This weekend also reminded me of a commitment I made some time ago to help Stanford University’s Folding@Home project which researches fundamental causes of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. Cancer and Parkinson’s have both impacted my family and I believe that with enough emphasis we can cure these crippling diseases.

And you can help Stanford’s research by simply running a tiny piece of software on your computer that only uses the spare cycles when you don’t need them.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to its goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

Over a year ago I established a Folding Team for HTMLHelp.com and since that time 22 people have contributed, moving the team almost into the top 1% of contributing teams to the project.

So, my question now is, won’t you please lend your spare computing cycles to the Folding@Home project? All you need to do is install this small program, and in the settings enter your name as well as the HTMLHelp Team ID 51056. There is software for Windows, Linux, Mac and even the Playstation 3.

The more computers you can install it on, the better! You can see that my brother is kicking my butt because he installed it on a bunch of machines at his office and I simply couldn’t keep up. As long as you use the same name, and put in the right team number you can get credit for work units across any number of machines. And there are plenty of bragging rights up for grabs!

PS – As a little extra incentive I’ve already decided that next month’s Member of the Month prize is going to be awarded to one or more of the contributors to this project, so feel free to get started now if you are so inclined!