July 2000

Random Profile: Jeff Boote Every other month, Staff Notes Monthly spotlights a stochastically chosen staff member. This month we profile Jeff Boote, an SCD software engineer.

Jeff Boote. (Photo by Carlye Calvin.)

How Jeff got hired:

Gradually. He spent much of his childhood in Littleton and finished high school at Columbine. (Last year's tragedy was "pretty disturbing" for him, although he didn't know anyone affected.) Then Jeff majored in computer science at the University of Colorado. "I lived at the bottom of the NCAR hill and thought, 'That'd be a cool place to work.' In 1989, he and some classmates built a color editor for the NCAR Graphics display package, as a class project toward their software-engineering degrees. Jeff soon signed on as a student assistant, and about 18 months later, he got a permanent position in SCD.

"I wear a couple of different hats." One of them is working in the Visualization Lab, which is now part of the new Visualization and Enabling Technology Section. Jeff works with Tim Scheitlin, John Clyne, and section head Don Middleton to translate NCAR science into high- resolution, multidimensional animations.

Jeff says the Viz Lab does its best work after they've cultivated a working relationship with the scientists they're serving. "When we start out, we don't understand their science well enough to depict it, and often they don't understand what we can and can't do. Through a back- and-forth process, we can get to the point where we're producing something useful." Before they run their models, long-time clients consider the visualization component in deciding what variables should be output and what resolutions are necessary.

Very carefully. For instance, a model might use sigma coordinates that hug terrain instead of conforming to the standard Cartesian frame that viewers consciously or unconsciously place atop an image. Modelers have to decide whether to portray data as averages or instantaneous values and how much temporal and spatial resolution to use. Each of these choices can clarify or obscure the main scientific points at hand. "It can be really easy to make a visualization that doesn't adequately represent the data. Lots of times you can get a picture really easily, but whether that picture is accurate is something else."

Web wonk. He supervises the Web engineering group housed in SCD. So far, it includes only him and UCAR Webmaster Andrei Rodionov. ("Big group," he laughs.) The group is one of several established in the wake of the 1998 Information Technology Council strategic plan, which called for cross-divisional, task-oriented development groups to bring UCAR and NCAR up to speed. UCAR money is now funding Andrei's position and several new servers. For the recent redesign of the UCAR Web site, "We helped organize the directory hierarchy and the redirect [messages]."

"Freedom. I've got the freedom here to work on a lot of different things and take on additional challenges."

At home. Jeff was a work-at-home pioneer during the early 1990s, and he continues to spend about one workday a week there. "For about three years I worked exclusively at home on an NCAR Graphics package. I think I was probably more productive for that kind of work [at home]." The big challenge when he started home-work in 1994: configuring his SGI/Unix system for PPP (point-to-point protocol, a common method for dialing in). "Not very many people were telecommuting at that time. Now it's pretty standard."

His two daughters, 4-year-old Rachael and 5-year-old Randi, who just finished kindergarten. "She liked it a whole bunch for the first seven months and then decided it was boring. Rachael was super-jealous of Randi all year long."

Whether to road-bike or mountain-bike. "I do both." He doesn't cycle the 52-mile round trip from Arvada to work, but he takes frequent fun rides on evenings and weekends.

"One of my favorite mountain-bike rides is a loop around Gross Reservoir," a few miles west of Boulder. "It's not that difficult, but it's close, and it's never been that busy when I've been on it." When time is short, Jeff does a quick loop from Highway 93 down Cherryvale to Superior, passing through some county open space trails. "It's like an inner Morgul Bismark route," he says, referring to the famous road-race loop in that vicinity. For road biking, Jeff enjoys the loop around Standley Lake, which isn't far from his house.

Jeff might have been a professional musician. He came close to majoring in music at CU while playing trombone in both the marching and basketball bands. "The basketball band was a lot of fun, even though the team almost always lost."

• Bob Henson