In January, I attended the APAN meeting in Tokyo in January because the lessons learned in today's research networks are important both in the commercial networks we run today and in those we will build tomorrow.

APAN (a consortium of R&E networks), AARNET, TEIN2, GEANT, Pacific Wave, Abiline, Dante, SurfNet, etc., are the large R&E (research and engineering) networks of Asia, Europe and the US. What is interesting about them is high bandwidth and complex routing, the latter due to complex inter-academic 'business' relationships caused by complex, often government subsidized, funding. As a routing researcher, the routing complexity particularly interests me because these R&E networks have more complex inter-provider routing than we have in the commercial internet. Given that the second largest cause of internet failure, after Telco circuit failure, is router misconfiguration, and that the routing topology and policies of these research networks is quite complex, I was shocked that they do not seem to use any automation in the generation, maintenancy, or analysis of their routing configurations.

I am not a good internet user. Though I develop tomorrow's technology and products, I myself tend to adopt technology late, and do not use as much of the net as most folk. I am still learning to compose good Google and Wikipedia queries. Someone once quoted me on a tee shirt, "I helped build the information superhighway, but I can't drive a car."

But I have learned to use BLOGs to save myself time. As I have been a telecommuter for 33 years and travel a lot, we do not get a hardcopy newspaper, I read the NY Times online with my morning coffee. I used to read the web browser presentation, clicking and exploring the pages which interest me. Now I get a BLOG version, where I just hit the space-bar and to move from article summary to article summary in the sections of the paper to which I 'subscribe' in the BLOG sense. If the summary interests me, I hit enter and a new tab opens in my browser with the full article. I get the same news in half the time.

The BLOG reader I use is Liferea on FreeBSD, and my browser is FireFox. As most folk use MS Windows, I would recommend the BLOG add-on for FireFox.